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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 15th, 2026 08:53 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Roald Dahl’s The BFG, which I liked fine but almost certainly would have liked more if I had read it at the right age. Contemplating whether I should modify my Dahl reading plans on this account? But then again, Dahl’s books are such quick reads, it seems silly to stop as long as I am enjoying them even if not as much as I would have as a child.
I also read Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, the sequel to the delightful Parnassus on Wheels, which alas like many sequels was not nearly as good as the original. I thought the German spy plot was rather silly, and undermined the more serious points that the book was trying to make about creating a lasting peace after the Great War.
And finally, I read the final Melendy book, Spiderweb for Two, in which Randy and Oliver spend a year completing a scavenger hunt left for them by their older siblings who have scattered to various boarding schools. Loved the scavenger hunt conceit. It worked so well to do it at the end of the series, too, because many of the clues refer back to events/objects from the earlier books, which means that the reader can solve some of the clues too.
I’ve read one other children’s novel featuring a scavenger hunt, but unfortunately my clearest memories of it involve exactly where it stood on the library shelf: in the section for the B or C authors, with a number of other books in the same series, which like the Melendy books were also about a family of about four children and their adventures, but these books were thicker and had red covers… And, like this book, it involved a clue that had been frozen in ice, although not in an ice cube as in Spiderweb for Two, but in some sort of pond or brook or something.
This is probably too vague for anyone to recognize the book, but I figured I’d put it out there just in case.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. It’s been a while since I’ve read one of Alexievich’s oral histories and I had forgotten that the experience is a bit like stabbing oneself repeatedly with a fork… you may not hit it the first time but you know that eventually it’s going to draw blood.
What I Plan to Read Next
Pondering whether Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters should be my next Very Long Book.
Roald Dahl’s The BFG, which I liked fine but almost certainly would have liked more if I had read it at the right age. Contemplating whether I should modify my Dahl reading plans on this account? But then again, Dahl’s books are such quick reads, it seems silly to stop as long as I am enjoying them even if not as much as I would have as a child.
I also read Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, the sequel to the delightful Parnassus on Wheels, which alas like many sequels was not nearly as good as the original. I thought the German spy plot was rather silly, and undermined the more serious points that the book was trying to make about creating a lasting peace after the Great War.
And finally, I read the final Melendy book, Spiderweb for Two, in which Randy and Oliver spend a year completing a scavenger hunt left for them by their older siblings who have scattered to various boarding schools. Loved the scavenger hunt conceit. It worked so well to do it at the end of the series, too, because many of the clues refer back to events/objects from the earlier books, which means that the reader can solve some of the clues too.
I’ve read one other children’s novel featuring a scavenger hunt, but unfortunately my clearest memories of it involve exactly where it stood on the library shelf: in the section for the B or C authors, with a number of other books in the same series, which like the Melendy books were also about a family of about four children and their adventures, but these books were thicker and had red covers… And, like this book, it involved a clue that had been frozen in ice, although not in an ice cube as in Spiderweb for Two, but in some sort of pond or brook or something.
This is probably too vague for anyone to recognize the book, but I figured I’d put it out there just in case.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. It’s been a while since I’ve read one of Alexievich’s oral histories and I had forgotten that the experience is a bit like stabbing oneself repeatedly with a fork… you may not hit it the first time but you know that eventually it’s going to draw blood.
What I Plan to Read Next
Pondering whether Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters should be my next Very Long Book.
