Reading report

[muckefuck]

Last night on the way home from work, I finished The emigrants (Utvandrarna), the first volume in Vilhelm Moberg's tetralogy of the same name. I started reading it in Door County because I was losing my enthusiasm for Der Stechlin (which I nonetheless made it to the end of a couple weeks later) and it seemed particularly appropriate. With my affection for "method reading", I especially grooved on beginning the story of a poor 19th-century peasant trying to eke out a living on three acres of rocky and thin soil while staying in a 19th-century cabin in the middle of three acres of rocky and thin soil. Moberg's not a big fan of subtext; it's a very straightforward style, but his characters are engaging, and if he does get a little histrionic at times, he's good at setting a scene and storytelling.

But Halloween is almost here and with it my desire for something "spooky" and/or "Celtic", which led me to pick up Le Fanu's In a glass darkly. "Carmilla" became my bedtime reading, and while it's exquisitely Victorian in many ways, it suffers from being an early draught of a tale we all know far too well by now. Maybe some of the less seminal stories in the volume will be more rewarding. Part of me longs to be reading something besides English as well, but I still haven't settled on what. I have a slim book of weird tales in Irish, but nothing suitably eerie in German or Swedish, alas.