The most important thing first of all: I have the privilege of going to Mass again on Sunday, to sing the psalm response, and this time I'd love to carry your intentions with me as I offer communion for all of you. Is there anything you'd like me to pray for? Please send me an email if you don't want to comment publicly.
And if you'd like to watch daily mass, our parish has been livestreaming since the day Masses were closed, so our tech guy has made great strides. Mass is at 9:00am EST every day.
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As with the general economy, so with personal productivity. My letter-writing pace has slowed to a crawl, but it does continue. If you asked me to write to you, rest assured that I will, even if it takes me all of Lent and Easter seasons. The pace of writing a letter is good for me. I tend to type too fast, and delete and edit on the fly. With a handwritten sentence, in ink, I have to stop and craft before I write. Sometimes I write a few words and realize I wasn't quite sure where I was going, and I have to make the rest of the sentence fit the rather stilted opening. I imagine future anthropologists coming across one of them in an attic and trying to analyze the prose style: "Looks like this author was a seventy-year-old woman who learned how to compose from Voyages in English, a series popular in Catholic schools in the mid-20th century."
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Today the first of my Amazon spree of second-hand Georgette Heyer books arrived, and after rushing the kids through their morning lessons I sat down to read. Alas, it was one of her lesser efforts -- a color-by-numbers plot about wards rushing off to avoid marriage, and a rude guardian and a beautiful lady of a certain age (29, heh) whose banter is supposed to prove that hate at first sight is really love at first sight but mostly proved how tedious they both were. He's rude, she snipes back, they're both strangely flustered, but the reader is strangely unmoved. Lather, rinse, repeat every time they interact. Add in a stable of mostly cardboard characters, with nary a true human interaction from cover to cover. At the close of the book I found myself drained rather than refreshed.
Heyer has considerable literary talents, but if I didn't already know, this wouldn't be the book to convince me of it.
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I wish I had a longer post to write. I've had a number of seedlings germinating in my brain, and some that would probably come to fruition if I would just sit down and write.
8 comments:
Thanks for praying for us! My cousin is in prison and I would pray that his conversion continues and deepens. Also for his mother, my recently widowed aunt.
Please pray for a friend dealing with life-changing decisions.
Thank you for the prayers!! I really appreciated your reflections on the two experiences of going to Mass - and the weight of being a representative for all of us in the Body of Christ.
Pray for our income to resume. We are fine (ish) for now, but some actual closed contracts would go a long way.
That I find true love (or that it finds me) and that my siblings and two of friends get good jobs
My favorite Georgette Heyers are Frederica, The Grand Sophy, and The Reluctant Widow. Others that I enjoyed and won't recycle plots too much with each other: Cotillion, The Nonesuch, The Black Sheep, and The Unknown Ajax. None of these involve a teenager ending up with a 40 year old or has a hate relationship with a controlling man turn into a romance. There's no other Heyer book to match A Civil Contract. Cousin Kate has a different feel, but along the lines of a kind of suspenseful gothic novel. The romance is very secondary and feels kind of tacked on.
I will remember especially all of these intentions tomorrow.
Kelly, I was just thinking of you, because The Nonesuch and Sylvester arrived yesterday, and I devoured them. Sylvester was amusing, but The Nonesuch was much the better book, and I was quite pleased. The one I hated so much the other day was A Lady of Quality. Frederica I own, and I think both The Reluctant Widow (which I read once, years ago) and The Grand Sophy ought to be arriving any day now.
I've been reading The Spanish Bride. As a military novel it's quite superior, but I'm finding it too easy to set it down and not rush back to it.
Seconding Kelly on "The Civil Contract". Another with a side of history is "An Infamous Army" taking place in Brussels parallel to the battle of Waterloo. The protagonists are grown people, on equal footing as persons and quite well sketched. It's a proper novel.
The Masqueraders and The Toll Gate are fun. Regency Buck is to avoid massively. And Sprig Muslin is endearing.
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