Quirk

We submitted the revised paper last week, and now I'm back to reading more!

Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine", translated by Emma Lazarus. I've been curious about Heine for a while, and last week I was looking up what Emma Lazarus did other than write The New Colossus, and found that she'd translated these, so I thought I'd try them. I'm sure these are better in the original, but they're never boring. The one that jumped out at me was his version of Tannhauser", which is basically a Fairy Queen ballad, and therefore the translation into a ballad with somewhat antiquated language worked pretty well for me. But then there's a weird tonal shift at the end where it becomes a European/German travelogue, and Lazarus skips over a bunch of verses.

Love's Labor's Lost, William Shakespeare. Readaloud. Not the first time I've read this aloud, but I feel like this play is growing on me. Why don't people perform it more? This time I took the part of the Princess, which is a great role with some particularly fun lines. In comparison with the ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream, I appreciate that after the men have fun mocking the lower-class performers, the women follow it up by telling them to grow up, rather than fading into the background. (Also I noticed the parallels with Tennyson's The Princess / Gilbert & Sullivan's Princess Ida, only with genders swapped.)

The Rise of a Star, Edith Ayrton Zangwill. Scanned by kurowasan, not yet ready for Distributed Proofreaders, but eventually this will make it to Project Gutenberg! This is probably the most conventional plot of Edith Ayrton Zangwill's novels, and also the one with the most satisfying ending (and where the protagonist ends up with the most appealing guy). You can more or less guess the plot and where it ends up from the title, though I was expecting it to be about Hollywood, but Joan, our titular star stays on the stage, not on the screen. It also starts at an unusual point, when Joan's grandmother is forced to leave the stage just as her career is taking off, so that her daughter (Joan's mother) can marry a wealthy capitalist who detests the theater. This leads to a slow start, and overall there is not as much backstage theatre hijinks as I'd hoped. But the plot tension does ramp up, because while we know where Joan will end up, we don't know how or at what cost.
(As typical for Zangwill, there are some racial slurs used but no named characters of color.)

Mona Maclean, Medical Student, Graham Travers (a pseudonym for Margaret Todd. At the end of The Rise of a Star there's a bunch of quotes from reviews of Edith Ayrton Zangwill's earlier books, including one which said that she'd written the best lady medical student/scientist character since Mona Maclean. So then I had to look up this 1892 novel, written by an actual woman medical student and future doctor (though she kept up her writing career). This is generally charming, and I'll have more to say about it after I've finished, but I'm glad I read the Goodreads reviews first, because there is much less medical school in this book than you'd guess from the title. Instead the book starts when our protagonist, in despair after failing her exams for the second time, impulsively decides to agree to take six months away from school to live in a small Scottish village with a cousin she's never met from the less-respectable side of the family, which turns out to be an even worse idea than all her friends tell her it will be, but gives her a chance for self-reflection and personal growth.