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Saturday Links

Saturday Links

Dickens’s cold-hearted women, reading a hundred pages a day, the politics of “Coriolanus,” the work of orchestral librarians, and more

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Micah Mattix
Dec 07, 2024
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Schatzalp Hotel, Davos, Switzerland—the setting for Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.”

Good morning! Ebenezer Scrooge isn’t the only character in A Christmas Carol that is cold and hard. Consider the women: “We imagine—or imagine a Victorian novelist would imagine—that women are more empathetic than men. Yet both Mrs. Cratchit and Fred’s wife are, well, “unfeeling” toward Scrooge. ‘He’ll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt!’ says Mrs. Cratchit bitterly, and Fred’s wife can say only that she is sure Scrooge is ‘very rich’—suggesting that if money is his only joy, it’s the lot he chose. It is left to Fred to speculate on how Scrooge ‘loses some pleasant moments’ by dint of his humbuggery. What accounts for this divide between the sexes? Why are the women of A Christmas Carol so much less eager than the men to extend forgiveness to Scrooge?”

Matthew Walther on reading a hundred pages a day: “Almost nothing I have written in the last few years has given rise to more correspondence than a throwaway column about reading, in which I alluded to what I call the “hundred pages strategy.” This is exactly what it sounds like: every day, come rain or shine, on religious and secular holidays, when I travel and when I am exceptionally busy, I read at least one hundred printed pages.”

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