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osprey_archer) wrote2024-01-17 06:29 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2024-01-17 06:29 pm
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Two Mary Stolz books! First, Night of Ghosts and Hermits, the ghosts and hermits of course being species of crab, for the book tells the story of the various sea creatures on the beach at night: hermit crabs searching for larger shells, a heron looking for ghost crabs to eat, a sea turtle dragging herself up the beach to lay her eggs. I found it oddly hard fix my attention on it, but a child with an interest in natural history might find it just the thing.
Second, Bartholomew Fair, which was such a blast from the past for me. In my youth I went through a Tudor phase, in part because children’s publishing was going through a Tudor phase so many fine books were available (although I missed this one somehow), so it was a breath from my childhood to read about these six characters lives’ intersecting at Bartholomew Fair in the late days of Elizabeth I’s reign. Six was perhaps a bit too ambitious for such a slender book – the story might be stronger if it were not so diffuse – but I enjoyed the Tudor London atmosphere of it all.
I also slogged to the end of Agnes Danforth Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. Man, these 1930s Newbery books are feast or famine: either I have a great time or I’m dragging myself through by my fingertips, praying for the sweet release of the final chapter. This one is set in Portugal, right before Vasco da Gama sailed around Cape Horn (a.k.a. the Devil’s Cave) to find a direct route to the spices of India. Rather than follow Gama (which would at least be an adventure) we stick around Lisbon for a paint-by-numbers love story.
A point of interest: Hewes is attempting to fight anti-Semitism by showcasing the efforts of Jewish financiers in funding Gama’s voyage. (Since the book was published in 1930, when Hitler and the Nazis were not on the general American radar, Hewes is undoubtedly aiming this at homegrown anti-Semites.) The modern audience, seeing the Age of Exploration through the eyes of post-colonial theory, may wince, but the 1930s reader is expected to see this as a good and heroic thing.
What I’m Reading Now
No progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. (I may have to revise my reading strategy for this one, or else it will take ages to get through the book.) I have, however, begun reading E. B. White’s essay collection One Man’s Meat, one essay each morning with my morning cup of tea.
Here are his musings on television, in 1938 when it was still a scientific novelty rather than a home furnishing: “Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals…”
I think that this prophecy (with the addition of internet sights and sounds, of course) has been more than fulfilled.
What I Plan to Read Next
Pining quietly for Further Chronicles of Avonlea. WILL the library ever bring it to me? Only time can tell…
Two Mary Stolz books! First, Night of Ghosts and Hermits, the ghosts and hermits of course being species of crab, for the book tells the story of the various sea creatures on the beach at night: hermit crabs searching for larger shells, a heron looking for ghost crabs to eat, a sea turtle dragging herself up the beach to lay her eggs. I found it oddly hard fix my attention on it, but a child with an interest in natural history might find it just the thing.
Second, Bartholomew Fair, which was such a blast from the past for me. In my youth I went through a Tudor phase, in part because children’s publishing was going through a Tudor phase so many fine books were available (although I missed this one somehow), so it was a breath from my childhood to read about these six characters lives’ intersecting at Bartholomew Fair in the late days of Elizabeth I’s reign. Six was perhaps a bit too ambitious for such a slender book – the story might be stronger if it were not so diffuse – but I enjoyed the Tudor London atmosphere of it all.
I also slogged to the end of Agnes Danforth Hewes’ Spice and the Devil’s Cave. Man, these 1930s Newbery books are feast or famine: either I have a great time or I’m dragging myself through by my fingertips, praying for the sweet release of the final chapter. This one is set in Portugal, right before Vasco da Gama sailed around Cape Horn (a.k.a. the Devil’s Cave) to find a direct route to the spices of India. Rather than follow Gama (which would at least be an adventure) we stick around Lisbon for a paint-by-numbers love story.
A point of interest: Hewes is attempting to fight anti-Semitism by showcasing the efforts of Jewish financiers in funding Gama’s voyage. (Since the book was published in 1930, when Hitler and the Nazis were not on the general American radar, Hewes is undoubtedly aiming this at homegrown anti-Semites.) The modern audience, seeing the Age of Exploration through the eyes of post-colonial theory, may wince, but the 1930s reader is expected to see this as a good and heroic thing.
What I’m Reading Now
No progress in Sir Isumbras at the Ford. (I may have to revise my reading strategy for this one, or else it will take ages to get through the book.) I have, however, begun reading E. B. White’s essay collection One Man’s Meat, one essay each morning with my morning cup of tea.
Here are his musings on television, in 1938 when it was still a scientific novelty rather than a home furnishing: “Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals…”
I think that this prophecy (with the addition of internet sights and sounds, of course) has been more than fulfilled.
What I Plan to Read Next
Pining quietly for Further Chronicles of Avonlea. WILL the library ever bring it to me? Only time can tell…
no subject
"The Browns had retreated to their 'farmhouse' in the country and were trying to raise crops on its stony acres; they talked warmly about primal simplicities but couldn't help longing sometimes for electric light and running hot water, and couldn't cope with the potato bugs. (Large numbers of city dwellers thus moved to the country, but not enough of them engaged in real farming to do more than partially check the long-term movement from the farms of America to the cities and towns.)"
(The context here is an extended... analogy?... about how different typical families - "the Smiths", "the Browns" - coped with the financial downturn.)