Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 31st, 2024 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Mary Stolz had a knack for writing books that take on classic problem-novel subjects without feeling like problem novels. In Go and Catch a Flying Fish, Taylor and Jem’s parents are lurching fight by fight toward the cusp of divorce, and this is a real and heavy thing that is hanging over their heads, but it never becomes the entirety of their lives or of the book. Taylor’s love of birds, Jem’s love of ocean fish (every three weeks he empties his aquarium and refills it with fish he catches from the bay), give it a lightness, a sense of perspective—an opening out beyond the characters’ personal problems, painful though those problems sometimes are.
This book is the precursor to What Time of Night Is It?, which I read first. Both books more or less stand alone, so this wasn’t really a problem, but nonetheless I wish the fact that the books are linked was indicated in some way on Mary Stolz’s Wikipedia page. (Which probably means I should do it myself. I could point out the Thomas and Grandfather quartet as well… Is it hard to edit a Wikipedia page?)
In 1959, Mary Stolz published Emmett’s Pig, which achieved such long-lasting success that three decades later, in 1991, she published a sequel, King Emmett the Second… in which she promptly killed Emmett’s pig. When Emmett’s parents arranged for a farmer to keep a pet pig for their pig-loving son, they evidently did not arrange that this pig should not be killed for bacon, which frankly seems pretty careless!
Emmett ends up getting a dog instead, which really does seem like a better choice for a pet than a pig he only gets to see once a month. But honestly I’m puzzled by the decision to begin the sequel by killing the pig whose acquisition was the happy ending of the previous book.
What I’m Reading Now
I waffled about getting The Romantic Friendship Reader, a collection of 19th-century short stories and excerpts from novels in which romantic friendships between men play a large role, because I knew it was going to add a bunch of books to my reading list. And lo, it has! Clearly I’ll need to read Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, in which a cynical wayfarer (his cynicism a thin veneer over his idealism) meets a dreamy artist, which whom he takes long night walks through New York City. Possibly also more of Bret Hart’s western short stories. (The introduction to the story anthologized here, “Tenneessee’s Partner,” notes that it wasn’t uncommon for two men in the west to bach it together all their lives.)
Trundling forward in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat. World War II has struck, and White is rereading his own youthful journals written as World War I raged in Europe: all ice skating and canoe trips, and occasional musings that perhaps he should think more about the war, but somehow youth kept breaking in even after America joined.
In D. K. Broster’s Sir Isumbras at the Ford, we are on the cusp of learning the Chevalier de la Vireville’s Tragic Backstory! Also the attempted Royalist invasion of France is falling apart due to the incompetence of the commanders, and now the invasion force is all hemmed in on a peninsula rather than fanning out into the countryside, oops.
What I Plan to Read Next
D. E. Stevenson’s Summerhills is here! And I put an interlibrary loan on Doris Gates’ A Filly for Melinda, too. The speed of the interlibrary loan office is really going to spoil me.
A school of flying fish flashed by, skimming the surface of the waves like a flock of great silver-blue dragonflies. They dazzled and were gone. You had to be looking at just the right moment, to see flying fish, and then you were never sure you really had—even though you knew you had—it was a sight so bright, beautiful, brief.
Mary Stolz had a knack for writing books that take on classic problem-novel subjects without feeling like problem novels. In Go and Catch a Flying Fish, Taylor and Jem’s parents are lurching fight by fight toward the cusp of divorce, and this is a real and heavy thing that is hanging over their heads, but it never becomes the entirety of their lives or of the book. Taylor’s love of birds, Jem’s love of ocean fish (every three weeks he empties his aquarium and refills it with fish he catches from the bay), give it a lightness, a sense of perspective—an opening out beyond the characters’ personal problems, painful though those problems sometimes are.
This book is the precursor to What Time of Night Is It?, which I read first. Both books more or less stand alone, so this wasn’t really a problem, but nonetheless I wish the fact that the books are linked was indicated in some way on Mary Stolz’s Wikipedia page. (Which probably means I should do it myself. I could point out the Thomas and Grandfather quartet as well… Is it hard to edit a Wikipedia page?)
In 1959, Mary Stolz published Emmett’s Pig, which achieved such long-lasting success that three decades later, in 1991, she published a sequel, King Emmett the Second… in which she promptly killed Emmett’s pig. When Emmett’s parents arranged for a farmer to keep a pet pig for their pig-loving son, they evidently did not arrange that this pig should not be killed for bacon, which frankly seems pretty careless!
Emmett ends up getting a dog instead, which really does seem like a better choice for a pet than a pig he only gets to see once a month. But honestly I’m puzzled by the decision to begin the sequel by killing the pig whose acquisition was the happy ending of the previous book.
What I’m Reading Now
I waffled about getting The Romantic Friendship Reader, a collection of 19th-century short stories and excerpts from novels in which romantic friendships between men play a large role, because I knew it was going to add a bunch of books to my reading list. And lo, it has! Clearly I’ll need to read Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, in which a cynical wayfarer (his cynicism a thin veneer over his idealism) meets a dreamy artist, which whom he takes long night walks through New York City. Possibly also more of Bret Hart’s western short stories. (The introduction to the story anthologized here, “Tenneessee’s Partner,” notes that it wasn’t uncommon for two men in the west to bach it together all their lives.)
Trundling forward in E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat. World War II has struck, and White is rereading his own youthful journals written as World War I raged in Europe: all ice skating and canoe trips, and occasional musings that perhaps he should think more about the war, but somehow youth kept breaking in even after America joined.
In D. K. Broster’s Sir Isumbras at the Ford, we are on the cusp of learning the Chevalier de la Vireville’s Tragic Backstory! Also the attempted Royalist invasion of France is falling apart due to the incompetence of the commanders, and now the invasion force is all hemmed in on a peninsula rather than fanning out into the countryside, oops.
What I Plan to Read Next
D. E. Stevenson’s Summerhills is here! And I put an interlibrary loan on Doris Gates’ A Filly for Melinda, too. The speed of the interlibrary loan office is really going to spoil me.
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Date: 2024-02-01 12:37 am (UTC)I've gotten through his essay on children's literature; it was wild to realize that it actually pre-dated his first foray into writing children's lit, since Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web are such classics now! I'm curious to know if his "conclusion that it must be a lot of fun to write for children— reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work" changed at all with experience. :P
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Date: 2024-02-01 02:09 am (UTC).... wow, that is a "choices were made" situation for sure!
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Date: 2024-02-01 11:13 am (UTC)I can only assume she was getting way too many fan letters about the pig, and so she did what Louisa May Alcott could only dream of doing.
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Date: 2024-02-04 02:23 am (UTC)OMG I love that place so much.
*calming breaths*
Western Massachusetts is very pretty too, though.