Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Over the years, littlerhymes has been educating me about Australian children’s literature. Most recently she sent me Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, a slim and lovely book full of gorgeous descriptions of the barren yet beautiful storm-wracked shore where seabirds nest. Our hero, Storm Boy, lives here with his father, and befriends a baby pelican whom he names Mr. Percival. Mr. Percival saves the lives of the sailors on a sinking tugboat by flying out to them with a rope, then a few months later is BRUTALLY MURDERED by some poachers on the preserve who are mad that he stopped them from shooting ducks.

This book was published in 1964, which was ALSO when American books were really getting into the murder of pets as a theme in children’s books. Something was clearly in the international waters. SOMETHING AWFUL. I cried. It’s a lovely book regardless but I did bawl through the last twenty pages or so.

After a gap of years since my last Ngaio Marsh, I returned to my favorite Golden Age mystery author! (Sorry, Sayers and Christie. Sayers in particular I think is probably actually a better writer than Marsh, but the heart wants what it wants.) This time, I read A Wreath for Rivera, in which a convoluted-seeming mystery winds round to a satisfyingly simple solution. The family dynamics are excellently portrayed as usual in Marsh, and although I love her mysteries I do just a little bit wish she’d written a non-mystery or two, just to see how it would have turned out.

I also finished Daphne du Maurier’s Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon and Their Friends, which is one of those books that is interesting while you’re reading it but also eminently put-downable, hence the fact that it’s taken me a few months. Despite the title, it’s really a biography of Anthony Bacon, Tudor Spy, with just a bit of Sir Francis Bacon (presumably Sir Francis’s name is more marketable). Major downside of being a Tudor spymaster: you pay for the whole operation out of pocket and are rewarded, at best, with gratitude.

Continuing the spy theme, I read Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, a rollicking adventure featuring spies who are having the time of their lives. They pull off a major intelligence coup which is made into a major motion picture about fifteen years later, in which spymaster Ewen Montagu himself got to play a cameo role! Spying: extremely effective, glamorous, and also glorious. The antithesis of Le Carre.

What I’m Reading Now

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, I just finished the tragic story “Lois the Witch,” about a girl accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. Really effectively miserable and claustrophobic. If anyone ever tries to pack you off to your sole remaining surviving family in Puritan New England, I strongly suggest that you find a job as an under-housemaid instead.

What I Plan to Read Next

Dick Francis’s Whip Hand awaits!

Comments

[asakiyume]

Really effectively miserable and claustrophobic. If anyone ever tries to pack you off to your sole remaining surviving family in Puritan New England, I strongly suggest that you find a job as an under-housemaid instead.


--Absolutely the lesson I took away from The Witch of Blackbird Pond

[magid]

Although at least in the end she escapes?

[asakiyume]

True! True. But ughhh, Puritans!

[magid]

Oh, definitely! And her leaving also means Mercy gets the one she loves, so that’s good too.

[osprey_archer]

Kit at least did not get executed for witchcraft at the end, and possibly SHE thought it was all worthwhile in order to get together with Nat... but the rest of us may draw our own conclusions.

[magid]

I love the Dick Francis books, having found them at some correct age for me. It’s such fun.

[osprey_archer]

Sid Halley is just so whumpable! Sometimes you just want to see someone get whumped and whumped hard.

[troisoiseaux]

They pull off a major intelligence coup which is made into a major motion picture about fifteen years later, in which spymaster Ewen Montagu himself got to play a cameo role! Spying: extremely effective, glamorous, and also glorious. The antithesis of Le Carre.

It really is too narratively improbable for fiction!!

[osprey_archer]

The reviewers would surely complain when the novel got to the Nazi intelligence officer who secretly wanted the Nazis to lose the war and therefore said this bogus intelligence was absolutely top grade stuff. "Come on!" they would snort. "That's just too unlikely!"

[troisoiseaux]

Also: I've also acquired Whip Hand, because your post made me look it up and the e-book was on sale! So I might not read it at the same time but I look forward to comparing notes.

[osprey_archer]

Oh yay! Did you already read the first book, Odds Against?

[troisoiseaux]

Yeah, I want to say... last summer? Around the time that it was making the DW rounds.

[osprey_archer]

Perhaps we can start another little DW book club...

[troisoiseaux]

I did some digging (this appears to be my sole review) and what do you MEAN we/I read this in February 2025? I could have sworn it was like... summer 2024. What is the passage of time, etc. etc.

[osprey_archer]

We read this LAST FEBRUARY?! o.O Honestly one of the scary things about keeping records is that you learn just how fallible your memory is.

[conuly]

I read somebody's opinion once that the rise of dead dogs in children's literature probably has something to do with the decline of dead siblings and playmates and real life - a lot of authors, consciously or not, thought that they had to Introduce Children to the Harsh Reality of Death because, damnit, all their friends were surviving childhood.

I don't *think* that such a simple answer explains it, but....

[osprey_archer]

I'm pretty sure you read that here, actually. The question of Why Dead Dogs has occupied the commentariat for quite some time.

[conuly]

You know, I may well have.

[mific]

The Operation Mincemeat movie with Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen (among others) is pretty good, and it's on Netflix. :)

[osprey_archer]

There's a musical, too! Truly the greatest spy coup of all time.

[troisoiseaux]

Technically there have been three musicals, but only Operation Mincemeat made it big:

"The story was the basis for the 2014 musical Dead in the Water, performed at the Camden, Brighton and Guildford Fringe Festivals in 2014.[134] In 2015 the Welsh theatre company Theatr na nÓg produced Y dyn na fu erioed (The Man Who Never Was), a musical based on the operation and Glyndwr Michael's upbringing in Aberbargoed. The musical was performed by primary school children from Caerphilly County Borough during that year's Eisteddfod yr Urdd." [X]

[osprey_archer]

Amazing?! This is a story that just keeps on giving.

[littlerhymes]

Ah, Storm Boy. A staple of the Australian classroom! We all read Storm Boy in primary school, and were made sad - NOSTALGIA.

Spying: extremely effective, glamorous, and also glorious. The antithesis of Le Carre
Le Carre is shaking his head.

[osprey_archer]

Why must children be made to suffer with classroom reading? Would it not be more likely to win them over to reading if they read joyful books?

[thisbluespirit]

This time, I read A Wreath for Rivera, in which a convoluted-seeming mystery winds round to a satisfyingly simple solution. The family dynamics are excellently portrayed as usual in Marsh, and although I love her mysteries I do just a little bit wish she’d written a non-mystery or two, just to see how it would have turned out.

It would have been interesting! Sometimes she barely even gets round to the murder till over halfway through. (I had to google to find which one had been renamed this time and it's Swing Brother Swing; I vaguely remembered the name Rivera as being from one of the music ones, but there are at least two of those.)

[osprey_archer]

Yes, this is one of the ones where the murder doesn't happen for ages. And I knew the murder was coming, and I enjoyed the mystery-solving when we got there, but still there was a little whisper... "what if there just wasn't a murder this time? What if Marsh just kept hanging out with these characters?"