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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 13th, 2016 09:11 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, which, all due respect to the author of Five Best-Selling Female Writers You May Not Have Heard Of, is a forgotten novel for a reason. Harper was an African-American public speaker and author who lectured and wrote on topics like abolition, racial uplift, and temperance, and one gets the strong sense that she cut and pasted a lot of her speeches into this book, giving different paragraphs to different characters because it’s easier to read dialogue than it is to read one big long speech.
It’s weirdly fascinating if you’re into 1890s progressivism (with more emphasis on race and racial equality than many white progressives would have had at the time), but I wouldn’t recommend it as a novel.
I also read Abbie Farwell Brown’s John of the Woods. Brown, a children’s book author, was one of Josephine Preston Peabody’s buddies: Peabody’s letters to her are some of the most charming in the Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody, and Brown wrote a review of Peabody’s play Marlowe when it was first performed.
But I think that they had a baleful literary influence on each other’s works for children, like maybe they were forever urging each other on to new heights of tweeness. John of the Woods is less twee than Brown’s short stories for children, but probably its tweeness levels are acceptable only if you really, really like early twentieth century children’s fiction, in which case you’ve probably worked up an incredible tweeness tolerance in the first place.
Naturally I found it rather charming. A little lost orphan boy escapes from the troupe of abusive acrobats (and nonetheless retains a silver amulet that the acrobats, despite being dyed-in-the-wool evil, never took from him because I guess they want him to realize his secret heritage someday); he dashes in a panic into a forest, only to be found by a saintly religious hermit’s dog, which leads him to the hermit’s hut, where he spends the next few years learning how to tame wild animals, cure simple diseases, and read the hermit’s Bible. Only for their happy solitude to be interrupted by an evil king and his evil son, out for an evil hunt of the friendly wild creatures of the forest!
It’s like early twentieth children’s literature bingo. An orphan! With abusive caregivers! And an unlikely proof of his identity! Reverence for nature, books, and Jesus! Generic Middle Ages! Magic powers that aren’t actually magic because early twentieth century children’s authors seem to have been chary of having actual magical occurrences in their stories! Except for George MacDonald, but who knows what the fuck is up with him.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m working on Rosemary Taylor’s Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother’s Boarders, which is a memoir about growing up in a boarding house in the early decades of the twentieth century, and charming in a Cheaper by the Dozen sort of way: lots of funny anecdotes about the boarders and the author’s parents.
What I Plan to Read Next
I went on a bit of a Kindle free book spree, as I periodically do, and made out like a bandit with a couple of old girls’ series books - the The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted and Blue Bonnet’s Ranch Party - as well as (my biggest prize) Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of To-Day. Kindle continues not to have the Duncan book that I want most of all, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Around the World By Ourselves, a fictionalized memoir about, well, what it says in the title. Someday!
Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, which, all due respect to the author of Five Best-Selling Female Writers You May Not Have Heard Of, is a forgotten novel for a reason. Harper was an African-American public speaker and author who lectured and wrote on topics like abolition, racial uplift, and temperance, and one gets the strong sense that she cut and pasted a lot of her speeches into this book, giving different paragraphs to different characters because it’s easier to read dialogue than it is to read one big long speech.
It’s weirdly fascinating if you’re into 1890s progressivism (with more emphasis on race and racial equality than many white progressives would have had at the time), but I wouldn’t recommend it as a novel.
I also read Abbie Farwell Brown’s John of the Woods. Brown, a children’s book author, was one of Josephine Preston Peabody’s buddies: Peabody’s letters to her are some of the most charming in the Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody, and Brown wrote a review of Peabody’s play Marlowe when it was first performed.
But I think that they had a baleful literary influence on each other’s works for children, like maybe they were forever urging each other on to new heights of tweeness. John of the Woods is less twee than Brown’s short stories for children, but probably its tweeness levels are acceptable only if you really, really like early twentieth century children’s fiction, in which case you’ve probably worked up an incredible tweeness tolerance in the first place.
Naturally I found it rather charming. A little lost orphan boy escapes from the troupe of abusive acrobats (and nonetheless retains a silver amulet that the acrobats, despite being dyed-in-the-wool evil, never took from him because I guess they want him to realize his secret heritage someday); he dashes in a panic into a forest, only to be found by a saintly religious hermit’s dog, which leads him to the hermit’s hut, where he spends the next few years learning how to tame wild animals, cure simple diseases, and read the hermit’s Bible. Only for their happy solitude to be interrupted by an evil king and his evil son, out for an evil hunt of the friendly wild creatures of the forest!
It’s like early twentieth children’s literature bingo. An orphan! With abusive caregivers! And an unlikely proof of his identity! Reverence for nature, books, and Jesus! Generic Middle Ages! Magic powers that aren’t actually magic because early twentieth century children’s authors seem to have been chary of having actual magical occurrences in their stories! Except for George MacDonald, but who knows what the fuck is up with him.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m working on Rosemary Taylor’s Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother’s Boarders, which is a memoir about growing up in a boarding house in the early decades of the twentieth century, and charming in a Cheaper by the Dozen sort of way: lots of funny anecdotes about the boarders and the author’s parents.
What I Plan to Read Next
I went on a bit of a Kindle free book spree, as I periodically do, and made out like a bandit with a couple of old girls’ series books - the The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted and Blue Bonnet’s Ranch Party - as well as (my biggest prize) Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of To-Day. Kindle continues not to have the Duncan book that I want most of all, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Around the World By Ourselves, a fictionalized memoir about, well, what it says in the title. Someday!
