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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 20th, 2016 09:06 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy, which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
evelyn_b recommended. This is actually a reread, though it’s been so many years since I read it that I’d forgotten most of it. It’s about two small girls (four/five years old) who live across the street from each other, and become best friends, and play imaginative adventure games, and it is adorable and reading it is like sinking into a warm bath.
This second one is not so much a “finished” as a “given up on,” but sometimes life is simply too short for certain books. I started Katherine Ellis Barrett’s The Wide-Awake Girls in Winsted, and it got off to a good start - if a trifle confusing, because it’s the sequel to another book, and that book is apparently about four girls becoming best buddies through penpallery, and clearly amazing - anyway. The heroine was going to found a library for her small town.
But then! The heroine took the train to another town to talk to the librarians about how to run a library, and I was all excited to learn about early twentieth century libraries - except I guess Barrett didn’t feel inclined to do any research, because rather than follow the heroine on her voyage to the library, instead the book follows the irritating tiny tag-along child who snuck onto the train to go on the trip with her, but then falls asleep and gets put off at the next station, and through some complicated series of coincidences ends up back at the proper station just in time.
WHY. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS. And he’s such an irritating, twee, precious-in-the-bad-sense little twerp, too. He talks with that written-out ungrammatical lisp that many writers in the early twentieth century seem to have thought was an adorable evocation of toddler-speak. And he made us miss the library!
What I’m Reading Now
Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which is about the adventures of eight-year-old Betsy, Tacy, and their new friend Tib. So far they have attempted to learn how to fly by jumping off of things (Betsy chickened out at the critical moment and told a story about how they all turned into birds to distract the others from how she wasn’t jumping out of the tree) and baked a pudding… cake… thing using pretty much everything in their cupboard.
I once attempted to make a cake like this. I didn’t use everything in the cupboard, but I used a fair number of things, although IIRC neither baking powder nor baking soda, so the poor cake was just a lump.
I’m also reading Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, which I feel like should be totally my thing, but inexplicably I’m having trouble getting through it. It’s very frustrating.
What I Plan to Read Next
The rest of the Betsy-Tacy books. I read Betsy and Tacy Go over the Big Hill and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown when I was a kid, but after that, it will all be uncharted territory for me. (I think the later books are about high school years and boys and I lost interest once it was no longer all friendship, all the time.)
Oh, and the Newbery winner for this year is out! It’s Matt de la Pena’s Last Stop on Market Street, which is… a picture book, I guess? Well, that’s something different; I don’t think there are any other picture book Newbery winners. Last year I read the Newbery Honor books as well as the winner itself, and that turned out well, so I may do that again this year.
Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy, which
evelyn_b recommended. This is actually a reread, though it’s been so many years since I read it that I’d forgotten most of it. It’s about two small girls (four/five years old) who live across the street from each other, and become best friends, and play imaginative adventure games, and it is adorable and reading it is like sinking into a warm bath. This second one is not so much a “finished” as a “given up on,” but sometimes life is simply too short for certain books. I started Katherine Ellis Barrett’s The Wide-Awake Girls in Winsted, and it got off to a good start - if a trifle confusing, because it’s the sequel to another book, and that book is apparently about four girls becoming best buddies through penpallery, and clearly amazing - anyway. The heroine was going to found a library for her small town.
But then! The heroine took the train to another town to talk to the librarians about how to run a library, and I was all excited to learn about early twentieth century libraries - except I guess Barrett didn’t feel inclined to do any research, because rather than follow the heroine on her voyage to the library, instead the book follows the irritating tiny tag-along child who snuck onto the train to go on the trip with her, but then falls asleep and gets put off at the next station, and through some complicated series of coincidences ends up back at the proper station just in time.
WHY. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS. And he’s such an irritating, twee, precious-in-the-bad-sense little twerp, too. He talks with that written-out ungrammatical lisp that many writers in the early twentieth century seem to have thought was an adorable evocation of toddler-speak. And he made us miss the library!
What I’m Reading Now
Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which is about the adventures of eight-year-old Betsy, Tacy, and their new friend Tib. So far they have attempted to learn how to fly by jumping off of things (Betsy chickened out at the critical moment and told a story about how they all turned into birds to distract the others from how she wasn’t jumping out of the tree) and baked a pudding… cake… thing using pretty much everything in their cupboard.
I once attempted to make a cake like this. I didn’t use everything in the cupboard, but I used a fair number of things, although IIRC neither baking powder nor baking soda, so the poor cake was just a lump.
I’m also reading Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, which I feel like should be totally my thing, but inexplicably I’m having trouble getting through it. It’s very frustrating.
What I Plan to Read Next
The rest of the Betsy-Tacy books. I read Betsy and Tacy Go over the Big Hill and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown when I was a kid, but after that, it will all be uncharted territory for me. (I think the later books are about high school years and boys and I lost interest once it was no longer all friendship, all the time.)
Oh, and the Newbery winner for this year is out! It’s Matt de la Pena’s Last Stop on Market Street, which is… a picture book, I guess? Well, that’s something different; I don’t think there are any other picture book Newbery winners. Last year I read the Newbery Honor books as well as the winner itself, and that turned out well, so I may do that again this year.
