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Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 28th, 2018 01:30 pmWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did Next, the third book in the What Katy Did trilogy, in which Katy goes to Europe, travels about, nurses a sick girl, and - spoilers I suppose, but how else is a 19th century novel series about a young girl going to end? - finds love.
It cuts off before the wedding, which I thought was a little mean: I wanted to see Katy all in orange blossom, and sailing off to new adventures with her husband the navy officer! Oh well. But then again there is yet ANOTHER sequel (Clover), so I may yet have my wish. And probably see Katy’s little sister Clover married too.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m working on Alice Hoffman’s Nightbird, which is almost but not quite a thing I love - a portrait of a town, in this case a New England town, and a mildly uncanny one at that, and all in all it should be right up my alley but the town just doesn’t feel quite well-realized enough to me. It doesn’t feel solid. The attempted uncanniness is in peril of slipping into twee.
And I’m nearly done listening to Eleanor and Park. ELEANOR’S STEPFATHER IS THE WORST THE WORST THE ACTUAL WORST, although honestly her mother is pretty awful too; I just can’t get over the fact that her financial situation (along with all her other life situations) actually got worse after she married this horrible man. There is literally no excuse!
She tells Eleanor “Oh, I need a husband because otherwise when you kids are grown up I’ll be all alone,” but (1) the youngest of her pre-remarriage children is FIVE, she has more than a decade in which to figure things out, and (2) I can only hope that her new husband will get die in a not-so-tragic accident with a trash compactor and then all her children will abandon her the moment they turn 18 because they can't forgive her for ruining their lives by marrying that awful horrible man. It would be poetic justice for her to end up all alone when she threw her kids under the metaphorical bus in a desperate attempt to avoid it.
I’ve also been reading another Sara Jeannette Duncan (someday I’m going to convince someone to join me in reading Sara Jeannette Duncan, the most archly sarcastic writer in late nineteenth-century Canada), A Voyage of Consolation. Even the title of this book is sarcastic. The narrator Mamie embarks on a “voyage of consolation” to Europe after her engagement breaks, even though she is notably lacking in any need of consolation whatsoever.
Once in Europe, she runs into Mr. Dod, a young man whom she has known since childhood - who is attempting to romantically pursue an English girl named Miss Portheris. (“Miss Portheris only came out two months ago,” remarked Mr. Dod, with the effect of announcing that Venus had just arisen from the foam.)
However, an Englishman - who proposed to Mamie in a previous novel - is also attempting to win Miss Portheris’s hand! Mamie attempts to deflect his attention. This leads to exchanges between the Englishman and Mamie like -
”Marriage in England is such a permanent institution.”
“I have known it to last for years even in the United States,” I sighed.
At the moment my money is on Mamie & Mr. Dod ending up together. They were trapped in the catacombs together for hours! In the company of Mrs. Portheris, Miss Portheris’s formidable mother, who resorted to nibbling a tallow candle for sustenance during their seven hours ordeal, which perhaps makes the whole thing a comic rather than romantic interlude. But still.
What I Plan to Read Next
God, so many things. My next audiobook will be Roald Dahl’s Going Solo, which is a memoir of Dahl’s time as a World War II pilot (how could I say no to that?) AND is read by Dan Stevens, who played Matthew in Downton Abbey and more recently Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I liked a lot - I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dan Stevens in anything I disliked - anyway, I expect he’ll be a fabulous audiobook reader.
And my next book-to-read-on-my-computer-at-work is Cornelia Meigs’ The Windy Hill, which was a Newbery Honor award winner in 1922. (Meigs went on to win the Newbery Medal in 1934 with Invincible Louisa, her biography of Louisa May Alcott.) 1922 is the first year the Newbery Medal was awarded and, because of the vagaries of copyright law, the only year for which some of the books are available free online, so after this I’m going to have to throw myself on the tender mercies of Interlibrary Loan, I guess.
Or I could start reading the Honor books from the most recent years instead of the most far-distant. That might be a better plan.
Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did Next, the third book in the What Katy Did trilogy, in which Katy goes to Europe, travels about, nurses a sick girl, and - spoilers I suppose, but how else is a 19th century novel series about a young girl going to end? - finds love.
It cuts off before the wedding, which I thought was a little mean: I wanted to see Katy all in orange blossom, and sailing off to new adventures with her husband the navy officer! Oh well. But then again there is yet ANOTHER sequel (Clover), so I may yet have my wish. And probably see Katy’s little sister Clover married too.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m working on Alice Hoffman’s Nightbird, which is almost but not quite a thing I love - a portrait of a town, in this case a New England town, and a mildly uncanny one at that, and all in all it should be right up my alley but the town just doesn’t feel quite well-realized enough to me. It doesn’t feel solid. The attempted uncanniness is in peril of slipping into twee.
And I’m nearly done listening to Eleanor and Park. ELEANOR’S STEPFATHER IS THE WORST THE WORST THE ACTUAL WORST, although honestly her mother is pretty awful too; I just can’t get over the fact that her financial situation (along with all her other life situations) actually got worse after she married this horrible man. There is literally no excuse!
She tells Eleanor “Oh, I need a husband because otherwise when you kids are grown up I’ll be all alone,” but (1) the youngest of her pre-remarriage children is FIVE, she has more than a decade in which to figure things out, and (2) I can only hope that her new husband will get die in a not-so-tragic accident with a trash compactor and then all her children will abandon her the moment they turn 18 because they can't forgive her for ruining their lives by marrying that awful horrible man. It would be poetic justice for her to end up all alone when she threw her kids under the metaphorical bus in a desperate attempt to avoid it.
I’ve also been reading another Sara Jeannette Duncan (someday I’m going to convince someone to join me in reading Sara Jeannette Duncan, the most archly sarcastic writer in late nineteenth-century Canada), A Voyage of Consolation. Even the title of this book is sarcastic. The narrator Mamie embarks on a “voyage of consolation” to Europe after her engagement breaks, even though she is notably lacking in any need of consolation whatsoever.
Once in Europe, she runs into Mr. Dod, a young man whom she has known since childhood - who is attempting to romantically pursue an English girl named Miss Portheris. (“Miss Portheris only came out two months ago,” remarked Mr. Dod, with the effect of announcing that Venus had just arisen from the foam.)
However, an Englishman - who proposed to Mamie in a previous novel - is also attempting to win Miss Portheris’s hand! Mamie attempts to deflect his attention. This leads to exchanges between the Englishman and Mamie like -
”Marriage in England is such a permanent institution.”
“I have known it to last for years even in the United States,” I sighed.
At the moment my money is on Mamie & Mr. Dod ending up together. They were trapped in the catacombs together for hours! In the company of Mrs. Portheris, Miss Portheris’s formidable mother, who resorted to nibbling a tallow candle for sustenance during their seven hours ordeal, which perhaps makes the whole thing a comic rather than romantic interlude. But still.
What I Plan to Read Next
God, so many things. My next audiobook will be Roald Dahl’s Going Solo, which is a memoir of Dahl’s time as a World War II pilot (how could I say no to that?) AND is read by Dan Stevens, who played Matthew in Downton Abbey and more recently Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas, which I liked a lot - I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dan Stevens in anything I disliked - anyway, I expect he’ll be a fabulous audiobook reader.
And my next book-to-read-on-my-computer-at-work is Cornelia Meigs’ The Windy Hill, which was a Newbery Honor award winner in 1922. (Meigs went on to win the Newbery Medal in 1934 with Invincible Louisa, her biography of Louisa May Alcott.) 1922 is the first year the Newbery Medal was awarded and, because of the vagaries of copyright law, the only year for which some of the books are available free online, so after this I’m going to have to throw myself on the tender mercies of Interlibrary Loan, I guess.
Or I could start reading the Honor books from the most recent years instead of the most far-distant. That might be a better plan.
