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Wednesday Reading Meme
Apr. 18th, 2018 08:38 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Because I liked Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration so much, I decided to read another one of her books, Little Sister Snow - and discovered on the very first page that it was illustrated by a fellow named Genjiro Kataoka, an early twentieth-century Japanese-American illustrator who was tremendously popular for Japanese-themed books, including Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, which I have marked down for further reading.
It’s fortunate that I got so much enjoyment out of Genjiro Kataoka’s existence (and his lovely illustrations), because the book itself is a bit of a wash. I was pleasantly surprised that The Lady of the Decoration was so refreshingly low on stereotypes, but evidently Little was saving them all up to use in Little Sister Snow. The book is in the POV of a Japanese maiden who attends an American missionary school, and even with the missionary school connection, it seems that was just a bridge too far from her own experience for Little to grapple with successfully.
However, the award for “most racist book read this week” definitely goes to Jean Webster’s The Four-Pools Mystery. I really had no reason to expect better of Jean Webster, but I love Daddy-Long-Legs so much that I did. The book was published in 1908 and takes place on a post-bellum Virginia plantation and is steeped in the racial attitudes of the time, although at the end it struck me that Webster intended the book to be anti-racist.
Or, as her New York reporter detective explains to the Virginians at the end, his ability to solve the crime that baffled them “proves another thing… which is a thing that you people don’t seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human beings and have feelings like the rest of us. Poor old Colonel Gaylord paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life.”
You see, a black vagrant murdered Colonel Gaylord because he was mad that the Colonel had given him a thrashing. The Virginians couldn’t imagine that a black man might hold a grudge about getting thrashed (“it comes natural to niggers to be whipped and they don’t mind it,” the sheriff informs the skeptical reporter) so they didn’t consider the vagrant as a suspect.
Now I realize that racists have believed a lot of weird things, but I just don’t believe that racism has ever rendered anyone incapable of pinning a crime on a convenient black vagrant.
To add insult to injury, the mystery itself is poorly done, too. The narrator is clearly intended to play Watson to the reporter-detective’s Holmes, but a Watson needs to be at least as smart as the reader, not a total bozo who can’t figure out the most obvious things.
I also read D. E. Stevenson’s Celia’s House, which I really liked (it turns out that it’s a stealth retelling of Mansfield Park, and this version actually has enough time for the Fanny & Edmund characters to fall in love at the end. Also, no one is against plays qua plays), but I’m too worn out from writing about the others to write about it properly. Maybe I should do a separate weekly Obscure Old Books post to space things out a little.
What I’m Reading Now
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Short stories are generally not my thing, but I’ve been enjoying these, in a “I would probably like any one of these more if it were a novel and I had more time to get to know the characters” sort of way. So far my favorite is “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.”
I’ve also begun listening to Kevin Henkes’ Junonia, which is not bad. Olive’s Ocean wasn’t bad either. I was going to say that this would be my last Kevin Henkes book, because there’s not enough time in the world to waste it on “not bad,” but it turns out he got a Newbery Honor for The Year of Billy Miller, so there’s at least one more in my future.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Year of Billy Miller, probably. (I’ve decided to get cracking on my Newbery Honor project.) Should I read it on paper, or listen to it as an audiobook? An important question.
In fact it looks like most of the recent Newbery Honor books are available as audiobooks. I’ll need to give this some thought.
Because I liked Frances Little’s The Lady of the Decoration so much, I decided to read another one of her books, Little Sister Snow - and discovered on the very first page that it was illustrated by a fellow named Genjiro Kataoka, an early twentieth-century Japanese-American illustrator who was tremendously popular for Japanese-themed books, including Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl, which I have marked down for further reading.
It’s fortunate that I got so much enjoyment out of Genjiro Kataoka’s existence (and his lovely illustrations), because the book itself is a bit of a wash. I was pleasantly surprised that The Lady of the Decoration was so refreshingly low on stereotypes, but evidently Little was saving them all up to use in Little Sister Snow. The book is in the POV of a Japanese maiden who attends an American missionary school, and even with the missionary school connection, it seems that was just a bridge too far from her own experience for Little to grapple with successfully.
However, the award for “most racist book read this week” definitely goes to Jean Webster’s The Four-Pools Mystery. I really had no reason to expect better of Jean Webster, but I love Daddy-Long-Legs so much that I did. The book was published in 1908 and takes place on a post-bellum Virginia plantation and is steeped in the racial attitudes of the time, although at the end it struck me that Webster intended the book to be anti-racist.
Or, as her New York reporter detective explains to the Virginians at the end, his ability to solve the crime that baffled them “proves another thing… which is a thing that you people don’t seem to have grasped; and that is that negroes are human beings and have feelings like the rest of us. Poor old Colonel Gaylord paid a terrible price for not having learned it earlier in life.”
You see, a black vagrant murdered Colonel Gaylord because he was mad that the Colonel had given him a thrashing. The Virginians couldn’t imagine that a black man might hold a grudge about getting thrashed (“it comes natural to niggers to be whipped and they don’t mind it,” the sheriff informs the skeptical reporter) so they didn’t consider the vagrant as a suspect.
Now I realize that racists have believed a lot of weird things, but I just don’t believe that racism has ever rendered anyone incapable of pinning a crime on a convenient black vagrant.
To add insult to injury, the mystery itself is poorly done, too. The narrator is clearly intended to play Watson to the reporter-detective’s Holmes, but a Watson needs to be at least as smart as the reader, not a total bozo who can’t figure out the most obvious things.
I also read D. E. Stevenson’s Celia’s House, which I really liked (it turns out that it’s a stealth retelling of Mansfield Park, and this version actually has enough time for the Fanny & Edmund characters to fall in love at the end. Also, no one is against plays qua plays), but I’m too worn out from writing about the others to write about it properly. Maybe I should do a separate weekly Obscure Old Books post to space things out a little.
What I’m Reading Now
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Short stories are generally not my thing, but I’ve been enjoying these, in a “I would probably like any one of these more if it were a novel and I had more time to get to know the characters” sort of way. So far my favorite is “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.”
I’ve also begun listening to Kevin Henkes’ Junonia, which is not bad. Olive’s Ocean wasn’t bad either. I was going to say that this would be my last Kevin Henkes book, because there’s not enough time in the world to waste it on “not bad,” but it turns out he got a Newbery Honor for The Year of Billy Miller, so there’s at least one more in my future.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Year of Billy Miller, probably. (I’ve decided to get cracking on my Newbery Honor project.) Should I read it on paper, or listen to it as an audiobook? An important question.
In fact it looks like most of the recent Newbery Honor books are available as audiobooks. I’ll need to give this some thought.
