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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 30th, 2018 02:10 pmWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Frances Little’s Jack and I in Lotus Land, in which the intrepid heroine of The Lady of the Decoration and her husband Jack return to Japan to recuperate after the stresses of the Great War. Jack manages to relax for approximately two days before the Red Cross summons him to Vladivostok to care for Russian war orphans, leaving the Lady on her own to gallivant through Japan. I often get a bit bored with landscape descriptions but Little’s are so clear and lovely (and, it must be said, concise) that I enjoy them. You could imagine this scenery in a Studio Ghibli film.
Little’s book also shares with many Ghibli films a fascination with work, particularly woman’s work. The Lady meets a female motor bus conductor, tours a paper run by women (“In the book binding business, the printing business, and in typesetting, Japanese women hold their own with the men of their kind,” (131) she comments), and admires the hard work and good spirits of country women picking tea or looking after the silkworms in a factory.
I also read another Newbery Honor book, Amy Timberlake’s One Came Home, which I didn’t particularly like because it follows a plot I rarely enjoy, wherein the hero or heroine’s (heroine, in this case) loved one (sister) supposedly dies, only the heroine is convinced that she is ACTUALLY ALIVE and sets out on a quest to prove it
This is a quest with two possible endings and IMO neither are very satisfying. It’s a bummer if the loved one turns out to be dead and the whole point was to teach a lesson about The Finality of Death, but it’s also sort of irritating if the protagonist is 100% right and the loved one is in fact alive. I mean come on.
However, One Came Home does at least avoid the most annoying ending, where the loved one purposefully faked their own death and is therefore basically a psychopath (somehow, no one ever takes this in a “so in a way they ARE dead! The decent human being the protagonist always loved never really existed!” direction), and there is a lot of stuff about passenger pigeons, so there are enjoyable elements.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m still thrashing through the Iliad. I am so bored of descriptions of soldiers dying gory deaths. As far as I can tell their armor only actually works if a god purposefully strengthens it right at the moment of impact.
I’m also reading Susan Coolidge’s Eyebright, which starts out as a tale of young Isabella Bright (I. Bright… Eyebright) who lives in a small town in New York and entertains her friends with imaginative adventure stories. At one point her school takes a field trip to the local Shaker settlement, a turn of events that delighted me beyond words.
And then I guess Susan Coolidge got bored because she killed off the heroine’s invalid mother, bankrupted her father (the bankruptcy is unrelated to the mother’s death; it just kind of all happens at once), and now Eyebright and her father have moved to his one remaining possession, a tiny farm on a small island off the coast of Maine.
I always find nineteenth-century plotting sort of fascinating because authors will just do stuff like this. You start off reading one book and it takes a completely weird turn and then suddenly the author is resolving a difficult plot problem with a volcano eruption, as Frances Little Does in Jack and I in Lotus Land. (Don’t worry. It’s a small eruption - just large enough to show the comparative mettle of the heroine’s protegee’s two suitors.)
What I Plan to Read Next
Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn! I am excited because (1) Daphne du Maurier!!!, and (2) there is a miniseries based on this book which is directed by a woman (and therefore fits my project) AND stars Jessica Brown Findlay, who played Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey. I quit the show mid-episode when it became clear that Sybil was about to die. Nothing I have heard about it since has made me regret this decision.
Frances Little’s Jack and I in Lotus Land, in which the intrepid heroine of The Lady of the Decoration and her husband Jack return to Japan to recuperate after the stresses of the Great War. Jack manages to relax for approximately two days before the Red Cross summons him to Vladivostok to care for Russian war orphans, leaving the Lady on her own to gallivant through Japan. I often get a bit bored with landscape descriptions but Little’s are so clear and lovely (and, it must be said, concise) that I enjoy them. You could imagine this scenery in a Studio Ghibli film.
Little’s book also shares with many Ghibli films a fascination with work, particularly woman’s work. The Lady meets a female motor bus conductor, tours a paper run by women (“In the book binding business, the printing business, and in typesetting, Japanese women hold their own with the men of their kind,” (131) she comments), and admires the hard work and good spirits of country women picking tea or looking after the silkworms in a factory.
I also read another Newbery Honor book, Amy Timberlake’s One Came Home, which I didn’t particularly like because it follows a plot I rarely enjoy, wherein the hero or heroine’s (heroine, in this case) loved one (sister) supposedly dies, only the heroine is convinced that she is ACTUALLY ALIVE and sets out on a quest to prove it
This is a quest with two possible endings and IMO neither are very satisfying. It’s a bummer if the loved one turns out to be dead and the whole point was to teach a lesson about The Finality of Death, but it’s also sort of irritating if the protagonist is 100% right and the loved one is in fact alive. I mean come on.
However, One Came Home does at least avoid the most annoying ending, where the loved one purposefully faked their own death and is therefore basically a psychopath (somehow, no one ever takes this in a “so in a way they ARE dead! The decent human being the protagonist always loved never really existed!” direction), and there is a lot of stuff about passenger pigeons, so there are enjoyable elements.
What I’m Reading Now
I’m still thrashing through the Iliad. I am so bored of descriptions of soldiers dying gory deaths. As far as I can tell their armor only actually works if a god purposefully strengthens it right at the moment of impact.
I’m also reading Susan Coolidge’s Eyebright, which starts out as a tale of young Isabella Bright (I. Bright… Eyebright) who lives in a small town in New York and entertains her friends with imaginative adventure stories. At one point her school takes a field trip to the local Shaker settlement, a turn of events that delighted me beyond words.
And then I guess Susan Coolidge got bored because she killed off the heroine’s invalid mother, bankrupted her father (the bankruptcy is unrelated to the mother’s death; it just kind of all happens at once), and now Eyebright and her father have moved to his one remaining possession, a tiny farm on a small island off the coast of Maine.
I always find nineteenth-century plotting sort of fascinating because authors will just do stuff like this. You start off reading one book and it takes a completely weird turn and then suddenly the author is resolving a difficult plot problem with a volcano eruption, as Frances Little Does in Jack and I in Lotus Land. (Don’t worry. It’s a small eruption - just large enough to show the comparative mettle of the heroine’s protegee’s two suitors.)
What I Plan to Read Next
Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn! I am excited because (1) Daphne du Maurier!!!, and (2) there is a miniseries based on this book which is directed by a woman (and therefore fits my project) AND stars Jessica Brown Findlay, who played Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey. I quit the show mid-episode when it became clear that Sybil was about to die. Nothing I have heard about it since has made me regret this decision.
