Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 27th, 2018 08:54 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women. What a peculiar, intense book this is.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
evelyn_b, I hope you do read this one, for the entirely selfish reason that I want someone to talk about it with; I’m not sure if you’ll like it (I’m not sure if I like it) but I think I can say pretty definitely that you won’t be bored.
It’s a hard book to describe without giving away spoilers, which is odd because it’s not a hugely plotty book. But the way that you see certain characters changes as the book progresses till they seem like different people - not because they’ve changed in any way - it’s as if as you learn more about them, the things you already know snap into a different configuration, and suddenly you’ve got a totally new view.
I also read Caroline Frances Little’s Little Wintergreen, purely because it came up when I searched Frances Little (author of Lady of the Decoration) and I was curious what it was. It turns out that it’s a Sunday school tract, complete with a Terrible Accident Caused by Disobedience which leads to conversion (with the aid of a little book of Bible verses).
Oh! And I finished a couple more books for the Newbery Honor project. The voice remained good throughout Sheila Turnage’s Three Times Lucky, but as a mystery I thought it relied too much on luck & coincidence, which is a problem I’ve had with other children’s mysteries I’ve read.
And I had mixed to negative feelings about Stephanie Tolan’s Surviving the Applewhites. After he gets kicked out of all the schools in Rhode Island, thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent Jake Semple is sent to live with friends of his family: the artsy Applewhite clan, who live in an old motel which they’ve transformed into a studio.
In some ways the Applewhite clan is charming, and I suspect that when I was actually in school, I would have been thrilled by the descriptions of project-based homeschooling: yes, let me read about the psychological effects of torture all day! (That was my hobby when I was a teenager. I thought it would help me write better and more realistic trauma in fic.)
But I thought Jake’s reform was much too easy: within a few chapters he’s decided it’s this or juvie so he’s gotta make this work (people have told him this before, so why did he decide it was true this time around?) and he begins to settle in, and even before his reformation, he never does anything seriously delinquent on Applewhite property. Sure, he smokes, he swears, he wears a lot of earrings, but he doesn’t set the barn on fire (he’s famous for having set his school on fire, which was evidently an accident, though we never hear the details) or punch anyone in the face or whatever. If you’ve set a character up as the most delinquent juvenile delinquent EVER, there’s gotta be some deliquenting before he’s saved by the power of Art, you know?
And I gave up on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Life is too short for books that aren’t grabbing you.
What I’m Reading Now
Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers, and How They Grew. Can you believe I haven’t read this book before? I feel that I really ought to have read it for my college capstone paper. So far it’s treacly.
What I Plan to Read Next
Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner. I liked Nora Twomey’s animated version so much that I decided to check out the book as well.
Oh! And it turns out Thanhha Lai (who wrote Inside Out and Back Again) has a new book out. So probably that, too!
Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women. What a peculiar, intense book this is.
evelyn_b, I hope you do read this one, for the entirely selfish reason that I want someone to talk about it with; I’m not sure if you’ll like it (I’m not sure if I like it) but I think I can say pretty definitely that you won’t be bored. It’s a hard book to describe without giving away spoilers, which is odd because it’s not a hugely plotty book. But the way that you see certain characters changes as the book progresses till they seem like different people - not because they’ve changed in any way - it’s as if as you learn more about them, the things you already know snap into a different configuration, and suddenly you’ve got a totally new view.
I also read Caroline Frances Little’s Little Wintergreen, purely because it came up when I searched Frances Little (author of Lady of the Decoration) and I was curious what it was. It turns out that it’s a Sunday school tract, complete with a Terrible Accident Caused by Disobedience which leads to conversion (with the aid of a little book of Bible verses).
Oh! And I finished a couple more books for the Newbery Honor project. The voice remained good throughout Sheila Turnage’s Three Times Lucky, but as a mystery I thought it relied too much on luck & coincidence, which is a problem I’ve had with other children’s mysteries I’ve read.
And I had mixed to negative feelings about Stephanie Tolan’s Surviving the Applewhites. After he gets kicked out of all the schools in Rhode Island, thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent Jake Semple is sent to live with friends of his family: the artsy Applewhite clan, who live in an old motel which they’ve transformed into a studio.
In some ways the Applewhite clan is charming, and I suspect that when I was actually in school, I would have been thrilled by the descriptions of project-based homeschooling: yes, let me read about the psychological effects of torture all day! (That was my hobby when I was a teenager. I thought it would help me write better and more realistic trauma in fic.)
But I thought Jake’s reform was much too easy: within a few chapters he’s decided it’s this or juvie so he’s gotta make this work (people have told him this before, so why did he decide it was true this time around?) and he begins to settle in, and even before his reformation, he never does anything seriously delinquent on Applewhite property. Sure, he smokes, he swears, he wears a lot of earrings, but he doesn’t set the barn on fire (he’s famous for having set his school on fire, which was evidently an accident, though we never hear the details) or punch anyone in the face or whatever. If you’ve set a character up as the most delinquent juvenile delinquent EVER, there’s gotta be some deliquenting before he’s saved by the power of Art, you know?
And I gave up on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Life is too short for books that aren’t grabbing you.
What I’m Reading Now
Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers, and How They Grew. Can you believe I haven’t read this book before? I feel that I really ought to have read it for my college capstone paper. So far it’s treacly.
What I Plan to Read Next
Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner. I liked Nora Twomey’s animated version so much that I decided to check out the book as well.
Oh! And it turns out Thanhha Lai (who wrote Inside Out and Back Again) has a new book out. So probably that, too!
