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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 4th, 2018 08:12 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Two Franceses this week! Frances Hodgson Burnett’s My Robin and Frances Little’s The House of the Misty Star.
My Robin is about the real robin which was the original of the robin in The Secret Garden. They met in an enclosed rose garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett and her robin - when the robin was still so young his breast had not yet turned red; and each day as Burnett wrote in the garden, the robin came out and stayed with her, and perched on the bamboo poles of her sun-shade and sang.
I must admit that my strongest reaction to this book was to feel that it’s quite unfortunate that Burnett lived before the age of blogs. She would have been a fantastic blogger.
Completing The House of the Misty Star means that I’ve read all of Frances Little’s novels. (I’m also closing in on Jean Webster’s complete bibliography. Fear not, however. I shall never run out of Frances Hodgson Burnett or Mrs. Oliphant.) I feel quite accomplished! Although possibly I should not as there are only six of them.
Little remained most famous throughout her life for her first book, The Lady of the Decoration, which seems to me a just verdict: that book and its sequels are by far the strongest of her work. The House of the Misty Star is fairly boilerplate Victorian romance, enlivened by the Japanese setting and by the fact that the narrator is a fifty-year-old woman, looking on the romance of the younger characters: a mixed race Japanese-American girl and an American boy. (“Didn’t Little already write that story in The Lady and Sada-San?” you ask. Well, yes, but in that version no one had amnesia. And actually Zura and Sada have very different temperaments: Zura is a rebellious artist, while Sada is much more peaceable and naive.)
Both of Little’s mixed-race heroines achieve happy endings, in case you’re curious. I really wish I had read these books back when I was working on my project: they would have added something interesting to the section about race. But I guess they’re technically books for adults, so they wouldn’t have really fit into the purview of a project about books for girls anyway.
One last book this week: Diane Athill’s Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood, which is… well, as the title might lead you to expect, it’s a memoir about her childhood in England in the 1920s & 30s. Interesting, but it didn’t blow me away.
What I’m Reading Now
I still mean to finish Five Little Peppers someday, but I couldn’t bear the treacliness anymore, so I’ve started Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, which is fascinating in how nearly the heroine resembles the Mary Sues of the 1990s. (And quite possibly the self-insert fics teenagers write today, too. Franklin wrote the book when she herself was sixteen.)
Although Sybylla, our heroine, grows up on a poor dairy farm and believes that she’s ugly and useless, within two chapters of moving to live with her higher class relations she’s discovered to be brilliantly talented at both music and acting. And while she may not be pretty, she’s something even better: her face is so striking and mobile that men can’t help but fall in love with her! She’s snubbing suitors left and right already.
I’m trying not to find this aggravating, but… I’m finding it aggravating. I really preferred the movie, which dispensed with most of Sybylla’s self-loathing yet oddly self-satisfied internal monologue.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m going to be spending a week in a cabin in Canada and I intend to do some hardcore reading while I’m there! (Also some fishing. And some writing. I may have planned too much for one vacation.) In particular, I’m taking a second whack at Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for my July reading challenge: “a book that’s more than 500 pages.”
Two Franceses this week! Frances Hodgson Burnett’s My Robin and Frances Little’s The House of the Misty Star.
My Robin is about the real robin which was the original of the robin in The Secret Garden. They met in an enclosed rose garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett and her robin - when the robin was still so young his breast had not yet turned red; and each day as Burnett wrote in the garden, the robin came out and stayed with her, and perched on the bamboo poles of her sun-shade and sang.
I must admit that my strongest reaction to this book was to feel that it’s quite unfortunate that Burnett lived before the age of blogs. She would have been a fantastic blogger.
Completing The House of the Misty Star means that I’ve read all of Frances Little’s novels. (I’m also closing in on Jean Webster’s complete bibliography. Fear not, however. I shall never run out of Frances Hodgson Burnett or Mrs. Oliphant.) I feel quite accomplished! Although possibly I should not as there are only six of them.
Little remained most famous throughout her life for her first book, The Lady of the Decoration, which seems to me a just verdict: that book and its sequels are by far the strongest of her work. The House of the Misty Star is fairly boilerplate Victorian romance, enlivened by the Japanese setting and by the fact that the narrator is a fifty-year-old woman, looking on the romance of the younger characters: a mixed race Japanese-American girl and an American boy. (“Didn’t Little already write that story in The Lady and Sada-San?” you ask. Well, yes, but in that version no one had amnesia. And actually Zura and Sada have very different temperaments: Zura is a rebellious artist, while Sada is much more peaceable and naive.)
Both of Little’s mixed-race heroines achieve happy endings, in case you’re curious. I really wish I had read these books back when I was working on my project: they would have added something interesting to the section about race. But I guess they’re technically books for adults, so they wouldn’t have really fit into the purview of a project about books for girls anyway.
One last book this week: Diane Athill’s Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood, which is… well, as the title might lead you to expect, it’s a memoir about her childhood in England in the 1920s & 30s. Interesting, but it didn’t blow me away.
What I’m Reading Now
I still mean to finish Five Little Peppers someday, but I couldn’t bear the treacliness anymore, so I’ve started Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, which is fascinating in how nearly the heroine resembles the Mary Sues of the 1990s. (And quite possibly the self-insert fics teenagers write today, too. Franklin wrote the book when she herself was sixteen.)
Although Sybylla, our heroine, grows up on a poor dairy farm and believes that she’s ugly and useless, within two chapters of moving to live with her higher class relations she’s discovered to be brilliantly talented at both music and acting. And while she may not be pretty, she’s something even better: her face is so striking and mobile that men can’t help but fall in love with her! She’s snubbing suitors left and right already.
I’m trying not to find this aggravating, but… I’m finding it aggravating. I really preferred the movie, which dispensed with most of Sybylla’s self-loathing yet oddly self-satisfied internal monologue.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m going to be spending a week in a cabin in Canada and I intend to do some hardcore reading while I’m there! (Also some fishing. And some writing. I may have planned too much for one vacation.) In particular, I’m taking a second whack at Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment for my July reading challenge: “a book that’s more than 500 pages.”
