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Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 12th, 2018 09:30 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School. I feel VERY put out, because the library has only the first book in this series and I want to read the rest of Elizabeth Allen’s adventures! Oh well. Perhaps if I haunt used bookstores long enough, I might find the rest.
In particular, the picture of Elizabeth Allen’s school is fascinating: Whyteleafe is a progressive co-educational boarding school ruled by the students along socialist lines: the children all put their pocket money in the school kitty, and each gets to withdraw two pounds a week; if they want more they have to apply to the student council for it, and the council is a body with actual power, not basically decorative like the student councils in my day.
I wonder if this general powerlessness of modern student councils contributes to the difficulty getting young people to vote. In student council elections, they’re voting for a governing body that has no actual power. We’re basically training kids that voting is useless.
Anyway! Whyteleafe is a very different school than the traditional girls’ boarding schools Blyton wrote about in Malory Towers and St. Clair’s, and it’s interesting to me that she wrote so impartially; her characters find good friends and fun things to do at both kinds of school. You don’t get the sense that Blyton is arguing that one type is better than the other - they’re just different.
I finally finished Martha Finley’s Elsie at the World’s Fair, which lost focus on the World’s Fair at the end, alas, although I did garner a certain amount of good detail before then. My ideas about the World’s Fair book have been evolving: I hadn’t realized so many women artists worked on the fair and now I’d like to focus on the novel on one of them. And there is the possibility of a fantasy element - so many people compare the fair to a fairyland - and couldn’t there be an actual court of the fairy on the Court of Honor?
But I don’t think Faerie as written in urban fantasy these days would be suitable for the World’s Fair, so I’ll have to think abuot this more.
And also I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s A Fabulous Creature. MY FEELINGS. MY FEELINGS. HOW CAN YOU STOMP ON MY FEELINGS LIKE THIS? ( spoilers )
What I’m Reading Now
Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Smith College Stories, which continues to be moderately interesting but not engrossing. Possibly I shouldn’t have read it so soon after rereading Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls? I feel that she quoted from most of the most interesting stories.
I’ve also begun Remember, Remember: The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby, which begins with a selection of autobiographical stories, including one about a man who never really appreciates life till he receives a fatal diagnosis, at which point he starts gazing upon the apple trees wondering if he’ll live to see them blossom in the spring, etc. It sounds rather trite, but knowing that Holtby wrote it after her own diagnosis it’s almost unbearably sad.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been struggling to decide what to read for my final reading challenge (“a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own”) - so many possibilities! But then one of my friends gave me Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, who did the covers of Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and Juniper), and I’ve long meant to read something by Allende, so there we are.
Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School. I feel VERY put out, because the library has only the first book in this series and I want to read the rest of Elizabeth Allen’s adventures! Oh well. Perhaps if I haunt used bookstores long enough, I might find the rest.
In particular, the picture of Elizabeth Allen’s school is fascinating: Whyteleafe is a progressive co-educational boarding school ruled by the students along socialist lines: the children all put their pocket money in the school kitty, and each gets to withdraw two pounds a week; if they want more they have to apply to the student council for it, and the council is a body with actual power, not basically decorative like the student councils in my day.
I wonder if this general powerlessness of modern student councils contributes to the difficulty getting young people to vote. In student council elections, they’re voting for a governing body that has no actual power. We’re basically training kids that voting is useless.
Anyway! Whyteleafe is a very different school than the traditional girls’ boarding schools Blyton wrote about in Malory Towers and St. Clair’s, and it’s interesting to me that she wrote so impartially; her characters find good friends and fun things to do at both kinds of school. You don’t get the sense that Blyton is arguing that one type is better than the other - they’re just different.
I finally finished Martha Finley’s Elsie at the World’s Fair, which lost focus on the World’s Fair at the end, alas, although I did garner a certain amount of good detail before then. My ideas about the World’s Fair book have been evolving: I hadn’t realized so many women artists worked on the fair and now I’d like to focus on the novel on one of them. And there is the possibility of a fantasy element - so many people compare the fair to a fairyland - and couldn’t there be an actual court of the fairy on the Court of Honor?
But I don’t think Faerie as written in urban fantasy these days would be suitable for the World’s Fair, so I’ll have to think abuot this more.
And also I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s A Fabulous Creature. MY FEELINGS. MY FEELINGS. HOW CAN YOU STOMP ON MY FEELINGS LIKE THIS? ( spoilers )
What I’m Reading Now
Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Smith College Stories, which continues to be moderately interesting but not engrossing. Possibly I shouldn’t have read it so soon after rereading Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls? I feel that she quoted from most of the most interesting stories.
I’ve also begun Remember, Remember: The Selected Stories of Winifred Holtby, which begins with a selection of autobiographical stories, including one about a man who never really appreciates life till he receives a fatal diagnosis, at which point he starts gazing upon the apple trees wondering if he’ll live to see them blossom in the spring, etc. It sounds rather trite, but knowing that Holtby wrote it after her own diagnosis it’s almost unbearably sad.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been struggling to decide what to read for my final reading challenge (“a book by an author of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than your own”) - so many possibilities! But then one of my friends gave me Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, who did the covers of Monica Furlong’s Wise Child and Juniper), and I’ve long meant to read something by Allende, so there we are.
