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Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 2nd, 2019 08:25 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Vivien Alcock’s The Monster Garden would make a delightful anime. Our heroine, Frankie Stein (the name is an unsubtle hint at the books theme), gets a bit of primordial goo from her brother, which gets struck by lightning and begins to grow into a… well, a monster: that’s Frankie’s first reaction. It’s a strange, blob-like, gelid, red-eyed creature that grows at an alarmingly rapid rate.
And yet Frankie comes to love it, and see it as lovable and cute in its very strangeness, and there are a bunch of adorable scenes where she learns how to read its body language (when it’s happy, it sometimes forms its mouth into a figure eight, for instance) and watches it explore its environment. The book is in fact an answer to Frankenstein: “What would have happened if Frankenstein loved his monster?”
I also finished Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, which really hits its stride in its final chapter, when Gates offers his interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance as an attempt to push back against white supremacy through art and go some way to undoing the Redemption, in which white supremacists “redeemed” the South from Reconstruction by reinstituting white supremacy policies.
“Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture… There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.”
I suspect there’s a general human tendency (God knows you can see it in some of the sillier revolutionary pretensions of fandom) to believe that whatever we personally happen to be involved in is not merely important, but the most important thing there is. Gates’ summing up is a useful corrective to this tendency: “While all art, inevitably, is political, one cannot launch a political revolution through art alone.”
After watching Downton Abbey, I felt such enthusiasm that I snagged Jessica Fellowes’ murder mystery, The Mitford Murders, from the library. (Jessica Fellowes is the niece of Julian Fellowes, who created Downton Abbey.) Unfortunately, I found it rather a disappointment: most of the Mitfords are still children for most of the book and don’t seem to have grown into their personalities yet (mind, I don’t know a great deal about the Mitfords, but I know enough to know that they should all have personalities rather than just being an indistinguishable mass of children), and the mystery plot relies on too many coincidences. Won’t be continuing the series.
What I’m Reading Now
I could easily have finished William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions, but I’ve actually slowed down reading it because I don’t want it to be over yet. Not only am I enjoying spending time with Howells, but his literary reminiscences have added a number of books to my Gutenberg list, too. Of course many of the books he talks about are classics that I was already aware of (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens), but he also waxes lyrical about a few nineteenth century authors who are no longer widely read. I’m looking forward to trying out Ik Marvel’s Dream Life.
I’ve also been reading Paul Watkins’ Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England. Paul Watkins is the real name of Sam Eastland, author of the Inspector Pekkala books, and I am beginning to suspect that Watkins felt drawn to Stalinist Russia because its arbitrarily punitive atmosphere reminded him of the days of his youth in an English boarding school.
What I Plan to Read Next
Has anyone read Alys Clare’s The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits? I’ve been eyeing it thoughtfully at the library, but on the other hand I’m not sure I need another Victorian mystery series. The setting might invite unfair comparison to The Most Comfortable Man in London, a.k.a. the Charles Lenox mysteries.
Vivien Alcock’s The Monster Garden would make a delightful anime. Our heroine, Frankie Stein (the name is an unsubtle hint at the books theme), gets a bit of primordial goo from her brother, which gets struck by lightning and begins to grow into a… well, a monster: that’s Frankie’s first reaction. It’s a strange, blob-like, gelid, red-eyed creature that grows at an alarmingly rapid rate.
And yet Frankie comes to love it, and see it as lovable and cute in its very strangeness, and there are a bunch of adorable scenes where she learns how to read its body language (when it’s happy, it sometimes forms its mouth into a figure eight, for instance) and watches it explore its environment. The book is in fact an answer to Frankenstein: “What would have happened if Frankenstein loved his monster?”
I also finished Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, which really hits its stride in its final chapter, when Gates offers his interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance as an attempt to push back against white supremacy through art and go some way to undoing the Redemption, in which white supremacists “redeemed” the South from Reconstruction by reinstituting white supremacy policies.
“Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture… There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.”
I suspect there’s a general human tendency (God knows you can see it in some of the sillier revolutionary pretensions of fandom) to believe that whatever we personally happen to be involved in is not merely important, but the most important thing there is. Gates’ summing up is a useful corrective to this tendency: “While all art, inevitably, is political, one cannot launch a political revolution through art alone.”
After watching Downton Abbey, I felt such enthusiasm that I snagged Jessica Fellowes’ murder mystery, The Mitford Murders, from the library. (Jessica Fellowes is the niece of Julian Fellowes, who created Downton Abbey.) Unfortunately, I found it rather a disappointment: most of the Mitfords are still children for most of the book and don’t seem to have grown into their personalities yet (mind, I don’t know a great deal about the Mitfords, but I know enough to know that they should all have personalities rather than just being an indistinguishable mass of children), and the mystery plot relies on too many coincidences. Won’t be continuing the series.
What I’m Reading Now
I could easily have finished William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions, but I’ve actually slowed down reading it because I don’t want it to be over yet. Not only am I enjoying spending time with Howells, but his literary reminiscences have added a number of books to my Gutenberg list, too. Of course many of the books he talks about are classics that I was already aware of (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens), but he also waxes lyrical about a few nineteenth century authors who are no longer widely read. I’m looking forward to trying out Ik Marvel’s Dream Life.
I’ve also been reading Paul Watkins’ Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England. Paul Watkins is the real name of Sam Eastland, author of the Inspector Pekkala books, and I am beginning to suspect that Watkins felt drawn to Stalinist Russia because its arbitrarily punitive atmosphere reminded him of the days of his youth in an English boarding school.
What I Plan to Read Next
Has anyone read Alys Clare’s The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits? I’ve been eyeing it thoughtfully at the library, but on the other hand I’m not sure I need another Victorian mystery series. The setting might invite unfair comparison to The Most Comfortable Man in London, a.k.a. the Charles Lenox mysteries.
