Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 27th, 2019 09:00 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Matt Phelan’s Snow White: A Graphic Novel, a stylishly gothic retelling set in 1930s New York City. Did I love it? Of course I loved it. Everything about that description is made for me.
Snow White is the daughter of a financier; her stepmother is a Ziegfield girl; the seven dwarves are orphaned street urchins, and the glass coffin is the Macy’s department store window, which the street urchins sneak Snow into as, I think, a way of honoring this girl who has been so nice to them.
But of course she turns out not to be dead. As a nod to the original fairy tale, a police detective kisses her cheek, but as there’s been no magic so far, probably the stepmother just miscalculated the dosage when she injected the poison into an apple with a hypodermic needle. And then Snow uses the fortune she inherited from her father to adopt all seven of the urchins. Happy end!
And I dived back into the world of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax with The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax and A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, the latter of which includes the delightful and characteristic line “Her knowledge of army hierarchies had never been very clear and it had always seemed to her that generals tended to multiply like corporative vice-presidents or rabbits.”
Oh! And I read Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because I was puzzled that I found the recent movie adaptation (Mary and the Witch’s Flower) so underwhelming, because most of Mary Stewart’s work feels like it would be really easy to adapt to a movie. The plots of the book and movie are quite similar - the movie gives Mary’s new friend Peter a bigger role, because of course it does; movies always beef up the boy’s role - but the movie raises the stakes for a big flashy climax, and the book plot that is perfectly serviceable for lower stakes buckles under the strain.
What I’m Reading Now
Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, per![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
evelyn_b’s suggestion. This is an anti-racist novel from 1901 (Chesnutt was an African-American author and lawyer, in case you were wondering) and I am therefore waiting braced for everyone to suffer horribly. There was just a lovefest between Mammy Jane and her former masters, which ended with Mrs. Carteret gushing “We would share our last crust with you,” so I’m pretty much expecting the Carterets to throw poor Jane over and leave her to die in the poor house by the end of the book.
I’ve also begun Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which I tried to read in high school but gave up because it felt so despairing. This time around, it no longer feels like a pit of despair - or maybe I just haven’t gotten to the despair part yet? Will share further thoughts once I’ve finished reading it.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Christmas season is almost upon us! As perthisbluespirit’s instructions, it’s time to put Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch on hold.
Matt Phelan’s Snow White: A Graphic Novel, a stylishly gothic retelling set in 1930s New York City. Did I love it? Of course I loved it. Everything about that description is made for me.
Snow White is the daughter of a financier; her stepmother is a Ziegfield girl; the seven dwarves are orphaned street urchins, and the glass coffin is the Macy’s department store window, which the street urchins sneak Snow into as, I think, a way of honoring this girl who has been so nice to them.
But of course she turns out not to be dead. As a nod to the original fairy tale, a police detective kisses her cheek, but as there’s been no magic so far, probably the stepmother just miscalculated the dosage when she injected the poison into an apple with a hypodermic needle. And then Snow uses the fortune she inherited from her father to adopt all seven of the urchins. Happy end!
And I dived back into the world of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax with The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax and A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, the latter of which includes the delightful and characteristic line “Her knowledge of army hierarchies had never been very clear and it had always seemed to her that generals tended to multiply like corporative vice-presidents or rabbits.”
Oh! And I read Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because I was puzzled that I found the recent movie adaptation (Mary and the Witch’s Flower) so underwhelming, because most of Mary Stewart’s work feels like it would be really easy to adapt to a movie. The plots of the book and movie are quite similar - the movie gives Mary’s new friend Peter a bigger role, because of course it does; movies always beef up the boy’s role - but the movie raises the stakes for a big flashy climax, and the book plot that is perfectly serviceable for lower stakes buckles under the strain.
What I’m Reading Now
Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, per
evelyn_b’s suggestion. This is an anti-racist novel from 1901 (Chesnutt was an African-American author and lawyer, in case you were wondering) and I am therefore waiting braced for everyone to suffer horribly. There was just a lovefest between Mammy Jane and her former masters, which ended with Mrs. Carteret gushing “We would share our last crust with you,” so I’m pretty much expecting the Carterets to throw poor Jane over and leave her to die in the poor house by the end of the book. I’ve also begun Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which I tried to read in high school but gave up because it felt so despairing. This time around, it no longer feels like a pit of despair - or maybe I just haven’t gotten to the despair part yet? Will share further thoughts once I’ve finished reading it.
What I Plan to Read Next
The Christmas season is almost upon us! As per
thisbluespirit’s instructions, it’s time to put Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch on hold.
