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Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 19th, 2020 07:20 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I picked up Marie G. Lee’s Finding My Voice because Gabrielle Moss mentioned it in Paperback Crush as the first YA book about the Asian-American experience; I’m not sure this is actually true (so often supposed firsts turn out not to actually be firsts), but nonetheless it sounded interesting, and indeed it is, although perhaps mainly as a snapshot of life in 1992.
This sounds like a polite way of saying that the book is dated, and there’s some truth to that, but I also mean it in the more positive sense that the book gives you a strong sense of the time and place: a small town in northern Minnesota, where Ellen Sung is the only Asian-American student in her high school. The book gives a panoramic view of her life: school (both her studies and her place on the gymnastics team), family, friends (I loved Ellen’s relationship with her best friend Jessie), romance, college applications… it’s the fall semester of Ellen’s senior year and Ellen (who hopes to go to Harvard) hasn’t even taken her SATs yet. Truly a different time.
( I thought the book bobbled a bit on the ending... )
Coincidentally, Caroline B. Cooney’s Flight #116 Is Down! was also written in 1992, although it did not give me the same “Ah, a visit to my childhood” vibes, possibly because a 747 crashing in someone’s backyard is so out of the ordinary that it semi-obliterates a sense of time.
This book is great. It offers a panoramic view of the accident, both from the points of view of a variety of plane passengers (and yes, you absolutely do spend 90% of the book on tenterhooks: “WHO WILL DIE?”) and the rescuers - particularly Heidi, behind whose rural mansion the plane crashed, and Patrick, a seventeen-year-old who is already trained as an EMT. The area is too sparsely populated to support a professional ambulance or fire department; all the local emergency responders are volunteers.
One of the things I enjoy about Cooney’s work is that she often paints a vivid picture of her settings - not just the natural surroundings but the local economy, the social structure, the tensions in the community. For instance, although there are plenty of rich people living in the area (they commute to a nearby city), Patrick notes that the volunteer emergency workers are all working class.
( Some spoilers )
What I’m Reading Now
Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first book in Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, which has been recommended to me by various people over the years, including myself when I realized that Elizabeth Peters is another penname of Barbara Michaels (real name: Barbara Mertz). I think I ship Amelia and her lady companion Evelyn Barton-Forbes, who Amelia rescued after she (Evelyn) fainted in the Forum after being abandoned by her lover, with much dwelling upon Evelyn’s beauty.
I also discontinued reading Wendell Berry’s The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, because it turns out that five hundred pages is about my limit on the amount I can read about topsoil. Possibly six hundred pages is too many pages for a collection of essays that are all about the same topic, more or less.
(Even though I didn’t finish, I did add it to my book log because (1) I read five hundred pages! That’s so many pages!!!, and (2) I feel that I got the gist of it. Topsoil good, wantonly allowing topsoil to erode bad, wanton waste in general causes ecological destruction that will come back to bite us, probably sooner rather than later.)
What I Plan to Read Next
Possibly the library fairies don’t want me to read Bessel Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, because the darn book has been in transit for over a week, and has it arrived yet? Noooooooo.
Supposedly Scary Stories for Young Foxes is also on it’s way, but who knows, it may fall in the pit of perpetual transit too. We shall see!
I picked up Marie G. Lee’s Finding My Voice because Gabrielle Moss mentioned it in Paperback Crush as the first YA book about the Asian-American experience; I’m not sure this is actually true (so often supposed firsts turn out not to actually be firsts), but nonetheless it sounded interesting, and indeed it is, although perhaps mainly as a snapshot of life in 1992.
This sounds like a polite way of saying that the book is dated, and there’s some truth to that, but I also mean it in the more positive sense that the book gives you a strong sense of the time and place: a small town in northern Minnesota, where Ellen Sung is the only Asian-American student in her high school. The book gives a panoramic view of her life: school (both her studies and her place on the gymnastics team), family, friends (I loved Ellen’s relationship with her best friend Jessie), romance, college applications… it’s the fall semester of Ellen’s senior year and Ellen (who hopes to go to Harvard) hasn’t even taken her SATs yet. Truly a different time.
( I thought the book bobbled a bit on the ending... )Coincidentally, Caroline B. Cooney’s Flight #116 Is Down! was also written in 1992, although it did not give me the same “Ah, a visit to my childhood” vibes, possibly because a 747 crashing in someone’s backyard is so out of the ordinary that it semi-obliterates a sense of time.
This book is great. It offers a panoramic view of the accident, both from the points of view of a variety of plane passengers (and yes, you absolutely do spend 90% of the book on tenterhooks: “WHO WILL DIE?”) and the rescuers - particularly Heidi, behind whose rural mansion the plane crashed, and Patrick, a seventeen-year-old who is already trained as an EMT. The area is too sparsely populated to support a professional ambulance or fire department; all the local emergency responders are volunteers.
One of the things I enjoy about Cooney’s work is that she often paints a vivid picture of her settings - not just the natural surroundings but the local economy, the social structure, the tensions in the community. For instance, although there are plenty of rich people living in the area (they commute to a nearby city), Patrick notes that the volunteer emergency workers are all working class.
( Some spoilers )What I’m Reading Now
Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first book in Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, which has been recommended to me by various people over the years, including myself when I realized that Elizabeth Peters is another penname of Barbara Michaels (real name: Barbara Mertz). I think I ship Amelia and her lady companion Evelyn Barton-Forbes, who Amelia rescued after she (Evelyn) fainted in the Forum after being abandoned by her lover, with much dwelling upon Evelyn’s beauty.
I also discontinued reading Wendell Berry’s The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, because it turns out that five hundred pages is about my limit on the amount I can read about topsoil. Possibly six hundred pages is too many pages for a collection of essays that are all about the same topic, more or less.
(Even though I didn’t finish, I did add it to my book log because (1) I read five hundred pages! That’s so many pages!!!, and (2) I feel that I got the gist of it. Topsoil good, wantonly allowing topsoil to erode bad, wanton waste in general causes ecological destruction that will come back to bite us, probably sooner rather than later.)
What I Plan to Read Next
Possibly the library fairies don’t want me to read Bessel Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, because the darn book has been in transit for over a week, and has it arrived yet? Noooooooo.
Supposedly Scary Stories for Young Foxes is also on it’s way, but who knows, it may fall in the pit of perpetual transit too. We shall see!
