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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 27th, 2020 07:36 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Jennifer L. Holm’s Penny from Heaven was my favorite of Jennifer L. Holm’s Newbery Honor-winning books based loosely on her family history (she seems to have founded her own tiny subgenre), until ( spoilers )
Audrey Coloumbis’s Getting Near to Baby is also pretty heavy. I strongly suspect this is another book about children that is actually for adults. There’s a sequence where the neighbor girl shows Willa Jo and Little Sister the underground tunnel she dug with her brothers, which is a proper hideout and would surely appeal to any child - but other than that, there’s not a lot here that I think I would have enjoyed as a kid, although as an adult I can see that some of the writing is lovely.
I also finished Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, a nonfiction book that suffers from the flaw of many nonfiction book: this would have made an excellent article and a pretty good short book, but because of the demands of publishing it’s a full-size book, and there are really only so many ways that you can say “US Americans in the early 19th century were enormously enthusiastic about South American revolutions, in which they saw a reflection of their own revolution, until in 1826 southern Congressman whipped up a frenzy about the racial identity and abolitionist tendencies of the South American revolutions, at which point enthusiasm faded.”
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun Elizabeth Peters’ The Mummy Case! I missed this series while I couldn’t get any books from the library. It’s nice to finally have the next book to be getting on with. (I must say that I find Amelia’s son Ramses irritatingly precocious, but maybe that will change as he gets older over the course of the books.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I may slow down on the Newbery Honor books once I finish the books of the 2000s (of which there are… seven more… how can there still be seven left? I’ve read so many!), or at least on the physical books. The ebooks are so convenient to read while I’m playing Island Experiment…
In fact I went through the library catalog and wrote down all the Newbery Honor books that are available as ebooks. The oldest one available is Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, from 1922, so I guess I didn’t need to get that from Project Gutenberg after all… but who would have expected the library to have an ebook of a book published in 1922!
The most recent Newbery Honor book that the library does not have in the catalog at all, even in one of the shared system school libraries, are the three Honor books from 1970, Mary Q. Steele’s Journey Outside, Sulamith Ish-Kashor’s Our Eddie, and Janet Gaylord Moore’s The Many Ways of Seeing: An Invitation to the Pleasures of Art.
1970 must be some kind of internal cut-off date in the library, because there are a whole lot of pre-1970 Newbery Honor books that the library doesn’t have in any capacity. Once I get to that point, I’ll have to decide if I care about this project enough to interlibrary loan them all… but that is many books away, so I won’t worry about that for a while yet.
Jennifer L. Holm’s Penny from Heaven was my favorite of Jennifer L. Holm’s Newbery Honor-winning books based loosely on her family history (she seems to have founded her own tiny subgenre), until ( spoilers )
Audrey Coloumbis’s Getting Near to Baby is also pretty heavy. I strongly suspect this is another book about children that is actually for adults. There’s a sequence where the neighbor girl shows Willa Jo and Little Sister the underground tunnel she dug with her brothers, which is a proper hideout and would surely appeal to any child - but other than that, there’s not a lot here that I think I would have enjoyed as a kid, although as an adult I can see that some of the writing is lovely.
I also finished Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, a nonfiction book that suffers from the flaw of many nonfiction book: this would have made an excellent article and a pretty good short book, but because of the demands of publishing it’s a full-size book, and there are really only so many ways that you can say “US Americans in the early 19th century were enormously enthusiastic about South American revolutions, in which they saw a reflection of their own revolution, until in 1826 southern Congressman whipped up a frenzy about the racial identity and abolitionist tendencies of the South American revolutions, at which point enthusiasm faded.”
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun Elizabeth Peters’ The Mummy Case! I missed this series while I couldn’t get any books from the library. It’s nice to finally have the next book to be getting on with. (I must say that I find Amelia’s son Ramses irritatingly precocious, but maybe that will change as he gets older over the course of the books.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I may slow down on the Newbery Honor books once I finish the books of the 2000s (of which there are… seven more… how can there still be seven left? I’ve read so many!), or at least on the physical books. The ebooks are so convenient to read while I’m playing Island Experiment…
In fact I went through the library catalog and wrote down all the Newbery Honor books that are available as ebooks. The oldest one available is Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, from 1922, so I guess I didn’t need to get that from Project Gutenberg after all… but who would have expected the library to have an ebook of a book published in 1922!
The most recent Newbery Honor book that the library does not have in the catalog at all, even in one of the shared system school libraries, are the three Honor books from 1970, Mary Q. Steele’s Journey Outside, Sulamith Ish-Kashor’s Our Eddie, and Janet Gaylord Moore’s The Many Ways of Seeing: An Invitation to the Pleasures of Art.
1970 must be some kind of internal cut-off date in the library, because there are a whole lot of pre-1970 Newbery Honor books that the library doesn’t have in any capacity. Once I get to that point, I’ll have to decide if I care about this project enough to interlibrary loan them all… but that is many books away, so I won’t worry about that for a while yet.
