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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 10th, 2020 08:55 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I’ve meant to read Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing for ages, and last week while shelf-reading (my library has been under renovation since December, and we are getting the shelves back in order to reopen) I found it on the shelves, and who am I to say no when Fate puts a book in my path like that?
This quote struck me as particularly timely right now. Although Russ is primarily writing about women’s writing, she also notes that similar tactics are used to suppress all marginalized writers, with certain variations, of course. (Critics can straight-up ignore Melville’s working class origins or Whitman’s sexuality in a way that it is difficult to ignore Jane Austen’s femaleness, for instance.)
I also finished Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963. This is one of those books that I’ve been aware of for decades, and therefore formed a certain expectation about (specifically: it’s a Civil Rights book), and then I read it and… that’s not really what it is.
The story is mostly concerned with the characters’ everyday lives, particularly with Kenny’s family life, especially his relationship with his older brother and little sister. If you’re interested in sibling relationships, the sibling relationships in the book are excellent: complicated, thorny, ultimately loving but often aggressive in the moment. (There’s also a lot of bullying, particularly in the early chapters, some of it from Kenny’s classmates, but also from Kenny’s older brother. I much preferred the second half, once school is out and the Watsons are on their way to Birmingham.)
For most of the book, the Civil Rights movement remains a background detail. It explodes onto the page in the last two chapters in the form of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, and even then, the focus is much more on the personal effects of the bombing than the wider political context.
What I’m Reading Now
Last week when Trump started making noises about calling in the troops to suppress the protests, I decided that shit had finally gotten real enough to justify breaking out Eva Ibbotson’s The Reluctant Heiress, an unread Ibbotson book being the ultimate comfort read. Shit has since gotten somewhat less real, but nonetheless I have continued the book, on the theory that if it gets real again there’s always Mary Stewart to step into the breach, and anyway you can’t quit an Ibbotson once you’ve begun it.
Our heroine is Tessa, general factotum at a struggling opera company in Vienna. She is also, unbeknownst to her colleagues at the theater, the Princess of Pfaffenstein, heir to a gorgeous castle that her family can no longer afford to keep after the devastation of World War I… which has just conveniently been purchased by a rich Englishman, Guy Farne. He intends to make this castle the centerpiece of a scheme to woo the lost love of his youth, Nerine, now an exquisitely beautiful but snobbish young widow. The centerpiece of Guy’s scheme? A command performance of the opera Magic Flutes... performed, of course, by Tessa’s opera company.
There’s a fairy-tale quality to most of Ibbotson’s romances which is especially evident here. Not only does Pfaffenstein seem like an enchanted castle, but in Ibbotson’s hands, Vienna seems like an enchanted city. Any time I read one of her books that is set there, I want to hop on a plane and go visit.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been meaning to read James Baldwin for ages (this seems to be a theme in this week’s Wednesday Reading Meme), and in How to Suppress Women’s Writing Joanna Russ recommended his work highly, so… again, who am I to argue with Fate? She doesn’t mention a specific book, so I thought I might start at the beginning with Go Tell It On the Mountain.
I’ve meant to read Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing for ages, and last week while shelf-reading (my library has been under renovation since December, and we are getting the shelves back in order to reopen) I found it on the shelves, and who am I to say no when Fate puts a book in my path like that?
At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. To act in a way that is both sexist and racist, to maintain one’s class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.
This quote struck me as particularly timely right now. Although Russ is primarily writing about women’s writing, she also notes that similar tactics are used to suppress all marginalized writers, with certain variations, of course. (Critics can straight-up ignore Melville’s working class origins or Whitman’s sexuality in a way that it is difficult to ignore Jane Austen’s femaleness, for instance.)
I also finished Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963. This is one of those books that I’ve been aware of for decades, and therefore formed a certain expectation about (specifically: it’s a Civil Rights book), and then I read it and… that’s not really what it is.
The story is mostly concerned with the characters’ everyday lives, particularly with Kenny’s family life, especially his relationship with his older brother and little sister. If you’re interested in sibling relationships, the sibling relationships in the book are excellent: complicated, thorny, ultimately loving but often aggressive in the moment. (There’s also a lot of bullying, particularly in the early chapters, some of it from Kenny’s classmates, but also from Kenny’s older brother. I much preferred the second half, once school is out and the Watsons are on their way to Birmingham.)
For most of the book, the Civil Rights movement remains a background detail. It explodes onto the page in the last two chapters in the form of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, and even then, the focus is much more on the personal effects of the bombing than the wider political context.
What I’m Reading Now
Last week when Trump started making noises about calling in the troops to suppress the protests, I decided that shit had finally gotten real enough to justify breaking out Eva Ibbotson’s The Reluctant Heiress, an unread Ibbotson book being the ultimate comfort read. Shit has since gotten somewhat less real, but nonetheless I have continued the book, on the theory that if it gets real again there’s always Mary Stewart to step into the breach, and anyway you can’t quit an Ibbotson once you’ve begun it.
Our heroine is Tessa, general factotum at a struggling opera company in Vienna. She is also, unbeknownst to her colleagues at the theater, the Princess of Pfaffenstein, heir to a gorgeous castle that her family can no longer afford to keep after the devastation of World War I… which has just conveniently been purchased by a rich Englishman, Guy Farne. He intends to make this castle the centerpiece of a scheme to woo the lost love of his youth, Nerine, now an exquisitely beautiful but snobbish young widow. The centerpiece of Guy’s scheme? A command performance of the opera Magic Flutes... performed, of course, by Tessa’s opera company.
There’s a fairy-tale quality to most of Ibbotson’s romances which is especially evident here. Not only does Pfaffenstein seem like an enchanted castle, but in Ibbotson’s hands, Vienna seems like an enchanted city. Any time I read one of her books that is set there, I want to hop on a plane and go visit.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been meaning to read James Baldwin for ages (this seems to be a theme in this week’s Wednesday Reading Meme), and in How to Suppress Women’s Writing Joanna Russ recommended his work highly, so… again, who am I to argue with Fate? She doesn’t mention a specific book, so I thought I might start at the beginning with Go Tell It On the Mountain.
