Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 1st, 2020 09:03 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finally finished Donna Tartt’s The Little Stranger! But my thoughts upon it grew very long, so I’ve separated them out to be their own post.
Marian Hurd McNeely’s The Jumping-Off Place is a Newbery Honor book from 1930, about four children, recently orphaned by the death of their uncle, who fulfill their uncle’s dying wish by heading out to Dakota to settle a homestead that he had meant to claim before he was felled by a stroke. The book’s portrayal of grief distinguishes it from other homesteading books (this seems to have been its own genre in the 1920s and 30s, if not for longer): although mostly the children are carrying on with life, planting a garden, admiring the beautiful prairie, bemoaning the drought that kills their crops, every once in a while grief sneaks up and catches them, even as the months pass by.
Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, similarly, is a Newbery Honor book from the 2000s, which does what it says on the tin. Only two books left from the 2000s! Which means I’ve hit the books I had no particular desire to read earlier, which makes for somewhat slow going.
What I’m Reading Now
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troisoiseaux mentioned Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, a collection of oral histories about the transition from the USSR to post-Soviet Russia, which as you can imagine I was all over like white on rice. So far the keynote of the collection is a sense of disillusionment. Many of the interviewees had high hopes for democracy originally (although some still believed in communism and deplored the whole reform process from start to finish), but now it’s come to nothing but stores stocked with salami no one can afford, which is perhaps worse than stores with no salami in the first place.
Other consistent themes: a sense of shame about the enormous loss of prestige on the international stage (from superpower to third-world country), a sense that the world no longer makes sense - that the fall of the Soviet Union destroyed the structures that gave life meaning. A lot of people comment on the war orientation of communism, that they were raised to die for their country, and now that country has fallen without a war, without a single shot, and they’ve been cast adrift.
I’ve also begun Onoto Watanna’s Miss Nume of Japan, which has developed into a complicated love quadrangle. Miss Nume is in love with her betrothed. Takashima, who has been sent to the United States to study. After finishing his studies, on the very steamer back to Japan, Takashima falls in love with Cleo, an American coquette… who is on the way to Japan to reunite with her betrothed, Sinclair, who Cleo loves because he is the only man who has ever seemed immune to her charms. And, in fact, aside from that one night when the moonlight drove Sinclair to ask Cleo to marry him, Sinclair remains immune! But he is showing signs of susceptibility to Nume…
Now in a way this seems like an easy knot to untie: just switch fiances! Takashmia + Cleo, Sinclair + Nume! But will a book written in 1899 allow a white American girl to marry a Japanese man? We shall see!
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve really got to get a move on Alicia Williams’ Genesis Begins Again if I’m going to get that finished before it’s due back. (Someone’s got a hold on it, so I can’t renew it.) I’ve read all the other 2020 Newbery books, so as soon as I knock this one off I can put up my post about that.
I finally finished Donna Tartt’s The Little Stranger! But my thoughts upon it grew very long, so I’ve separated them out to be their own post.
Marian Hurd McNeely’s The Jumping-Off Place is a Newbery Honor book from 1930, about four children, recently orphaned by the death of their uncle, who fulfill their uncle’s dying wish by heading out to Dakota to settle a homestead that he had meant to claim before he was felled by a stroke. The book’s portrayal of grief distinguishes it from other homesteading books (this seems to have been its own genre in the 1920s and 30s, if not for longer): although mostly the children are carrying on with life, planting a garden, admiring the beautiful prairie, bemoaning the drought that kills their crops, every once in a while grief sneaks up and catches them, even as the months pass by.
Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom, similarly, is a Newbery Honor book from the 2000s, which does what it says on the tin. Only two books left from the 2000s! Which means I’ve hit the books I had no particular desire to read earlier, which makes for somewhat slow going.
What I’m Reading Now
troisoiseaux mentioned Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, a collection of oral histories about the transition from the USSR to post-Soviet Russia, which as you can imagine I was all over like white on rice. So far the keynote of the collection is a sense of disillusionment. Many of the interviewees had high hopes for democracy originally (although some still believed in communism and deplored the whole reform process from start to finish), but now it’s come to nothing but stores stocked with salami no one can afford, which is perhaps worse than stores with no salami in the first place. Other consistent themes: a sense of shame about the enormous loss of prestige on the international stage (from superpower to third-world country), a sense that the world no longer makes sense - that the fall of the Soviet Union destroyed the structures that gave life meaning. A lot of people comment on the war orientation of communism, that they were raised to die for their country, and now that country has fallen without a war, without a single shot, and they’ve been cast adrift.
I’ve also begun Onoto Watanna’s Miss Nume of Japan, which has developed into a complicated love quadrangle. Miss Nume is in love with her betrothed. Takashima, who has been sent to the United States to study. After finishing his studies, on the very steamer back to Japan, Takashima falls in love with Cleo, an American coquette… who is on the way to Japan to reunite with her betrothed, Sinclair, who Cleo loves because he is the only man who has ever seemed immune to her charms. And, in fact, aside from that one night when the moonlight drove Sinclair to ask Cleo to marry him, Sinclair remains immune! But he is showing signs of susceptibility to Nume…
Now in a way this seems like an easy knot to untie: just switch fiances! Takashmia + Cleo, Sinclair + Nume! But will a book written in 1899 allow a white American girl to marry a Japanese man? We shall see!
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve really got to get a move on Alicia Williams’ Genesis Begins Again if I’m going to get that finished before it’s due back. (Someone’s got a hold on it, so I can’t renew it.) I’ve read all the other 2020 Newbery books, so as soon as I knock this one off I can put up my post about that.
