Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 15th, 2020 07:35 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
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ladyherenya hadn’t posted about it, I probably never would have heard about Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed, and that would have been a great pity. The children’s book centers on two teenagers who end up living on the streets during the early days of the Blitz in London - or rather, living on the streets during the day and in the bomb shelters by night, because the Blitz somewhat ironically has made it much easier to be homeless.
This book is more serious than The Boxcar Children, but it’s got a similar kids-on-their-own feeling, with prose that is simultaneously lyrical and transparent. The narrator is telling the story years later, which gives the story an “Et in arcadia ego” feeling, the sense of the narrator looking back on a golden past that he realizes was not really golden (bombs dropping from the sky, and so forth) and yet remembers with great fondness.
I continued my James Baldwin journey with Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on Baldwin’s time as a youth preacher. The story is set, steeped really, in the traditions of a Black church in Harlem, which is both the characters’ savior and their tormentor, which provides them with a strait and narrow path through the grim circumstances of their lives and yet tortures them with the torments of hell when they slip and stray..
I realize that this makes the book sound absolutely grim, and that’s not inaccurate, but it’s written with such clarity and truthfulness that it has a certain raw horrifying beauty. In this quality it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s work, even though in many ways the two authors are quite different; but both of them look at the dark side of the human soul without flinching.
On a much lighter note, I read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the memoir which inspired the TV show The Durrells in Corfu, about an English family living on the Greek island of Corfu in the late 1930s. In terms of specific incidents, there’s actually not a lot of overlap between the book and the show, but they share very much the same feeling and atmosphere: the eccentric family having madcap adventures, featuring animals collected by young Gerry and exasperated epigrams by his older brother Larry, an aspiring writer.
And I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, which is jolly good fun, as Mrs. Pollifax books generally are. This one features a cameo from a sidekick in a previous book, plus of course Mrs. Pollifax’s new husband (technically her name is now Mrs. Reed-Pollifax, although the narration still calls her Mrs. Pollifax, presumably so as not to confuse us), to whose existence I am becoming resigned.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which tells Penelope’s story both before and after the Odyssey (it begins, in fact, when Penelope is already dead, a shade looking back at her life, and Atwood’s glimpses of life in the Greek underworld are darkly comic), interwoven with a Greek chorus of the twelve maids who Odysseus kills at the end of the Odyssey for dallying with the suitors. I’m not very far in, but so far I’m really enjoying it.
What I Plan to Read Next
My forward motion in the Mrs. Pollifax series has been tragically arrested by the fact that the library doesn’t have the next three titles (Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle, Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish, and Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief). Alas! I intend to request that the library purchase them as soon as possible, but unfortunately the library’s purchase request form is down right now on account of the pandemic, so who knows when THAT will be?
In brighter news, I’ve discovered that the 1971 adaptation Mrs. Pollifax - Spy stars Rosalind Russell, so that may very well be worth watching.
If
ladyherenya hadn’t posted about it, I probably never would have heard about Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed, and that would have been a great pity. The children’s book centers on two teenagers who end up living on the streets during the early days of the Blitz in London - or rather, living on the streets during the day and in the bomb shelters by night, because the Blitz somewhat ironically has made it much easier to be homeless. This book is more serious than The Boxcar Children, but it’s got a similar kids-on-their-own feeling, with prose that is simultaneously lyrical and transparent. The narrator is telling the story years later, which gives the story an “Et in arcadia ego” feeling, the sense of the narrator looking back on a golden past that he realizes was not really golden (bombs dropping from the sky, and so forth) and yet remembers with great fondness.
We saw London getting knocked apart. We knew where there was ruin, and we knew that it wasn’t all in the papers. We saw a lot of terrible things. But the strangest thing, in a way, was the way things were the same. It sounds silly to say that the oddest thing was that the leaves turned gold and fell off while Hitler’s bombers filled the sky; of course they would, and they did. But in all that disruption, in the midst of so much destruction, when everyone’s life was changed and we were alone, standing on our own feet for the first time, looking after ourselves, familiar things seemed as exotic and unlikely as hothouse flowers.
I continued my James Baldwin journey with Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on Baldwin’s time as a youth preacher. The story is set, steeped really, in the traditions of a Black church in Harlem, which is both the characters’ savior and their tormentor, which provides them with a strait and narrow path through the grim circumstances of their lives and yet tortures them with the torments of hell when they slip and stray..
I realize that this makes the book sound absolutely grim, and that’s not inaccurate, but it’s written with such clarity and truthfulness that it has a certain raw horrifying beauty. In this quality it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s work, even though in many ways the two authors are quite different; but both of them look at the dark side of the human soul without flinching.
She found herself fascinated by the gun in his holster, the club at his side. She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains.
On a much lighter note, I read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the memoir which inspired the TV show The Durrells in Corfu, about an English family living on the Greek island of Corfu in the late 1930s. In terms of specific incidents, there’s actually not a lot of overlap between the book and the show, but they share very much the same feeling and atmosphere: the eccentric family having madcap adventures, featuring animals collected by young Gerry and exasperated epigrams by his older brother Larry, an aspiring writer.
And I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, which is jolly good fun, as Mrs. Pollifax books generally are. This one features a cameo from a sidekick in a previous book, plus of course Mrs. Pollifax’s new husband (technically her name is now Mrs. Reed-Pollifax, although the narration still calls her Mrs. Pollifax, presumably so as not to confuse us), to whose existence I am becoming resigned.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve begun Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which tells Penelope’s story both before and after the Odyssey (it begins, in fact, when Penelope is already dead, a shade looking back at her life, and Atwood’s glimpses of life in the Greek underworld are darkly comic), interwoven with a Greek chorus of the twelve maids who Odysseus kills at the end of the Odyssey for dallying with the suitors. I’m not very far in, but so far I’m really enjoying it.
What I Plan to Read Next
My forward motion in the Mrs. Pollifax series has been tragically arrested by the fact that the library doesn’t have the next three titles (Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle, Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish, and Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief). Alas! I intend to request that the library purchase them as soon as possible, but unfortunately the library’s purchase request form is down right now on account of the pandemic, so who knows when THAT will be?
In brighter news, I’ve discovered that the 1971 adaptation Mrs. Pollifax - Spy stars Rosalind Russell, so that may very well be worth watching.
