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Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 16th, 2020 08:44 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
G. Neri’s Tru & Nelle: A Christmas Story, which I feel would have been more Christmassy if Neri hadn’t made Tru & Nelle responsible for the arrest of the Ezells. In real life, the Ezells were at the center of Harper Lee’s father’s only criminal case, a Black father and son who were charged with murder and hanged. Why put it at the center of a Christmas story when the incident really took place years before the story is set? And why make our heroes responsible for the arrest that led to this miscarriage of justice?
It occurred to me as I was reading the Tru & Nelle books that I’ve never actually read a Truman Capote book (yes, I know) and LO, it turned out that the library has his essay A Christmas Memory in adorably illustrated book form! Capote lovingly describes the fruitcake-making that figures so heavily in Tru & Nelle: A Christmas Story: pecans hulled with a “cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl”; the carefully hoarded money spent on dried fruits and spices and whisky (although the whisky purveyor offers to trade the whisky in return for a fruitcake, instead), the cakes compounded before a black stove that “glows like a lighted pumpkin.”
L. M. Montgomery’s Christmas with Anne, and Other Holiday Stories is a collection of Christmas stories Montgomery wrote for magazines, plus a couple of excerpts from the Anne books: the Christmas where Anne gets her longed-for dress with puffed sleeves, and also the time Anne takes sarcastic cross-patch Katherine Brooke home to Green Gables for Christmas and Katherine blossoms out like a desert flower in the rain now that she’s finally received some affection. I LOVE this dynamic. I may steal it for a story of my own. How many chapters of sarcastic crosspatchery do you think I could get away with before readers would despair of the romance ever getting off the ground?
One non-Christmas book snuck in: Christopher Bakken’s Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table, which was perhaps the wrong book to read in 2020, as it unfailingly made me yearn to go to Greece and eat everything in sight immediately, which is, unfortunately, impossible right now.
What I’m Reading Now
Christine Hallett’s Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War has a fairly dry introduction, but once you get into actual material about nursing work it’s absorbing, although inevitably sometimes gruesome. Who knew that tissue infected with gas gangrene makes a crackling noise?
Also, who knew that gas gangrene had nothing to do with the various poison gasses used in World War I? It’s caused by anaerobic bacteria in enclosed wounds without much oxygen, caused by bits of dirty cloth etc. driven deep into the wound by projectiles. This was common knowledge among medical staff in the war, but I, a confused layperson, always vaguely assumed it was something to do with mustard gas.
What I Plan to Read Next
In the long run I’d like to read more Truman Capote. In the short run, however, I’m rushing onward with Christmas books. I’ve got L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Kate Milford’s Greenglass House next on my stack.
G. Neri’s Tru & Nelle: A Christmas Story, which I feel would have been more Christmassy if Neri hadn’t made Tru & Nelle responsible for the arrest of the Ezells. In real life, the Ezells were at the center of Harper Lee’s father’s only criminal case, a Black father and son who were charged with murder and hanged. Why put it at the center of a Christmas story when the incident really took place years before the story is set? And why make our heroes responsible for the arrest that led to this miscarriage of justice?
It occurred to me as I was reading the Tru & Nelle books that I’ve never actually read a Truman Capote book (yes, I know) and LO, it turned out that the library has his essay A Christmas Memory in adorably illustrated book form! Capote lovingly describes the fruitcake-making that figures so heavily in Tru & Nelle: A Christmas Story: pecans hulled with a “cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milk-glass bowl”; the carefully hoarded money spent on dried fruits and spices and whisky (although the whisky purveyor offers to trade the whisky in return for a fruitcake, instead), the cakes compounded before a black stove that “glows like a lighted pumpkin.”
L. M. Montgomery’s Christmas with Anne, and Other Holiday Stories is a collection of Christmas stories Montgomery wrote for magazines, plus a couple of excerpts from the Anne books: the Christmas where Anne gets her longed-for dress with puffed sleeves, and also the time Anne takes sarcastic cross-patch Katherine Brooke home to Green Gables for Christmas and Katherine blossoms out like a desert flower in the rain now that she’s finally received some affection. I LOVE this dynamic. I may steal it for a story of my own. How many chapters of sarcastic crosspatchery do you think I could get away with before readers would despair of the romance ever getting off the ground?
One non-Christmas book snuck in: Christopher Bakken’s Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table, which was perhaps the wrong book to read in 2020, as it unfailingly made me yearn to go to Greece and eat everything in sight immediately, which is, unfortunately, impossible right now.
What I’m Reading Now
Christine Hallett’s Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War has a fairly dry introduction, but once you get into actual material about nursing work it’s absorbing, although inevitably sometimes gruesome. Who knew that tissue infected with gas gangrene makes a crackling noise?
Also, who knew that gas gangrene had nothing to do with the various poison gasses used in World War I? It’s caused by anaerobic bacteria in enclosed wounds without much oxygen, caused by bits of dirty cloth etc. driven deep into the wound by projectiles. This was common knowledge among medical staff in the war, but I, a confused layperson, always vaguely assumed it was something to do with mustard gas.
What I Plan to Read Next
In the long run I’d like to read more Truman Capote. In the short run, however, I’m rushing onward with Christmas books. I’ve got L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus and Kate Milford’s Greenglass House next on my stack.
