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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 19th, 2021 07:45 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
A profitable week in the Newbery department. I finished Russell Freedman’s Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery, a 1994 Newbery Honor book. I mention the year because the book is very tactful about Eleanor Roosevelt’s possible romantic involvements with women. If you are primed to see romantic potential in her series of very close woman friends who sometimes lived with her, the evidence is certainly here. But if I had read this in the 90s, the possible implications would absolutely have flown over my head.
This struck me particularly hard because in the 2021 winner (When You Trap a Tiger), the narrator’s older sister gets a girlfriend, who is expressly referred to as such in the text. That just would not have been possible in a 1994 book; the world has changed so much and so quickly.
I also read Jean Fritz’s Homesick: My Own Story, a childhood memoir about the author’s life in China in the late 1920s, when her father directed the YMCA in Hankow (which later merged with two other cities to become modern-day Wuhan). On a scale of happiness to misery ranging from Cheaper by the Dozen to Angela’s Ashes, this one is solidly in the middle: the political situation is tense (the family ultimately flees Hankow on an armored gunboat) and the family faces personal tragedy when Jean’s baby sister dies, but the overall focus is much more on Jean’s everyday life and friendships.
Oddly, given the title, the book doesn’t deal with homesickness at all. Perhaps it’s a retrospective title? Given the subsequent history of China, I suspect that Fritz could never revisit her childhood home.
What I’m Reading Now
Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, which I expected to love but am actually finding something of a slog. I first read about in the context of a ludicrously rich fish pie and therefore expected it to be about luxury and opulence and instead it’s mostly about slums.
Also Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, which I’m enjoying, although I wish the author would stop apologizing for non-murder digressions about Roman history. I submit that anyone geeky enough to read a book about Roman murder is also interested in other things Roman and will not go “God, why do we gotta talk about political intrigue? Ugh.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I am creeping toward the top of the hold list for Fugitive Telemetry. Any day now!
A profitable week in the Newbery department. I finished Russell Freedman’s Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery, a 1994 Newbery Honor book. I mention the year because the book is very tactful about Eleanor Roosevelt’s possible romantic involvements with women. If you are primed to see romantic potential in her series of very close woman friends who sometimes lived with her, the evidence is certainly here. But if I had read this in the 90s, the possible implications would absolutely have flown over my head.
This struck me particularly hard because in the 2021 winner (When You Trap a Tiger), the narrator’s older sister gets a girlfriend, who is expressly referred to as such in the text. That just would not have been possible in a 1994 book; the world has changed so much and so quickly.
I also read Jean Fritz’s Homesick: My Own Story, a childhood memoir about the author’s life in China in the late 1920s, when her father directed the YMCA in Hankow (which later merged with two other cities to become modern-day Wuhan). On a scale of happiness to misery ranging from Cheaper by the Dozen to Angela’s Ashes, this one is solidly in the middle: the political situation is tense (the family ultimately flees Hankow on an armored gunboat) and the family faces personal tragedy when Jean’s baby sister dies, but the overall focus is much more on Jean’s everyday life and friendships.
Oddly, given the title, the book doesn’t deal with homesickness at all. Perhaps it’s a retrospective title? Given the subsequent history of China, I suspect that Fritz could never revisit her childhood home.
What I’m Reading Now
Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, which I expected to love but am actually finding something of a slog. I first read about in the context of a ludicrously rich fish pie and therefore expected it to be about luxury and opulence and instead it’s mostly about slums.
Also Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, which I’m enjoying, although I wish the author would stop apologizing for non-murder digressions about Roman history. I submit that anyone geeky enough to read a book about Roman murder is also interested in other things Roman and will not go “God, why do we gotta talk about political intrigue? Ugh.”
What I Plan to Read Next
I am creeping toward the top of the hold list for Fugitive Telemetry. Any day now!
