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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 16th, 2021 08:01 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
At night in the sugarhouse, a person can only think and dream and tend the arch. But it doesn’t matter, for it is a gentle darkness that smells like maple clouds and reminds you of a winter now gone and a spring just born.
I loved Kathryn Lasky’s Sugaring Time, a 1984 Newbery Honor winner. I’ve read many books about sugaring off (it seems to be a perennial favorite topic in American children’s literature), but this is the most lyrical, and captures the experience so evocatively that you can almost feel yourself sitting in the sugarhouse in the clouds of maple steam.
I also knocked off two additional Newbery Honor books: William Steig’s Doctor De Soto, in which a mouse dentist cleans a fox’s mouth ( and cleverly escapes being eaten) and Rhoda Blumberg’s Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun, which was nothing to write home about.
What I’m Reading Now
Emily Henry’s Beach Read. After the death of her father reveals his duplicitous life, broke-as-hell romance novelist January moves into her father’s beach house… and discovers that her college nemesis, literary novelist Augustus Everett, lives next door. After gazing at each other’s genres in mutual disdain, they hatch a clever bet: January will write a literary novel, while Augustus Everett will write a romance! And they will give each other genre tutorials, which will look surprisingly like dates, without, of course, being dates in any way.
Do they fall in love? I’m only halfway through the book… but of course they fall in love. Is this hampered in any way by the fact that Augustus Everett sometimes goes by the nickname “Gus”? It does not seem to be! This is very cute so far; January’s backstory sounds more taxing than it actually feels as you read it. (Augustus Everett also has a traumatic backstory, still in the process of revelation, but I expect this will be sad in a way that doesn’t make the book less cute.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m continuing this year’s Sad Robot theme with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. (I realize Murderbot is not technically a robot, but you know what I mean.)
At night in the sugarhouse, a person can only think and dream and tend the arch. But it doesn’t matter, for it is a gentle darkness that smells like maple clouds and reminds you of a winter now gone and a spring just born.
I loved Kathryn Lasky’s Sugaring Time, a 1984 Newbery Honor winner. I’ve read many books about sugaring off (it seems to be a perennial favorite topic in American children’s literature), but this is the most lyrical, and captures the experience so evocatively that you can almost feel yourself sitting in the sugarhouse in the clouds of maple steam.
I also knocked off two additional Newbery Honor books: William Steig’s Doctor De Soto, in which a mouse dentist cleans a fox’s mouth ( and cleverly escapes being eaten) and Rhoda Blumberg’s Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun, which was nothing to write home about.
What I’m Reading Now
Emily Henry’s Beach Read. After the death of her father reveals his duplicitous life, broke-as-hell romance novelist January moves into her father’s beach house… and discovers that her college nemesis, literary novelist Augustus Everett, lives next door. After gazing at each other’s genres in mutual disdain, they hatch a clever bet: January will write a literary novel, while Augustus Everett will write a romance! And they will give each other genre tutorials, which will look surprisingly like dates, without, of course, being dates in any way.
Do they fall in love? I’m only halfway through the book… but of course they fall in love. Is this hampered in any way by the fact that Augustus Everett sometimes goes by the nickname “Gus”? It does not seem to be! This is very cute so far; January’s backstory sounds more taxing than it actually feels as you read it. (Augustus Everett also has a traumatic backstory, still in the process of revelation, but I expect this will be sad in a way that doesn’t make the book less cute.)
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m continuing this year’s Sad Robot theme with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. (I realize Murderbot is not technically a robot, but you know what I mean.)
