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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 14th, 2021 07:18 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands! It reminded me of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books in its unusually grounded and realistic approach to romance, albeit in a world with elves and mermaids. The romances are not driven solely by grand sweeping feelings - Elliot actually does start out with a grand sweeping crush, and this doesn’t work out for him, and it’s very painful but not the end of the world - but by a complex calculus of who the characters are attracted to, and whether they actually like that person (a lot of books don’t bother to draw this distinction), and if so how much and if their feelings are returned and in what degree etc. etc. etc.
( Spoilers )
I also finished Bell Irwin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy, which I don’t think is as strong as his later book The Life of Billy Yank. He worked harder to understand the Yanks because he had less natural sympathy with them (he states this right out in the book) and I think it ultimately resulted in a more thoughtful book - plus of course he had ten years more experience as a writer and researcher by the time the second book came out.
And I zipped through Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, because I love books about what you might call cross-cultural life: “and THIS is how people in X country eat/sleep/play/exist!” This is one of those nonfiction books where the subtitle is at odds with the actual content of the book, wherein Doucleff points out that the cultures she’s writing are not fossilized remnants of the past, but living breathing current cultures where children watch TV and play on Xboxes and so forth and so on.
There’s a particularly good chapter at the beginning about the history of American child-rearing advice, which is fascinating and depressing in the same way as reading about the history of American dieting advice: both are replete with so-called experts blaring out with great authority advice that is based on shaky evidence (if any evidence at all!) and either does not work or actively works against the goal it’s supposed to achieve. For instance, in the intersection of dieting and child-rearing advice, a lot of advice that was intended to teach children healthy eating habits actually tends to create disordered eating behaviors, in part by focusing an unhealthy amount of attention on the child’s eating habits.
The other thing that struck me is that many of the child-rearing practices Doucleff describes could come straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I particularly had this feeling about the chapter about involving children in the work of the household at whatever level is appropriate to the child’s maturity and skill: sometimes the child can stir the bubbling pot of pumpkin, other times the child just looks on and watches as the parent melts lead for bullets.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward in Tom Brown’s School Days! Tom’s friend George Arthur has just been Dangerously Ill, and frankly I thought he was going to die because he is clearly Too Good for this World, but no, he’s been spared (for now! Wouldn’t be surprised if he dies before the end, though) to beg Tom to start actually doing his Greek homework instead of using cribs. Tom is aghast, but obviously he’s going to knuckle under and probably have an epiphany about how there might be something to these ancient Greek chaps after all.
What I Plan to Read Next
Does anyone know of any books that focus specifically on the experience of being a World War I amputee? Not just the medical experience during the war, but the lived experience after - what it was like to live with the prosthetic limbs of the era, and that sort of thing.
I’ve decided that I will, in fact, publish David and Robert (I’m thinking an October release date), so it’s crunch time on my World War I research.
I finished Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands! It reminded me of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books in its unusually grounded and realistic approach to romance, albeit in a world with elves and mermaids. The romances are not driven solely by grand sweeping feelings - Elliot actually does start out with a grand sweeping crush, and this doesn’t work out for him, and it’s very painful but not the end of the world - but by a complex calculus of who the characters are attracted to, and whether they actually like that person (a lot of books don’t bother to draw this distinction), and if so how much and if their feelings are returned and in what degree etc. etc. etc.
( Spoilers )
I also finished Bell Irwin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy, which I don’t think is as strong as his later book The Life of Billy Yank. He worked harder to understand the Yanks because he had less natural sympathy with them (he states this right out in the book) and I think it ultimately resulted in a more thoughtful book - plus of course he had ten years more experience as a writer and researcher by the time the second book came out.
And I zipped through Michaeleen Doucleff’s Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, because I love books about what you might call cross-cultural life: “and THIS is how people in X country eat/sleep/play/exist!” This is one of those nonfiction books where the subtitle is at odds with the actual content of the book, wherein Doucleff points out that the cultures she’s writing are not fossilized remnants of the past, but living breathing current cultures where children watch TV and play on Xboxes and so forth and so on.
There’s a particularly good chapter at the beginning about the history of American child-rearing advice, which is fascinating and depressing in the same way as reading about the history of American dieting advice: both are replete with so-called experts blaring out with great authority advice that is based on shaky evidence (if any evidence at all!) and either does not work or actively works against the goal it’s supposed to achieve. For instance, in the intersection of dieting and child-rearing advice, a lot of advice that was intended to teach children healthy eating habits actually tends to create disordered eating behaviors, in part by focusing an unhealthy amount of attention on the child’s eating habits.
The other thing that struck me is that many of the child-rearing practices Doucleff describes could come straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. I particularly had this feeling about the chapter about involving children in the work of the household at whatever level is appropriate to the child’s maturity and skill: sometimes the child can stir the bubbling pot of pumpkin, other times the child just looks on and watches as the parent melts lead for bullets.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward in Tom Brown’s School Days! Tom’s friend George Arthur has just been Dangerously Ill, and frankly I thought he was going to die because he is clearly Too Good for this World, but no, he’s been spared (for now! Wouldn’t be surprised if he dies before the end, though) to beg Tom to start actually doing his Greek homework instead of using cribs. Tom is aghast, but obviously he’s going to knuckle under and probably have an epiphany about how there might be something to these ancient Greek chaps after all.
What I Plan to Read Next
Does anyone know of any books that focus specifically on the experience of being a World War I amputee? Not just the medical experience during the war, but the lived experience after - what it was like to live with the prosthetic limbs of the era, and that sort of thing.
I’ve decided that I will, in fact, publish David and Robert (I’m thinking an October release date), so it’s crunch time on my World War I research.
