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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 29th, 2022 07:42 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Joan G. Robinson’s Charley, also sometimes called The Girl Who Ran Away, an enchanting book about - well, a girl who runs away! Through a series of miscommunications, no one realizes that young Charley never arrived at the house of the relation with whom she was meant to spend a holiday. Instead Charley spends a week on her own, making a home for herself in an old hen house and beneath a chestnut tree, finding food and a source of water and wandering in a beautiful copse where she makes up adventures for herself and an imaginary animal companion, a beautiful fawn.
Highly recommended if you like books about runaway children, with lots of rich detail about finding food and water and just generally looking after themselves. Charley comes to the end of her resources a little more swiftly than the Boxcar Children, but she has a wonderful time while it lasts.
I also finished Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembarom! It 100% turned out just as I expected - this is not a book that you read for surprises - but there’s great pleasure in watching Burnett do a fairly realistic take on a melodramatic plot involving a wandering amnesiac, the unexpected inheritance of a vast English estate, a haughty society beauty, and a self-made fortune from an invention in which Burnett is so uninterested that she simply calls in “the invention.” What does it do? What industry is it used in? Who knows! Who cares! Burnett certainly doesn’t, and honestly it’s inspiring how she flings such trifles aside to focus on the culture clash between a New York street kid made good and the fascinated gentry who live in the county around the estate he just inherited.
And I read ND Stevenson’s Nimona, which I expected to love and ended up hating. I am just extremely over stories where the protagonist kills a bunch of redshirts, and the narrative treats this as a quirky and even adorable personality flaw (Nimona just gets kinda murdery out on heists sometimes! Lookit, she turns into a dragon to do it, so fun), and the protagonist’s friends give her a mild scolding and then continue to shower her with love and acceptance.
I also hate that this story seems completely unable to grasp that there is a difference between “persecuted for being a shapeshifter!” (insert allegory for minority of choice here) and “prosecuted for destroying a WHOLE CITY with MANY CASUALTIES!” and treats ANY attempt to stop Nimona from murdering again as an example of the first. The ONLY allowable method of stopping her is to shower her with love and acceptance until she decides maybe she wants to stop.
And of course the book expects us to root for Nimona and presents “Nimona roams free!” as a happy ending, when she’s just spent the whole book killing people and she’s clearly going to kill again as soon as she feels like it.
What I’m Reading Now
I really meant to keep going with Black Narcissus and Sensational but then my hold on Emily Henry’s Book Lovers came in and as there are 479 holds on it (sadly this is not an exaggeration) I thought that PERHAPS I ought to prioritize that. I’ve enjoyed all of Henry’s books but so far this is a strong contender for my new favorite. Love the protagonist, a literary agent so intense that her colleagues call her the Shark, love her relationship with her sister, tentatively loving her dynamic with the love interest but we’ll see how that develops over the book.
In Dracula, Jonathan Harker has crawled along a ledge outside Dracula’s castle to sneak into Dracula’s room and thereby discovered that the count sleeps in a coffin in the crypt! Fascinating information no doubt but I personally hope that Harker soon turns his attention to the life-or-death question of “How is he going to escape?”
What I Plan to Read Next
Have discovered that the library has David Sweetman’s biography of Mary Renault and I am contemplating whether to read it now or to wait until I’ve read all or at least almost all of Mary Renault’s books. (No one has anything nice to say about Funeral Games so I may… just… not read that one.)
Joan G. Robinson’s Charley, also sometimes called The Girl Who Ran Away, an enchanting book about - well, a girl who runs away! Through a series of miscommunications, no one realizes that young Charley never arrived at the house of the relation with whom she was meant to spend a holiday. Instead Charley spends a week on her own, making a home for herself in an old hen house and beneath a chestnut tree, finding food and a source of water and wandering in a beautiful copse where she makes up adventures for herself and an imaginary animal companion, a beautiful fawn.
Highly recommended if you like books about runaway children, with lots of rich detail about finding food and water and just generally looking after themselves. Charley comes to the end of her resources a little more swiftly than the Boxcar Children, but she has a wonderful time while it lasts.
I also finished Frances Hodgson Burnett’s T. Tembarom! It 100% turned out just as I expected - this is not a book that you read for surprises - but there’s great pleasure in watching Burnett do a fairly realistic take on a melodramatic plot involving a wandering amnesiac, the unexpected inheritance of a vast English estate, a haughty society beauty, and a self-made fortune from an invention in which Burnett is so uninterested that she simply calls in “the invention.” What does it do? What industry is it used in? Who knows! Who cares! Burnett certainly doesn’t, and honestly it’s inspiring how she flings such trifles aside to focus on the culture clash between a New York street kid made good and the fascinated gentry who live in the county around the estate he just inherited.
And I read ND Stevenson’s Nimona, which I expected to love and ended up hating. I am just extremely over stories where the protagonist kills a bunch of redshirts, and the narrative treats this as a quirky and even adorable personality flaw (Nimona just gets kinda murdery out on heists sometimes! Lookit, she turns into a dragon to do it, so fun), and the protagonist’s friends give her a mild scolding and then continue to shower her with love and acceptance.
I also hate that this story seems completely unable to grasp that there is a difference between “persecuted for being a shapeshifter!” (insert allegory for minority of choice here) and “prosecuted for destroying a WHOLE CITY with MANY CASUALTIES!” and treats ANY attempt to stop Nimona from murdering again as an example of the first. The ONLY allowable method of stopping her is to shower her with love and acceptance until she decides maybe she wants to stop.
And of course the book expects us to root for Nimona and presents “Nimona roams free!” as a happy ending, when she’s just spent the whole book killing people and she’s clearly going to kill again as soon as she feels like it.
What I’m Reading Now
I really meant to keep going with Black Narcissus and Sensational but then my hold on Emily Henry’s Book Lovers came in and as there are 479 holds on it (sadly this is not an exaggeration) I thought that PERHAPS I ought to prioritize that. I’ve enjoyed all of Henry’s books but so far this is a strong contender for my new favorite. Love the protagonist, a literary agent so intense that her colleagues call her the Shark, love her relationship with her sister, tentatively loving her dynamic with the love interest but we’ll see how that develops over the book.
In Dracula, Jonathan Harker has crawled along a ledge outside Dracula’s castle to sneak into Dracula’s room and thereby discovered that the count sleeps in a coffin in the crypt! Fascinating information no doubt but I personally hope that Harker soon turns his attention to the life-or-death question of “How is he going to escape?”
What I Plan to Read Next
Have discovered that the library has David Sweetman’s biography of Mary Renault and I am contemplating whether to read it now or to wait until I’ve read all or at least almost all of Mary Renault’s books. (No one has anything nice to say about Funeral Games so I may… just… not read that one.)
