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Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 15th, 2023 07:33 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind, the last book in the Earthsea series. I deeply enjoyed Tenar’s discussions with the Kargad princess who has been dumped on the archipelago without a word of the language among people she has been raised to believe are wicked soul-stealing sorcerers. That intense culture shock - that’s the good stuff.
Otherwise… hmm. I admire Le Guin’s willingness to blow up her own worldbuilding from earlier books without necessarily admiring the way that she executed said explosion. In particular, I really struggled with the big shift in dragon worldbuilding in book four, and unfortunately the dragons are big in all three of the last books so you just can’t get away from it.
Carol Ryrie Brink’s Family Grandstand is a family story of the kind beloved and popular in the mid-twentieth century: think Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-King Family or Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats. I don’t think many books in this subgenre are being published now, but perhaps it’s due for a revival.
Anyway, I particularly enjoyed this one as it takes place near Midwestern University, the large land-grant college where the children’s father works as a professor, and in short reminded me a lot of my own childhood. Of course in some ways this milieu changed a lot between the book’s publication in 1952 and my own 1990s childhood - one of the plot points in the books is that it’s shameful that the Terrible Torrances are so badly behaved that they still need a babysitter even though they are six years old (and that babysitter is eleven!) - but the atmosphere of a college town on a football weekend remains absolutely spot on.
Deeply relieved to inform you that Annie Fellows Johnston took pity on us all in Mary Ware in Texas, and decided to allow a successful surgery on Mary’s brother Jack’s horribly painful paralyzing spinal fracture from last book. (I realize that I’m supposed to be against miracle cures for social justice reasons but it was too cruel to inflict that on a character ten books into a series.)
Also fascinated to see that a potential suitor has appeared for Mary’s sister Joyce! I really thought Joyce would end out the series as a spinster artist living with her friends in New York City, but now her old friend Jules is on the scene. Of course Mary dismisses the possibility with the comment “Oh, it never can be anything but friendship in this case... Jules is two years younger than Joyce,” but this seems like an extremely superable obstacle to me, so we shall see!
What I’m Reading Now
In The Yellow Poppy, D. K. Broster has at last introduced the yellow poppy of the title: a late-blooming yellow poppy called bride of the waves. The duchesse plucks one for the duc, only for the petals to blow away at once in the stiff breeze… FORESHADOWING MUCH? However, I recall the cruelly misleading foreshadowing in The Flight of the Heron, and sincerely hope that Broster is playing the same trick on us this time!
In David Copperfield, David is beginning to have a wisp of an inkling that perhaps - just perhaps! - marrying the silliest girl in all England was not, perhaps, the recipe for marital happiness. He is gamely attempting not to allow this realization to bloom to full consciousness, which is probably for the best, given the state of English divorce laws at the time and also the fact that Dora would probably wither away and die if thrust out into the cruel world on her own. You’ve made your bed and you must lie in it, sir!
What I Plan to Read Next
I accidentally another stack of World War I books at the library.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind, the last book in the Earthsea series. I deeply enjoyed Tenar’s discussions with the Kargad princess who has been dumped on the archipelago without a word of the language among people she has been raised to believe are wicked soul-stealing sorcerers. That intense culture shock - that’s the good stuff.
Otherwise… hmm. I admire Le Guin’s willingness to blow up her own worldbuilding from earlier books without necessarily admiring the way that she executed said explosion. In particular, I really struggled with the big shift in dragon worldbuilding in book four, and unfortunately the dragons are big in all three of the last books so you just can’t get away from it.
Carol Ryrie Brink’s Family Grandstand is a family story of the kind beloved and popular in the mid-twentieth century: think Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-King Family or Eleanor Estes’s The Moffats. I don’t think many books in this subgenre are being published now, but perhaps it’s due for a revival.
Anyway, I particularly enjoyed this one as it takes place near Midwestern University, the large land-grant college where the children’s father works as a professor, and in short reminded me a lot of my own childhood. Of course in some ways this milieu changed a lot between the book’s publication in 1952 and my own 1990s childhood - one of the plot points in the books is that it’s shameful that the Terrible Torrances are so badly behaved that they still need a babysitter even though they are six years old (and that babysitter is eleven!) - but the atmosphere of a college town on a football weekend remains absolutely spot on.
Deeply relieved to inform you that Annie Fellows Johnston took pity on us all in Mary Ware in Texas, and decided to allow a successful surgery on Mary’s brother Jack’s horribly painful paralyzing spinal fracture from last book. (I realize that I’m supposed to be against miracle cures for social justice reasons but it was too cruel to inflict that on a character ten books into a series.)
Also fascinated to see that a potential suitor has appeared for Mary’s sister Joyce! I really thought Joyce would end out the series as a spinster artist living with her friends in New York City, but now her old friend Jules is on the scene. Of course Mary dismisses the possibility with the comment “Oh, it never can be anything but friendship in this case... Jules is two years younger than Joyce,” but this seems like an extremely superable obstacle to me, so we shall see!
What I’m Reading Now
In The Yellow Poppy, D. K. Broster has at last introduced the yellow poppy of the title: a late-blooming yellow poppy called bride of the waves. The duchesse plucks one for the duc, only for the petals to blow away at once in the stiff breeze… FORESHADOWING MUCH? However, I recall the cruelly misleading foreshadowing in The Flight of the Heron, and sincerely hope that Broster is playing the same trick on us this time!
In David Copperfield, David is beginning to have a wisp of an inkling that perhaps - just perhaps! - marrying the silliest girl in all England was not, perhaps, the recipe for marital happiness. He is gamely attempting not to allow this realization to bloom to full consciousness, which is probably for the best, given the state of English divorce laws at the time and also the fact that Dora would probably wither away and die if thrust out into the cruel world on her own. You’ve made your bed and you must lie in it, sir!
What I Plan to Read Next
I accidentally another stack of World War I books at the library.
