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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 3rd, 2024 10:25 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Carol Ryrie Brink’s A Chain of Hands is not so much a personal memoir as a collection of essays about people Brink remembered from her childhood: “Those I remember best are unimportant people. When I have stopped remembering them, they will cease to exist in this world. So I must write in order to save a few of the faces that belong to a few of the hands…”
A fascinating impressionist image of life in a quiet college town in Idaho around 1900. There isn’t a lot of direct information about Brink’s writing career, but it did confirm that many of her books are based very closely on life. Caddie Woodlawn grew from her grandmother’s stories of her childhood, Two Are Better than One and Louly from Brink’s childhood, and Family Grandstand and Family Sabbatical from Brink’s grown-up life as a faculty wife at the University of Minnesota. (No wonder she did such a spectacular job evoking that big Midwestern university feeling!) I wonder if the Brink family really did take a sabbatical in France…
What I’m Reading Now
In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, Raymonde is on the scene!!! ( Spoilers )
What I Plan to Read Next
In A Chain of Hands, Carol Ryrie Brink reminisces about her college friendship with McKinley Helm (who wrote the state song of Idaho in a college song contest), and recommends his book Spring in Spain, “which detailed his travels with his wife and two Pekinese dogs and a large box of books.” Doesn’t that sound delightful?
But it falls in that awkward mid-century period where the books are still in copyright, but most libraries don’t keep them because they’re decades old. I could probably get it through ILL, but now, perhaps, is not the time… but I record it here on the theory that perhaps I will run across this note again at a quieter time in my life, and decide that it is indeed time for Spring in Spain.
Carol Ryrie Brink’s A Chain of Hands is not so much a personal memoir as a collection of essays about people Brink remembered from her childhood: “Those I remember best are unimportant people. When I have stopped remembering them, they will cease to exist in this world. So I must write in order to save a few of the faces that belong to a few of the hands…”
A fascinating impressionist image of life in a quiet college town in Idaho around 1900. There isn’t a lot of direct information about Brink’s writing career, but it did confirm that many of her books are based very closely on life. Caddie Woodlawn grew from her grandmother’s stories of her childhood, Two Are Better than One and Louly from Brink’s childhood, and Family Grandstand and Family Sabbatical from Brink’s grown-up life as a faculty wife at the University of Minnesota. (No wonder she did such a spectacular job evoking that big Midwestern university feeling!) I wonder if the Brink family really did take a sabbatical in France…
What I’m Reading Now
In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, Raymonde is on the scene!!! ( Spoilers )
What I Plan to Read Next
In A Chain of Hands, Carol Ryrie Brink reminisces about her college friendship with McKinley Helm (who wrote the state song of Idaho in a college song contest), and recommends his book Spring in Spain, “which detailed his travels with his wife and two Pekinese dogs and a large box of books.” Doesn’t that sound delightful?
But it falls in that awkward mid-century period where the books are still in copyright, but most libraries don’t keep them because they’re decades old. I could probably get it through ILL, but now, perhaps, is not the time… but I record it here on the theory that perhaps I will run across this note again at a quieter time in my life, and decide that it is indeed time for Spring in Spain.
