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Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 13th, 2024 08:28 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I’m still trundling along with the 2024 Newbery winners. This week, I read Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson’s Eagle Drums, a retelling of an Inupiaq legend about a boy who is kidnapped by eagles who can shift into human form, because they want to teach him to… Well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, because part of the pleasure of the book comes from figuring out just what the eagles DO want. I enjoyed all the details about traditional life in arctic, and also that feeling you really only get from old legends and retellings thereof that this story is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction.
Gary Paulsen’s The Quilt, another short memoir about a visit to his grandmother as a child. This time, he’s about six, and he goes to visit his grandmother and they go to stay with a neighbor who is about to have a baby… and while they wait, all the neighboring women come over (the men are all away for World War II) and get out a memory quilt that they’ve made, a patch for every member of their little community who has died over the past few decades.
Moving. And I think the book explains something about Paulsen's fiction, which is that although his main theme is masculinity, he doesn't have the that obnoxious male chauvinist attitude that so many writers do who are writing about Manly Men Being Manly. He respects women, and this is not merely an attitude he parrots but a thing that he knows in his bones from his childhood and his time with his grandmother.
What I’m Reading Now
Still traipsing along in Shirley. We have now moved into the POV of Martin Yorke, an obnoxious young lad who has become the go-between for Caroline and Robert Moore now that Robert is sorely injured and convalescing in the Yorke’s house. NO SHIRLEY for pages and pages! Woe.
What I Plan to Read Next
Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says, the last of the 2024 Newbery winners.
I’m still trundling along with the 2024 Newbery winners. This week, I read Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson’s Eagle Drums, a retelling of an Inupiaq legend about a boy who is kidnapped by eagles who can shift into human form, because they want to teach him to… Well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, because part of the pleasure of the book comes from figuring out just what the eagles DO want. I enjoyed all the details about traditional life in arctic, and also that feeling you really only get from old legends and retellings thereof that this story is built on axioms about how the world works that are vastly different than the ones structuring most modern fiction.
Gary Paulsen’s The Quilt, another short memoir about a visit to his grandmother as a child. This time, he’s about six, and he goes to visit his grandmother and they go to stay with a neighbor who is about to have a baby… and while they wait, all the neighboring women come over (the men are all away for World War II) and get out a memory quilt that they’ve made, a patch for every member of their little community who has died over the past few decades.
Moving. And I think the book explains something about Paulsen's fiction, which is that although his main theme is masculinity, he doesn't have the that obnoxious male chauvinist attitude that so many writers do who are writing about Manly Men Being Manly. He respects women, and this is not merely an attitude he parrots but a thing that he knows in his bones from his childhood and his time with his grandmother.
What I’m Reading Now
Still traipsing along in Shirley. We have now moved into the POV of Martin Yorke, an obnoxious young lad who has become the go-between for Caroline and Robert Moore now that Robert is sorely injured and convalescing in the Yorke’s house. NO SHIRLEY for pages and pages! Woe.
What I Plan to Read Next
Erin Bow’s Simon Sort of Says, the last of the 2024 Newbery winners.
