Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I've Just Finished Reading

I finished John Marsden's Letters from the Inside, which I actually ended up quite enjoying, despite my reservations about it last week. The girls' voices ended up much better differentiated than they were at the beginning, which I think makes sense even though it also makes the beginning slow: they become more themselves as they get more comfortable writing to each other. And also the ending destroyed me (in a good way, I mean.)

I also finished Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, which I still highly recommend.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm still moseying through Oliver Sachs' Musicophilia - I started it a few months ago and set it aside, but I decided to finish it after I heard he'd died. It's interesting while I'm reading it, but it doesn't quite have the propulsive force to draw me back in when I'm not.

I'm also reading Vivian Apple at the End of the World, which is about a girl who loses her parents to a small Rapture that takes up a few hundred odd believers and sets the rest of the world in a tizzy. That's about as far as I've gotten in the book, and I'm curious to see just what the author is going to do with her world-building.

What I Plan to Read Next

DID YOU KNOW THERE'S A NEW AMERICAN GIRL OUT?????? Yes! There is! Maryellen, a fifties girl. I only found this out because someone requested the canon for trickortreatex, which is perhaps a sign that I should, after all, sign up for trickortreatex this year.

Eventually American Girl's going to cover every decade in the twentieth century; they've already done more than half of them. And they're probably holding off on the eighties and nineties so they can hit my generation right in the pocketbook, buying the girl from our time period for our daughters/nieces/whoever.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of a tiny, highly selective Rapture! I hope the book is good. I'm glad to hear that Letters from the Inside sorted itself out eventually, too. It's pretty cool that the girls' individual voices developed over time.

The American Girl catalog occupied such a weird space in my childhood -- like so many other things, it caught me between desire and resentment. I loved the catalogs, was told in no uncertain terms that we could never afford so much as Kirsten's lunch pail so don't bother to ask, and was quite unattractively satisfied to discover, when I made a friend who actually owned a Samantha doll and multiple accessories, that the dolls were kind of ugly up close and the accessories weren't as meticulously painted as I'd imagined.

Weirdly, I never got into the books very much. We had some at the library and I liked to look at the History Facts! in the back, but the stories didn't grab me for whatever reason. Except that I was annoyed that there weren't more stories about Nellie, the factory girl/maid -- surly baby socialist that I was.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The physical dolls and accessories never seem nearly as magical as their catalog versions did. I'm not sure why they looked more intricate in catalog form; maybe because they were smaller in the photos? Plus with the photographs, there was always the sense that the dolls might start chatting with each other, whereas the physical dolls were very obviously inanimate.

Nellie was the best part of the Samantha books, IMO. I particularly loved the story in the last book, where Nellie and her sisters ran away from the orphanage and lived secretly in Samantha's attic where Samantha snuck them food. I particularly remember Samantha taking them Valentine cookies, though now that I'm older I hope there was healthy food too.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I need to refresh myself on what you said last time about Letters from the Inside--brb.

Back again.

So, was Letters from the Inside about letters from prison/jail? Or does "Inside" refer to someplace else?

... I'm having a hard time imagining what the stereotypically 1980s or 1990s clothing will be. I guess 1980s will be acid-washed jeans? And side ponytails? But what about 1990s?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes, one of the girls is in prison. She doesn't tell her penpal about it at first, which is probably why her letters seem flat at the beginning of the book: she's mirroring her penpal's voice back at her to try to sound "normal" rather than using her own voice.

I'm trying to remember what nineties clothes looked like, but I wasn't paying much attention at the time and I'm kind of drawing a blank. Navel-bearing shirts were a thing, I remember, but I'm not sure American Girl is going to go for that.