Wednesday Reading Meme
Jan. 6th, 2016 08:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Mistress Pat, but I already wrote about that at length yesterday.
And I read Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past, which is a short collection of poems from the point of view of a child. And it is, well, pretty twee: think Robert Louis Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” only a bit more so.
It’s too bad, because I really love Peabody’s published diaries and letters, but her poetry never works for me. Every time I read it I can only think what a shame it is that she never wrote a novel - or a memoir - because her prose is so much less mannered and more passionate and alive than her poetry.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve been reading Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy: Or, Shadows Uplifted, which was on a list![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tamsinwillougby linked of Five Best-Selling Female Writers You May Not Have Heard Of. (They’re all nineteenth-century American female writers, which I feel the title perhaps ought to have shared.)
Being an aficionado of nineteenth-century American female writers, of course I had to try some of them out, and Frances Harper got first dibs because she’s one of the earliest female African-American novelists. Iola Leroy is basically a tract thinly disguised as a novel, really, so I can’t say I recommend it, but it is interesting from a historical point of view.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been thinking about reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea. Anybody read it? Worth it?
My mother and I both read Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War, and both independently decided that we really must read two of the books that Manning mentioned: Rosemary Taylor’s Chicken Every Sunday: Life with My Mother’s Boarders and Henry Beetle Hough’s Country Editor.
This synchonity is perhaps less impressive than it sounds, as these were two of the books most popular with World War II troops. If they’re so engrossing that they can distract a soldier from the battlefield or even give wounded, shell-shocked soldiers a new will to live (many soldiers wrote letters to the authors telling them that these books helped them start to feel again when they felt numb and broken after battle), clearly they must be pretty great.
Mistress Pat, but I already wrote about that at length yesterday.
And I read Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Book of the Little Past, which is a short collection of poems from the point of view of a child. And it is, well, pretty twee: think Robert Louis Stevenson’s “My Shadow,” only a bit more so.
It’s too bad, because I really love Peabody’s published diaries and letters, but her poetry never works for me. Every time I read it I can only think what a shame it is that she never wrote a novel - or a memoir - because her prose is so much less mannered and more passionate and alive than her poetry.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve been reading Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy: Or, Shadows Uplifted, which was on a list
tamsinwillougby linked of Five Best-Selling Female Writers You May Not Have Heard Of. (They’re all nineteenth-century American female writers, which I feel the title perhaps ought to have shared.)Being an aficionado of nineteenth-century American female writers, of course I had to try some of them out, and Frances Harper got first dibs because she’s one of the earliest female African-American novelists. Iola Leroy is basically a tract thinly disguised as a novel, really, so I can’t say I recommend it, but it is interesting from a historical point of view.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve been thinking about reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea. Anybody read it? Worth it?
My mother and I both read Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War, and both independently decided that we really must read two of the books that Manning mentioned: Rosemary Taylor’s Chicken Every Sunday: Life with My Mother’s Boarders and Henry Beetle Hough’s Country Editor.
This synchonity is perhaps less impressive than it sounds, as these were two of the books most popular with World War II troops. If they’re so engrossing that they can distract a soldier from the battlefield or even give wounded, shell-shocked soldiers a new will to live (many soldiers wrote letters to the authors telling them that these books helped them start to feel again when they felt numb and broken after battle), clearly they must be pretty great.
