osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2016-01-27 09:50 am
osprey_archer) wrote2016-01-27 09:50 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. You know, every once in a while I will read a children’s book and get disheartened, because it’s not grabbing me and I feel like maybe I’ve outgrown children’s books and that’s just sad… but rereading the Betsy-Tacy books has reminded me that while it’s possible to outgrow particular children’s books (just as it’s possible to outgrow particular adult books), the best ones are always worth reading.
I particularly enjoyed Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, because there is an entire chapter devoted to Betsy going to the library, all by herself, to spend a whole day there, with fifteen cents so she can have lunch at the cafe across the street. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? That would have been my dream when I was twelve.
Also Depression 101, because the library didn't have "My life is a disaster and I have failed at everything that matters."
I nearly threw the book at the wall when it suggested accepting invitations when I receive them - it would be nice to live in that alternate universe where my friends invited me to things, now wouldn't it? - but, well. I've read mental health memoirs; I know there's always a section about If Only I Had Sought Help Sooner, I Could Have Started Water-Skiing on the French Riviera That Much Earlier, I Would Say Woe Is Me But My Therapist Recommended That I Not Dwell on Past Mistakes.
What I’m Reading Now
Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of To-day. Why is The Imperialist her most famous work (for very low values of "most famous")? The Imperialist is super boring. (The imperialist in a lengthy rumination about Canada's colonial ties to Britain, thinly disguised as a novel.) A Daughter of To-day is totally charming. The heroine Elfrida is studying painting in the Latin Quarter in Paris! Just look at her breakfast:
There was the egg, and there was some apricot-jam - the egg in a slender-stemmed Arabian silver cup, the jam golden in a little round dish of wonderful old blue. She set it forth, with the milk-bread and the butter and the coffee, on a bit of much mended damask with a pattern of roses and a coronet in one corner. Her breakfast gave her several sorts of pleasure.
Don't you want to have that breakfast?
What I Plan to Read Next
It was going to be Heaven to Betsy, except… the library doesn’t have it! I’ve requested it by interlibrary loan, of course, but I’m just boggled that they have every book in the series except one of the middle ones. Who does that??
The Betsy-Tacy books hitherto have all been rereads; this is the first one that I’ll be reading for the first time.
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. You know, every once in a while I will read a children’s book and get disheartened, because it’s not grabbing me and I feel like maybe I’ve outgrown children’s books and that’s just sad… but rereading the Betsy-Tacy books has reminded me that while it’s possible to outgrow particular children’s books (just as it’s possible to outgrow particular adult books), the best ones are always worth reading.
I particularly enjoyed Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, because there is an entire chapter devoted to Betsy going to the library, all by herself, to spend a whole day there, with fifteen cents so she can have lunch at the cafe across the street. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? That would have been my dream when I was twelve.
Also Depression 101, because the library didn't have "My life is a disaster and I have failed at everything that matters."
I nearly threw the book at the wall when it suggested accepting invitations when I receive them - it would be nice to live in that alternate universe where my friends invited me to things, now wouldn't it? - but, well. I've read mental health memoirs; I know there's always a section about If Only I Had Sought Help Sooner, I Could Have Started Water-Skiing on the French Riviera That Much Earlier, I Would Say Woe Is Me But My Therapist Recommended That I Not Dwell on Past Mistakes.
What I’m Reading Now
Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of To-day. Why is The Imperialist her most famous work (for very low values of "most famous")? The Imperialist is super boring. (The imperialist in a lengthy rumination about Canada's colonial ties to Britain, thinly disguised as a novel.) A Daughter of To-day is totally charming. The heroine Elfrida is studying painting in the Latin Quarter in Paris! Just look at her breakfast:
There was the egg, and there was some apricot-jam - the egg in a slender-stemmed Arabian silver cup, the jam golden in a little round dish of wonderful old blue. She set it forth, with the milk-bread and the butter and the coffee, on a bit of much mended damask with a pattern of roses and a coronet in one corner. Her breakfast gave her several sorts of pleasure.
Don't you want to have that breakfast?
What I Plan to Read Next
It was going to be Heaven to Betsy, except… the library doesn’t have it! I’ve requested it by interlibrary loan, of course, but I’m just boggled that they have every book in the series except one of the middle ones. Who does that??
The Betsy-Tacy books hitherto have all been rereads; this is the first one that I’ll be reading for the first time.
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For memoirs, I cannot recommend Mark Vonnegut's Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So highly enough. It's unclear what he actually has - it's definitely not regular depression - but it's a great book and is wildly unlikely to make you feel like "My life is a disaster and I have failed at everything that matters." Unlike many people who write good mental illness memoirs, he's not a Pulitzer Prize winner or anything of that nature, just a good writer (and a pediatrician) who happens to be the son of someone incredibly famous.
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Caveat: this stuff is WAY easier to use with a therapist, in part because the therapist will distill it for you and do the skipping for you. However, people do use it by themselves and I know that they at least sometimes get good results from it. Feel free to email me. CBT is one of my specialties, so I can at least answer questions.
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I want to have that whole book!
I also sort of faded out on Betsy-Tacy after Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown -- I don't remember why.
Libraries are strange, sometimes! My library has a thing where it only carries a single late book of several long mystery series. I'm sure there are other strangenesses I haven't discovered yet.
I know there's always a section about If Only I Had Sought Help Sooner, I Could Have Started Water-Skiing on the French Riviera That Much Earlier, I Would Say Woe Is Me But My Therapist Recommended That I Not Dwell on Past Mistakes.
:|
I feel your feelings here. I have run against so many examples of books making blithe assumptions about my life that I get mad even when the assumption is correct.
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Many libraries don't have the book after Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Heaven to Betsy, because the heroine questions religion (I haven't read it yet, so I'm not sure how much). I may have quit because I couldn't get the next book. Or maybe I just wasn't interested in Betsy once she was getting older and going to high school? I also fell out of the Anne of Green Gables books once Anne got married.
My library does the same thing with mystery series. It's soooo frustrating. No, library, I want to read every book in the series! Why is that so hard to understand? Especially given that recent mystery series often have storylines that build on each other from book to book, in a way that Ngaio Marsh, for instance, really doesn't.
Now that I no longer have the book in hand begging to be thrown across the room, I have realized that "No one ever invites me anywhere" is actually an overstatement, and I could probably do a better job accepting the occasional invitations I do receive...
But the author seemed to be vaguely under the impression that I could fill up a decently busy social calendar if only I started accepting the invitations that are undoubtedly streaming into my life, and no, NO MR. AUTHOR, I COULD NOT.