Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 10th, 2016 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Heaven to Betsy, the fifth Betsy-Tacy book. Betsy has started high school and discovered boys, the second of which is slightly tiresome, but what can you do? And on the whole it’s charming: Betsy has lots of delightful parties with her friends, which all sound marvelously fun and made me feel terribly lonely and old.
In between the boys and the parties there’s very little time for Tacy, though, and I did miss her. Perhaps there will be a bit more Tacy next book.
Heaven to Betsy is apparently challenged fairly regularly in libraries - my own library doesn’t have a copy, although of course they might just have lost it - because it contains religious questioning. I was expecting Betsy, or at least one of her friends, to perhaps flirt vaguely with atheism or maybe at least Mormonism, but no. The book is challenged because Betsy and her sister Julia convert from their childhood Baptist denomination to Episcopalianism.
That’s it. That’s the religious questioning. No wonder modern American fiction (outside of specifically Christian inspiration type books) tends to shy clear of anything that smacks even vaguely of religion.
What I’m Reading Now
I am indeed reading In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, because it just seemed like such a perfect book to read before a roaring blaze. So far the most colorful character is James Gordon Bennett Jr., the editor of the New York Herald, who sent Stanley to Africa to find Livingstone, hoaxed New York with a front-page story about the animals in the Central Park Zoo breaking free and eating pedestrians, and got himself banished from New York society after getting outrageously drunk and pissing in a piano during a New Year’s party.
He also had a habit of driving his coach buck naked through the nighttime streets of New York, so it’s rather impressive that the hostesses waited till the piano incident to refuse him entry to their salons. The piano incident, incidentally, so infuriated the brother of Bennett’s then-fiancee (the engagement did not survive Bennett’s ruining of the family piano) that he challenged Bennett to a duel, and they fought one of the last duels in the United States. Bennett fled the country for Paris afterward.
Now Bennett’s jaunting around Europe. He just met an eccentric cartographer named Petermann, who was convinced (and immortalized his conviction on his maps) that the Gulf Stream and the Kuro Siwo currents met at the North Pole to create a warm open polar sea. Inspired by Petermann’s vision, Bennett is searching for the perfect ship for polar exploration.
What I Plan to Read Next
I am sorely tempted by Janice P. Nimura’s Daughter of the Samurai, a book about three Japanese girls who came to the United States to study Western ways in the second half of the nineteenth century. I read just a little about these girls when I was doing my project about American girls’ literature (because series of college novels were popular, and one of the series I read had a Japanese student), and perhaps now is time to learn more about them? I’ve been thinking about maybe branching out to writing historical romance, and a college setting would give me lots of potential heroines...
And of course I’m going to read Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy in Spite of Herself.
Heaven to Betsy, the fifth Betsy-Tacy book. Betsy has started high school and discovered boys, the second of which is slightly tiresome, but what can you do? And on the whole it’s charming: Betsy has lots of delightful parties with her friends, which all sound marvelously fun and made me feel terribly lonely and old.
In between the boys and the parties there’s very little time for Tacy, though, and I did miss her. Perhaps there will be a bit more Tacy next book.
Heaven to Betsy is apparently challenged fairly regularly in libraries - my own library doesn’t have a copy, although of course they might just have lost it - because it contains religious questioning. I was expecting Betsy, or at least one of her friends, to perhaps flirt vaguely with atheism or maybe at least Mormonism, but no. The book is challenged because Betsy and her sister Julia convert from their childhood Baptist denomination to Episcopalianism.
That’s it. That’s the religious questioning. No wonder modern American fiction (outside of specifically Christian inspiration type books) tends to shy clear of anything that smacks even vaguely of religion.
What I’m Reading Now
I am indeed reading In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette, because it just seemed like such a perfect book to read before a roaring blaze. So far the most colorful character is James Gordon Bennett Jr., the editor of the New York Herald, who sent Stanley to Africa to find Livingstone, hoaxed New York with a front-page story about the animals in the Central Park Zoo breaking free and eating pedestrians, and got himself banished from New York society after getting outrageously drunk and pissing in a piano during a New Year’s party.
He also had a habit of driving his coach buck naked through the nighttime streets of New York, so it’s rather impressive that the hostesses waited till the piano incident to refuse him entry to their salons. The piano incident, incidentally, so infuriated the brother of Bennett’s then-fiancee (the engagement did not survive Bennett’s ruining of the family piano) that he challenged Bennett to a duel, and they fought one of the last duels in the United States. Bennett fled the country for Paris afterward.
Now Bennett’s jaunting around Europe. He just met an eccentric cartographer named Petermann, who was convinced (and immortalized his conviction on his maps) that the Gulf Stream and the Kuro Siwo currents met at the North Pole to create a warm open polar sea. Inspired by Petermann’s vision, Bennett is searching for the perfect ship for polar exploration.
What I Plan to Read Next
I am sorely tempted by Janice P. Nimura’s Daughter of the Samurai, a book about three Japanese girls who came to the United States to study Western ways in the second half of the nineteenth century. I read just a little about these girls when I was doing my project about American girls’ literature (because series of college novels were popular, and one of the series I read had a Japanese student), and perhaps now is time to learn more about them? I’ve been thinking about maybe branching out to writing historical romance, and a college setting would give me lots of potential heroines...
And of course I’m going to read Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy in Spite of Herself.
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no subject
Date: 2016-02-10 11:57 pm (UTC)Or something like that.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 02:54 am (UTC)Also, despite being Baptists, Betsy's parents play whist and dance occasionally. Maybe they're setting a bad example for Baptists even without the whole conversion thing.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-11 10:55 pm (UTC)Betsy has started high school and discovered boys, the second of which is slightly tiresome, but what can you do?
Is it tiresome because it takes time away from Tacy, or because the boys are badly written? You're entering the Zone of I Don't Remember If I Even Made it Through These Books, so . . . maybe I should just check them out for myself, actually.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-12 01:37 am (UTC)The boys are tiresome mostly because they take away from Tacy, although there were also a lot of new characters introduced in this book and I had some trouble getting them all straight. There are a couple of boys who stand out, but the rest of them are a sort of interchangeable crowd.
I think this is to a certain extent on purpose, though. There's a sense that the boys she doesn't specifically have a crush on are rather interchangeable to Betsy at this point in her life. She has a collector's interest in them, if you will? That makes her sound colder than she is.