Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Eva Ibbotson’s Madensky Square, and I enjoyed it so much that I nearly flung myself headlong into The Star of Kazan, which is the other Ibbotson book that I own, but then I decided to restrain myself and save The Star of Kazan for the next time I need a feel-good book. Most of Ibbotson’s books are quite reliable for that (except maybe The Morning Gift).

I highly recommend Madensky Square for the parts about creation, the description of Vienna, the musings on sadness and mortality and getting on with life (there’s a lot of sadness in it for such a happy book; but on balance it is a very happy book), and also because Ibbotson has the rare gift for writing child characters just as well in adult fiction as in her children’s books. They always feel like real people, not child-macguffins.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, a short book about her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. The first quarter of it (and it’s not a very long book) is entirely taken up with her voyage to the hospital; I am thinking that perhaps it won’t have as many nursing details as I hoped.

Oh, and my hold on Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On FINALLY came in! I’m enjoying it so far, although it’s really surprisingly bleak - or maybe I shouldn’t say surprisingly. It’s riffing off Harry Potter, and it just brings the bleakness that’s mostly hidden by whimsy and sense of wonder in Harry Potter right up to the surface.

(I used to think that J. K. Rowling created the Wizarding World without realizing how astonishingly dark it was beneath the jokey exterior, but now that I’ve read her adult detective novels I’ve decided that she probably knew exactly what she was doing.)

I think I’m going to write a longer review once I’ve finished reading; Carry On is doing some interesting things in its riff off of Harry Potter’s world-building (in particular, I think it’s responding to a lot of criticisms of the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows), and I’ll be able to articulate it better once I’m through.

What I Plan to Read Next

I also have Louisa May Alcott’s Moods on my Kindle, so I may read that once I’ve finished Hospital Sketches. Or maybe Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Gypsy’s Cousin Joy, which is a children’s book published about the same time as Little Women?

OH OH OH, also American Girl has a new historical character out! I feel leery, given how disappointing I found their last new series (Maryellen the 50s girl, who totally deserved better!), but this one is about the Civil Rights struggle in the sixties so I am cautiously optimistic that it might be good. At very least, it won’t be able to totally ignore the hard parts of history the way the Maryellen books did.

BUT THE LIBRARY DOESN’T HAVE IT YET, WOE. So I guess I won’t be reading it for a while.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

JKR does love herself some darkness. It's been way too long since I read Harry Potter to make any kind of judgment on it, but you're probably right (even if Career of Evil still feels kind of like every ex-Disney Club performer's "frantic proof of adulthood" album)

(She did get some genuinely creepy stuff in there that surprises me not at all on reflection -- that werewolf pedophile? What was his name? And so much of the W. World's politics is so rotten).

I hope the new American Girl is less badly thought out than the last! Those fictional girls deserve better!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I've heard that The Casual Vacancy also gets pretty "frantic proof of adulthood," although I haven't read it because those reviews didn't make it sound like something I would enjoy. Either JKR thinks she has LOTS of adulthood to prove, or she just really likes darkness and felt constrained in Harry Potter.

Fenrir Greyback, I think? He's only in the later books, and I didn't read them as many times as I read the first three. I've been thinking about doing a reread; maybe Carry On will give me the push that I need to go through with it.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Hospital Sketches does have nursing details but it's pretty romanticized, IIRC. Lots of uplifting death scenes that I suspect weren't quite as elevating as she portrays.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I just got to the first uplifting death scene during my lunch break today. Our narrator has rushed from the side of a shell-shocked drummer boy to sit by the side of the most perfect soldier ever to soldier as he takes his final earthly breaths.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's ringing a bell. I remember reading that and thinking she was writing what she thought would make those poor guys' families feel better, which probably bore about zero resemblance to what it was actually like.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

She also talks about how none of the soldiers ever cry out in agony, which seems somewhat unlikely to me.

I've read that Hospital Sketches is based on letters she wrote home, which makes me wonder if Bronson Alcott did some editing. (He apparently had no compunctions about editing his daughters' diaries, for instance.) I can just see him telling Louisa that he's improved her letters and made them so much more inspiring.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

It's unlikely verging on ridiculous. No anesthesia then; inadequate painkillers. Doesn't match other contemporary accounts. You do often see writers remark that soldiers don't make a sound when from the looks of their wounds, they should be screaming, but that's generally because of shock and 1) isn't a good thing - they're probably not going to make it since they couldn't treat shock back then either, 2) the exception rather than the rule.

Stupid Bronson Alcott! He was exactly the sort of person I really dislike in real life.

Way different period, but Enid Bagnold (National Velvet) was a nurse in WWI and wrote a book which is really well-written, fascinating, and has the unusual quality of being an unromanticized book by a writer who is clearly of a romantic set of mind. (In fact, it was so unromanticized that she was fired when it came out and had to leave the hospital and become an ambulance driver.)

[ladyherenya]

Madensky Square is lovely. I have the impression it's less well known (or maybe just less frequently re-issued) than some of her others, which is a shame.


I noticed aspects of Carry On that seemed to be a response to criticisms of Harry Potter, but they were generally criticisms in terms of HP's worldbuilding rather than those of any book in particular. So I'm interested in what ways you see it to be responding to criticisms of Deathly Hallows.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think perhaps it's because Madensky Square is less easily categorized than the others: her other adult books are all more or less romances (although romances with lots of extra perks that not all romances have), but the romance in Madensky Square is pretty much in the background, the heroine is already together with her guy at the start, and also she's his mistress and her happy ending is... to stay his mistress. It's not very romance-y. So I can see publishers being unsure what to do with it, even though it's lovely.

[entwashian.livejournal.com]

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