Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Maud Hart Lovelace’s Winona’s Pony Cart, which is the last of her Deep Valley books - the end of an era! But this is a very good book to end an era on. Young Winona is turning eight (and the book seems to be written for children at about that level), and she desperately wants a pony. So desperately that as the book begins, she’s been attempting to ride the birdbath as a pony-replacement.

It doesn’t have quite enough pony in it to count as a horse book, but I think it would be fun for fans of horse books nonetheless.

I also finally finished reading Alfred Habegger’s Emily Dickinson biography, which suffered quite a bit from the fact that her life gets really boring after about thirty-five. Someone could probably write a good novel about Emily Dickinson’s rich inner life in her later years, after she stopped leaving her house - or alternatively a good but terribly sad novel about her inner torment - but a biographer is stuck with the facts.

And the facts are that not much happened to her, and her record of her thoughts and feelings (her poems and letters) are so oblique and elusive that it’s hard to get much of a narrative out of them either.

Also I think Habegger gives short shrift to her relationships with women - shouldn’t her sister Vinnie be a bigger presence, for instance? And I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that Dickinson’s mother was still alive when her father died.

What I’m Reading Now

DID YOU KNOW BILL BRYSON HAS A NEW BOOK OUT? It’s The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, and it is - well, I think Bryson has become cranky in his old age (crankier, perhaps? He’s always been cranky), and it probably could have used better editing - I’m only on Chapter 7 and I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s called a view “splendid” - but parts of it are still very, very funny.

I also started reading Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley on my Kindle. I am ten percent of the way through the book and Shirley has not appeared yet.

What I Plan to Read Next

It seems there’s a new Benjamin January book out! So clearly I need to read that.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Heh. I think I was a little more sympathetic to Habegger and his lack of evidence than you. . . I mean, I thought he made some pretty interesting leaps of interpretation from the poems -- I felt skeptical a lot, but it was an admirable attempt, I thought. Half a novel, almost.

But it was the first Dickinson biography I'd ever read, so I think I took it pretty much at face value (except that he's constantly picking fights with previous biographers, in the grand tradition of biography).

Winona's Pony Cart sounds adorable. I don't think I read any of MH Lovelace's books that didn't have "Betsy" in the title -- I'm not sure I knew they existed.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's Habegger's fault really; it's a problem I've had with other scholarly biographies, which is why I don't read biographies that often. Even the most exciting people always seem to have a decade somewhere or other where nothing much happens in their lives, but their biographers feel duty-bound to write something about it anyway.

She wrote three other books set in Deep Valley: Winona's Pony Cart, Carney's House Party, and Emily of Deep Valley. My favorite of the three is Emily of Deep Valley, which is about a shy orphan girl who lives with her grandfather and needs to build a new social life for herself after graduating high school; all her friends have gone to college, but she can't because her grandfather is frail.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't realize you were a Benjamin January fan! I love that series dearly, and am always glad to see someone else who knows it.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Someone suckered me in with the promise of OT3. I didn't end up feeling terribly fannish about it, but I like the series enough that I try to keep up with the books as they come out.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Haha, that might well have been me, whoops. I do a lot of pimping of the fandom.