Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Jane Langton’s The Fragile Flag, and aaaaaaaah, I really liked this book, you guys. Young Georgie (also the heroine of Langton’s The Fledgling) finds an old American flag in the attic, which gives people visions if it wraps around them; she decides to march on Washington with it, in hopes of convincing the President not to launch the Peace Missile (for which read Reagan’s Star Wars; the book was published in 1984).

Naturally the march swells to enormous size as it continues on, and George manages to meet the president in the end, etc. etc. Of course it’s escapism, but it’s really nice escapism in the current political climate. And the book is beautifully constructed, too, all the pieces of the plot (it’s more complicated than I’ve made it sound here) all come together like clockwork, and strike like midnight at just the climactic moment.

I also finished Warren Lewis’s The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, which I read because the Inklings book I read recently praised it (Warren Lewis is C. S. Lewis’s brother) and also because I’ve long meant to learn more about France, and indeed it is a pleasant and readable introductory work to seventeenth century France.

And, for the Unread Book Club: I reread William McCleery’s Wolf Story, which in our youth my brother and I liked so much that we importuned our father to read it multiple times. I think he got bored and started making up new twists in the story to amuse himself, although I can’t be sure because the father in the book (who is telling a story to his child in the book) also gets bored with the story he is telling and keeps trying to come up with twists to end it quickly. It’s very meta.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m slogging through Margaret Stohl’s Black Widow: Forever Red, which I am not liking nearly as much as I expected sadly. I think this is partly the fault of my own expectations - I thought this would be about Natasha’s childhood or at least give us large lumps of backstory, perhaps flashbacks!, but it really does not. But it’s also not very strongly written.

Really not feeling this one. Maybe I’ll just give it up.

I’m also working on Gary Paulsen’s The Island, which is an oddly poetic book - I mean, not odd really, or only because my main association with Paulsen is Hatchet which is more of a survival story. This one involves a lot of our hero sitting on the island, contemplating nature.

And I continue to chug along in Tolkien’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight!

What I Plan to Read Next

Norah of Billabong is winging its way through the mail to me as we speak! So definitely that.

Comments

[missroserose]

Oh man, The Fragile Flag! I remember that one! My sixth grade teacher read it aloud to us, and it was one of my favorites from the year. Now that I think it over, I remember quite a bit from it; the bit about the celebrity reporter who "joins" their march (riding in the limousine when it gets rainy, only coming out to march in her designer raincoat with her hair freshly curled by her cigarette-lighter curler when the cameras arrive) especially stuck in my head. I guess I've always had a certain distrust of celebrity culture, haha. I should dig that one up and reread it, it sounds like it holds up well.

Interestingly, my other favorite book from that year was written by Gary Paulsen - Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod, which has also held up well and remains a favorite. (I wrote a review of it some years ago, if you're interested in my take.) I highly recommend that one - it's a quick read, but funny as hell, and really captures the essence of my home state in a way that many travelogues aspire to but never quite reach.

[osprey_archer]

Veronica Glassmore! She's actually a child star, so even more celebritorious than a celebrity reporter. And also a spy for the President, who nefariously suggests to Eleanor that there is a pro-Presidential counter-march taking place, in the hopes that this will make the Peace Marchers give up.

I may get around to Winterdance eventually. I wouldn't think to call myself a Gary Paulsen fan, and yet without really meaning to I've read a lot of his books.

[missroserose]

Ahh, yes, I remember that bit now. Also I am so using "celebritorious" in the future.

Paulsen does seem to be sort of prevalent, doesn't he? He reminds me more than a little of Hemingway, in that, and in his subject matter, and in his prose style - although he tends to be less overtly misogynist, at least in the books of his I've read.

[sovay]

I finished Jane Langton’s The Fragile Flag, and aaaaaaaah, I really liked this book, you guys.

I remember reading that in fifth grade. I found the genre-shift from The Fledgling very confusing, although in hindsight I'm not sure I should have found it any more confusing than the nuclear threat and history-changing of L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet. On the other hand, I can still remember the cover of the paperback in the school library and the glittering, militaristic hyper-patriotism of the new flag, which feels less and less like satire or parable these days. I should read it again.

[osprey_archer]

For a book that was written thirty years ago, it feels super relevant and fresh right now, and inspiring, too, even though I don't have a magic flag and am not 100% convinced Georgie's flag would work on Trump anyway: but just the vision of all these people coming together to fight for something and winning.

It does seem a bit odd that Georgie never even thinks about her flying adventures and her lost goose friend (STILL SAD), but I have noticed that older series of books often seem to proceed on the assumption that the readers have never read the earlier books - couldn't just order the back catalog from Amazon then, after all.

[missroserose]

That latter is something that's struck me about television from the era too, when watching older episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix. If something was popular enough, it might run in syndication, but there was no guarantee the episodes would be in order, so they had to be pretty standalone, and whenever there was a bigger arc they were referring to, there'd always be a recap. It's kind of fascinating to me how changes in technology (in this case, the rise of DVR/TV seasons on DVD and now Netflix and binge-watching culture) have led to a real flowering of longer-form, serialized storytelling in a way that was unusual even twenty years ago. (On the other hand, audiences are now much more fragmented; my mother told me about working as a waitress when Roots was running, for instance, and how the restaurant would be dead empty during prime dinner rush because everyone was home watching it. It does kind of feel like Event Television is less of a thing now...although that may just be because everyone's watching it at different times.)