osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2017-08-30 07:09 am
osprey_archer) wrote2017-08-30 07:09 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Holly Webb’s Return to the Secret Garden, which has a charming premise - evacuee children during World War II sent to Misselthwaite Manor! - and proceeds to use it to make the our beloved Secret Garden characters heirs to all the miseries of history.
No, I did not want to read about Dickon becoming a grumpy old man because during World War I he got facial scarring so severe that children flinch away from him. Nor did I want to read about Colin Craven dying at Dunkirk in World War II. No! The fact that it was a heroic death does not make it better! COLIN CRAVEN IS NEVER SUPPOSED TO DIE, DID YOU NOT EVEN READ THE SECRET GARDEN.
I have never been fond of “major character death” fic and the fact that this is professionally published does not make me like it any better.
What I’m Reading Now
I read a lot of books by women because generally speaking I find them less likely to be misogynistic than books by men. But there’s generally, and then there’s Edna Ferber, whose writing I don’t remember being nearly this soaked in misogynistic tropes in Dawn O’Hara. Maybe she soured as she got older, soured by her life as a ~failed spinster~ - spinsters being, in Ferberville, by definition failures. As are wives if they’re too conventional. And women who sleep around if they sleep around too much.
Pansy Deleath has just gone to the Klondike with a troupe of dancing girls, and Ferber takes every opportunity to remind us how silly they are and how much better and more solid and less slutty Pansy looks by comparison. She may end up being Vaughn Melendy’s mistress for the next fifty years, but that’s because it’s TRUE LOVE, not for base mercenary gold-digging reasons like those ~other girls.
Ugh. I’m going to finish the book because it’s part of the Unread Book Club and I intend to finish them all, but UGH.
In cheerier news - well, cheerier is the wrong word. But in more pleasurable if somewhat soul-destroying reading news, I’ve started Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is beautiful and wonderfully observed (and a good example of how to write a story set in a deeply sexist culture without making the story itself sexist, so TAKE THAT, Edna Ferber) and weirdly engrossing. I meant to do other things yesterday evening and instead gulped down the first half of the book.
What I Plan to Read Next
My reading challenge for September is “a book by an #ownvoices or #diversebooks author.” I was already planning to read Ashley Bryan’s Freedom Over Me, which won a Newbery Honor this year (also, I just looked Bryan up, and he’s 94 years old. Ninety-four and still winning book awards! I find it strangely inspiring), and also Jewell Parker Rhodes Bayou Magic, which looked intriguing when I found it at the used bookstore… although upon looking it up online, it looks like it’s the third in a trilogy, so maybe I ought to start at the beginning?
Upon further inspection, it looks like a rather loosely knit trilogy, so probably I can start with Bayou Magic and go back and read the others if I like it. I was planning to find a third book to make it a hat trick anyway - if I don’t like Bayou Magic enough to want to read the rest of that series, then maybe Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Mighty Miss Malone.
Holly Webb’s Return to the Secret Garden, which has a charming premise - evacuee children during World War II sent to Misselthwaite Manor! - and proceeds to use it to make the our beloved Secret Garden characters heirs to all the miseries of history.
No, I did not want to read about Dickon becoming a grumpy old man because during World War I he got facial scarring so severe that children flinch away from him. Nor did I want to read about Colin Craven dying at Dunkirk in World War II. No! The fact that it was a heroic death does not make it better! COLIN CRAVEN IS NEVER SUPPOSED TO DIE, DID YOU NOT EVEN READ THE SECRET GARDEN.
I have never been fond of “major character death” fic and the fact that this is professionally published does not make me like it any better.
What I’m Reading Now
I read a lot of books by women because generally speaking I find them less likely to be misogynistic than books by men. But there’s generally, and then there’s Edna Ferber, whose writing I don’t remember being nearly this soaked in misogynistic tropes in Dawn O’Hara. Maybe she soured as she got older, soured by her life as a ~failed spinster~ - spinsters being, in Ferberville, by definition failures. As are wives if they’re too conventional. And women who sleep around if they sleep around too much.
Pansy Deleath has just gone to the Klondike with a troupe of dancing girls, and Ferber takes every opportunity to remind us how silly they are and how much better and more solid and less slutty Pansy looks by comparison. She may end up being Vaughn Melendy’s mistress for the next fifty years, but that’s because it’s TRUE LOVE, not for base mercenary gold-digging reasons like those ~other girls.
Ugh. I’m going to finish the book because it’s part of the Unread Book Club and I intend to finish them all, but UGH.
In cheerier news - well, cheerier is the wrong word. But in more pleasurable if somewhat soul-destroying reading news, I’ve started Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is beautiful and wonderfully observed (and a good example of how to write a story set in a deeply sexist culture without making the story itself sexist, so TAKE THAT, Edna Ferber) and weirdly engrossing. I meant to do other things yesterday evening and instead gulped down the first half of the book.
What I Plan to Read Next
My reading challenge for September is “a book by an #ownvoices or #diversebooks author.” I was already planning to read Ashley Bryan’s Freedom Over Me, which won a Newbery Honor this year (also, I just looked Bryan up, and he’s 94 years old. Ninety-four and still winning book awards! I find it strangely inspiring), and also Jewell Parker Rhodes Bayou Magic, which looked intriguing when I found it at the used bookstore… although upon looking it up online, it looks like it’s the third in a trilogy, so maybe I ought to start at the beginning?
Upon further inspection, it looks like a rather loosely knit trilogy, so probably I can start with Bayou Magic and go back and read the others if I like it. I was planning to find a third book to make it a hat trick anyway - if I don’t like Bayou Magic enough to want to read the rest of that series, then maybe Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Mighty Miss Malone.
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I've had Bayou Magic on my to-read list for ages--maybe I'll get it out and get cracking on it (... maybe).
We're making progress on The Apple Stone--it's sweet and fun, and historically curious in some ways (e.g., the cousins' fathers are working on a rocket to the moon, and the book was written before the moon landing).
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I'll let you know how Bayou Magic goes. If it's wonderful you can bump it up the list, and if it's dreadful bump it off.
Glad to hear The Apple Stone is going well! Was there anyone else who wanted to read it, do you know? I was thinking - after you've sent it to me, and I've read it - perhaps I ought to send it on to someone else, to keep spreading the joy, as it were.
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Oh no!! Why must people do that? /o\ (Mind, I quite like the idea of Colin Craven dying at Dunkirk, because that's enough time to have a decent life first and then potentially HEROIC TRAGIC DEATH. But it should be the only one. 0_o)
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I also can't get over grumpy Dickon. I realize it real life that wars can have strange effects on people's characters and so forth and so on, but - Dickon! I could perhaps buy him as a mostly silent gardener that the heroine thinks is grumpy just because he's so quiet, but no, he's just plain grumpy.
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Seriously, it's not like he metaphysically has to become Ben Weatherstaff or something.
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WWI is hard to ignore and so many young men did die (especially of Colin's class, proportionally, even more than those like Dickon), but, yeah, grumpy Dickon is not on!
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NO WHY?!! NO. I categorically refuse.
I have read one sequel which... I remember being super over the top? It sounds better than this one at least. Oh, wait, I found the entry.
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I understand the impulse to write follow-ups to The Secret Garden, but all the same it is one of those books that is so perfect the way it is that it seems almost sacrilegious to meddle like that. What can anyone possibly write as a follow-up to a summer of magical beauty that won't seem like a let-down?
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I did not know that about Edna Ferber--haven't read anything by her for like fifty years (because I remember her work as basically humorless) but ugh. So much was imbued with misogynism back then, it was like the air constantly filled with cigarette smoke.
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Dammit!
I have never been fond of “major character death” fic and the fact that this is professionally published does not make me like it any better.
Major character death fic is slightly inseparable from The Secret Garden for me because it's in the 1987 TV adaptation which I otherwise recommend (it has a World War I frame story), but at least it doesn't kill off Colin. In fact it has him played as an adult by Colin Firth, making the series my introduction to him, although I wouldn't realize this was important for about another twenty years. Ditto Derek Jacobi, though in his case I noticed sooner.
spinsters being, in Ferberville, by definition failures. As are wives if they’re too conventional. And women who sleep around if they sleep around too much.
What does being a not-failed woman look like in Ferber's world?
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A good Ferber woman is sexual but not slutty, good at domestic tasks but not too good - and not given to innovations like those weird recipes in women's magazines, like chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce. (I don't understand why chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce is supposed to strike fear into our hearts, but apparently it is.) She's possessed of a firm will but nonetheless capable of melting into tears when a good man's shoulder presents itself. She stands by her man and she never nags or complains.
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Dickon does not survive World War I in the 1987 adaptation, which on the one hand is not cool, but on the other I encountered so early that it doesn't produce a despairing response. (I had at least read the book first.) I recognize the problem here is that everyone runs into history as soon as the book is over, but Frances Hodgson Burnett didn't know that. It would be nice to have an OT3 dodge the overwhelming odds of the trenches for once, anyway.
(I don't understand why chocolate pudding with vanilla sauce is supposed to strike fear into our hearts, but apparently it is.)
I kind of feel like making some now, though. It's either that or set things on fire.
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Hahaha, oh no. Poor Dickon! That hardly seems fair.
But at least Colin got to live a good long while and then. . . maybe save some guys with his fishing boat? Saving some guys with a fishing boat is an ok way to close out a life.
Pansy Deleath has just gone to the Klondike with a troupe of dancing girls, and Ferber takes every opportunity to remind us how silly they are and how much better and more solid and less slutty Pansy looks by comparison. She may end up being Vaughn Melendy’s mistress for the next fifty years, but that’s because it’s TRUE LOVE, not for base mercenary gold-digging reasons like those ~other girls.
Why so judgmental, Edna Ferber? :( Oh, well.
Elena Ferrante is excellent but will eat your life and your heart.
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The UNFAIRNESS of everything in My Brilliant Friend is just eating away at me. Why can't Lila go to school too? She's so brilliant! She would make such good use of the opportunity! WHYYYYYYY.
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Incidentally, I'm about halfway through the Little Colonel series and waiting eagerly for your discussion thereof, if you decide to do it.
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