Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Little’s The Lady and Sada San, a sequel to The Lady of the Decoration, in which the Lady returns to Japan for complicated plot reasons and, on the voyage, befriends young Sada - who is the product of a mixed-race marriage between an American man and his Japanese bride, who unfortunately were washed away in a tidal wave when Sada was but a babe, so she was raised in Nebraska by a missionary lady (who found baby Sada in the ruins of her washed-away village in Japan, but had to move back to Nebraska because of her own failing health).

Now Sada is returning to the beautiful land of her birth, confident that all shall be well! You have probably read enough fiction to guess that it will not be so simple.

So if anyone ever wants to write a novel with a mixed-race white & Japanese heroine in the deepest Midwest in 1911 - you can now point to this book as an unimpeachable source if anyone complains about your historical accuracy.

What I’m Reading Now

I meant to save Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven for later, on the grounds that one shouldn’t binge read a new favorite author’s entire oeuvre and then be left without anything else by that author to read (I did this with Jane Austen when I was a teenager, oops) buuuuut then I went to the library and it was in and I just couldn’t resist. It’s not grabbing me quite as much as his other books - the man-versus-nature aspect is what really got me in his other books and that’s not really present here - but Krakauer is still Krakauer and it’s still fascinating.

William Dean Howells Venetian Life, a travel book about Venice - where Howells was American consul during the Civil War - and Howells’ first book. The writing doesn’t flow as well as his later books, either because it is his first or possibly because long, ornate, multi-clausal sentences became less fashionable as the nineteenth century wore on. In any case I’m finding it rather slow going - but vivid - his description of the Venetian winters made me shiver. (And it seems the stereotype of the comfort-loving American who is baffled by the poor heating in other lands was already in place by the 1860s.)

I’m also working on Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby, but sloooowly. For whatever reason it’s just not grabbing me.

What I Plan to Read Next

Will the library ever get me Fire and Hemlock? WHO KNOWS. I had better start haunting used bookstores in quest of it, I think.

I have also discovered that American Girl has a new series out, set in Hawaii in 1941, but they have broken my heart TOO MANY TIMES and I am reluctant to read it.

Comments

[isis]

If you haven't yet read Krakauer's Where Men Win Glory I strongly recommend it, even if you (like me) are indifferent to football. It's more about war, anyway, and about politicians who deliberately mislead the public.

[thisbluespirit]

Will the library ever get me Fire and Hemlock? WHO KNOWS. I had better start haunting used bookstores in quest of it, I think.

I realise that this is annoying for you, but it seems perfectly appropriate for F&H.

[sovay]

So if anyone ever wants to write a novel with a mixed-race white & Japanese heroine in the deepest Midwest in 1911 - you can now point to this book as an unimpeachable source if anyone complains about your historical accuracy.

I really like this thing where you review books in genres I didn't know existed at the time.

[evelyn_b]

The new American Girl book better have pictures, at least! I'm still reeling from the (old) news that they put out a book without them. :( >:(

Those Frances Little books sound amazing, and I will definitely check them out if I ever decide to do Emily Byrd Starr-goes-to-Japan fic (and probably even if I don't).

National stereotypes can be pretty durable! It would be a good project for some enterprising popular historian to grab up a bunch of sources and see how they evolve or don't.