Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I Just Finished Reading

Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers, and How They Grew, in which a poor but honest an ever-cheerful family achieves the American dream through hard work and… well, honestly, mostly through being adopted en masse by a cranky rich man, who decides he wants all five children and their mother to live with him forever to bring cheer and joy into his loveless house and also entertain his son so he doesn’t have to.

Then it turns out they’re all cousins anyway, which seems like a somewhat random ending, although I suppose it does protect the Peppers from being turned out should the cranky rich man tire of them. And it seems like an appropriately treacly end to a book that was pretty treacly all through. But I’ve meant to read it for years so it’s nice to have that done and dusted.

What I’m Reading Now

The Penderwicks at Last! Which is the final Penderwicks book, which gives me mixed feelings, because on the one hand the Penderwicks deserves a proper conclusion, but on the other… no more Penderwicks books! What will I do??? Even among children’s authors these days, there are so few writing books so full of good cheer and happy times. ALL I WANT IS FUCKING PICNICS, AUTHORS. GIVE ME MY GODDAMN PICNICS.

I’m also still working on My Brilliant Career. I’m reading it on the computer at the library and described it to my library friend, who now asks me every time she sees me, “So does she have a career yet?” I am halfway through this book and Sybylla does not have so much as a ghost of a career.

She has just sort of accepted a marriage proposal, but only so that she break her suitor’s heart at the end of a three month secret probationary engagement she’s insisted they should have. Not that she doesn’t like him, you understand, she just doesn’t get why he asked her to marry him and this is her plan to deal with it. What?

I read on the Wikipedia page that Miles Franklin wrote this book when she was sixteen to amuse her friends, and I think that explains a lot about it.

What I Plan to Read Next

Oh God, I’ve got so many books from the library. So many. All my holds are streaming in all at the same time, and also people keep turning in books that I’m like “Oh hey, this looks like a fun read!”

There’s one called The Wisdom of Wolves: Lessons from the Sawtooth Pack that I’m super looking forward to. I love books about animal social dynamics; I feel like they’re often less bullshitty than books about human social dynamics (although sometimes they're bullshitty in their own special way).

Comments

[missroserose]

I read on the Wikipedia page that Miles Franklin wrote this book when she was sixteen to amuse her friends, and I think that explains a lot about it.

My immediate (if slightly snarky) thought is "Well, it certainly explains why the main character's name is 'Sybylla'. :)

[osprey_archer]

In a way it's rather nice to know that in some things sixteen-year-old girls are perennially the same, and one of those things is a love of unusual and euphonious names.

[missroserose]

Hah! This is true. :)

[evelyn_b]

Five Little Peppers! I ate that kind of plucky economical treacliness up with a spoon when I was a kid. There were a bunch more books after the first one, but I never read them because I wasn't interested in rich kids being treacly.

(The Boxcar Children did the same thing decades later - the plucky runaways were snapped up by their fabulously wealthy grandfather at the end of the first book, and all the books after had them being fabulously wealthy to an annoying degree. I wanted more cozy old-timey economies and fewer helicopter excursions).

Hah, My Brilliant Career sounds magical. One more for the neverending rec list!

[osprey_archer]

At least in the Boxcar Children he actually had some relation to them (that everyone knew about, rather than having it revealed in the last chapter) so it made sense when he adopted them. In Five Little Peppers it's just like WHAT.

The first Boxcar Children book is definitely the best, though. A few of the other early ones (the ones actually written by Gertrude Chandler Warner) are all right - I remember fondly the one with the coin collection - but they go rapidly downhill after that, and none of them ever reach such heights of emotion as the time Benny found a cup of his very own in the dump. Or the scene where they find blueberries. Or the bit where they find the boxcar!

[genarti]

Ha, yes, same! I enjoyed Five Little Peppers and How They Grew quite a bit as a kid. I suspect now I'd roll my eyes at it, even as I read to the end. But I had a very high treacle tolerance as a kid.

What offended me most about The Boxcar Children's sequels wasn't that they were fabulously wealthy -- there's that, but that was clearly wish fulfillment for them -- as that they'd genre-shifted out of being kids surviving on their own and into, like, plucky rich kids solving mysteries and so forth. I liked plucky groups of siblings solving mysteries, but I already read several series like that! I wanted orphans surviving by their wits in the wilderness! I'd happily have read about them, oh, repeatedly taking camping trips and reminiscing cheerily about the cup and how they learned to store milk in the stream and so forth, but at least the couple of sequels I happened to get my hands on didn't provide me with that.

[osprey_archer]

If only in the course of solving mysteries they had sometimes gotten lost in the wilderness and had to survive by their wits, that would have been an acceptable compromise. But no, it's all cozy mystery solving and no more SURVIVAL at all.

[genarti]

If only! I would have been totally up for that. But I was reading the Bobbsey Twins for cozy sibling mysteries and the Boxcar Children for SURVIVAL, and was very cranky about the genre bait-and-switch. Your proposed solution would have been an excellent way to have the wish-fulfillment ending of the happily-ever-after with the rich grandfather as well as the fun of the first book.

[osprey_archer]

Another thought: the Boxcar Children books really missed a trick when they didn't have any of those helicopter excursions end in a crash that stranded the children in the wilderness, so they had to survive by their wits as they made their way back to civilization. While also figuring out who sabotaged the helicopter, probably. We could have had mysteries AND plucky children surviving by their wits AND a rich grandfather to take them home for hot cocoa 'round a roaring fire after all the excitement is over.

[rachelmanija]

Mostly what I remember about Five Little Peppers is some mouth-watering accounts of jelly.

[osprey_archer]

You know, I don't actually remember any jelly in the book. There are some long discussions about raisins, though, and whether or not they have enough raisins to make a proper cake.

[rachelmanija]

Joel goes temporarily blind and gets a glass of red jelly?

[osprey_archer]

Polly goes temporarily blind, and then Joel gets the measles too and people send over good food; perhaps the jelly came in there? The part that stuck with me was the bit where they get A KNOB OF BUTTER and this is like the best thing that has ever happened to them, even though all the butter has to go to the sick children.

[conuly]

The Penderwicks at Last! Which is the final Penderwicks book, which gives me mixed feelings, because on the one hand the Penderwicks deserves a proper conclusion, but on the other… no more Penderwicks books! What will I do??? Even among children’s authors these days, there are so few writing books so full of good cheer and happy times. ALL I WANT IS FUCKING PICNICS, AUTHORS. GIVE ME MY GODDAMN PICNICS.

The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher. I don't think there are any picnics, but in the second book they DO camp out in a lighthouse.

The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street. Sweet enough to make your teeth ache.

[osprey_archer]

I do have The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street on my list! Which is ever growing, alas alas.

[conuly]

Read Family Fletcher first. For my money, it is, hands down, the best family novel written this century, even better than Year of the Dog (my previous fave).

[skygiants]

I read Five Little Peppers as a kid, and then got curious a few years back and read two of the Five Little Peppers sequels, which feature lots of depictions of all the Peppers rejoicing in their newfound wealth by being conspicuously and condescendingly charitable to all the other poor people around them, other rich people wishing they could adopt some Peppers because they're all just so charming, and eventually the rich man's son proposing to the Eldest Little Pepper while holding her mother's hand. Early American virtue signalling is so much!

[osprey_archer]

I strongly suspected Jasper would propose to Polly in the end, but it's good to hear that it really does happen! Not so much from a shipping standpoint, but because it's nice to have one's predictions proven correct.