Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The next two Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels, The Truth about Stacey and Mary Anne Saves the Day. You know, I read a lot of BSC back in the day, but I guess I never read any of the first few books in the series, so it’s been kind of delightful to meet my favorite old characters again in a new format in new-to-me stories.

I’ve also reread Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America as research for my next book - or rather the parts of it that are about the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair chapters and the murder chapters are quite separate: you can read one without the other. This book is so good at creating that “you are there” feeling that is so delicious in reading about history. I suppose the book would have been less of a success this way, but I wish he’d dropped the murder chapters entirely and filled the book with even more description of the fair: a fuller description of a performance at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a walk around the Algerian Village, more detail about the exhibits on view in the great white palaces.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Chimney-corner. During a chapter about public amusements (Stowe is in favor, and feels that church censoriousness tends to turn amusements that could be innocent into corrupting influences), Stowe talks a bit about public amusements in Germany, which people attend with “their faces radiant with that mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be characteristic of the nation.”

I’m always a little startled when 19th century people say this sort of thing (you can see it in Alcott, too, when she’s talking about Professor Bhaer); it’s so different than the 20th & 21st century ideas about Germany.

Other things this chapter taught me: Sunday school fetes and picnics (like the one Anne is so wild to attend in Anne of Green Gables were an innovation of the 1860s. Who knew? It strikes me that when we talk about “the nineteenth century,” at least in America, what we’re really talking about is the last half - even the last third of the nineteenth century, and the earlier part of it has quite a different character.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, which I’m enjoying more than the Bastables. (Sorry, Bastables.) The children have found a Psammead, a sand fairy, which has obligingly agreed to grant them one wish a day - now I know where Edward Eager got this structure!

I’ve also just begun Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress: A Story of the City Beautiful. This is research for my World’s Fair book - but it should be very pleasant research indeed! I can’t wait to find out what FHB made of the World’s Fair.

We haven’t gotten to the fair yet, though; right now the Two Pilgrims (Meg and Robin) are stuck at their Aunt Matilda’s farm, a large and successful operation that she manages on her own as a female farmer.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve discovered that my library has a copy of Dorothy Gilman’s A Nun in the Closet. Well, clearly my fate is sealed! I must read it!

Comments

[asakiyume]

I’m always a little startled when 19th century people say this sort of thing (you can see it in Alcott, too, when she’s talking about Professor Bhaer); it’s so different than the 20th & 21st century ideas about Germany. --Yeah! It's fascinating when outsiders' sense of national character does big switches. My dad is fond of pointing out that in Elizabethan days, the English had reputations as hotheads prone to violence and romance--all the stiff-upper-lip, press-those-feelings-down stuff came *later*.

[osprey_archer]

And the Spaniards were the dour ones who always wore black! No bright colors or manana about them in Elizabethan times.

[amaebi]

About two-thirds of the way through our time in Spain, a few yers ago, I suddenly remembered the stereotype of the "proud Spaniard." I have been boggling ever since-- nearly everyone was staggeringly kind.Even more than in Greece.

[kore]

I tried reading White City but the murder chapters put me off so much I couldn't finish it. I might try just the fair chapters again.

It strikes me that when we talk about “the nineteenth century,” at least in America, what we’re really talking about is the last half - even the last third of the nineteenth century, and the earlier part of it has quite a different character.

Oh yes.

[osprey_archer]

There are a couple of chapters where the fair stuff bleeds over into the murder chapters, but for the most part they're very much separated, and even when the fair stuff gets in the murder chapters it's away from the actual murder parts.

It occurs to me that "when people talk about such-and-such era they're generally talking about the last part of that era" is true for more than just the nineteenth century. When I look at pictures from my childhood, say, all the early-nineties stuff looks stereotypically eighties. It doesn't start looking "nineties" till like 1997.

[kore]

Oh yeah, you can REALLY see that happen with the sixties. Early sixties looks like a continuation of the fifties. Mid-sixties is starting to get mod. People don't start looking/dressing like "the sixties" until the late sixties and even mid-seventies. And yeah, the early nineties looked very eighties. Maybe it's the effect of "new year, new decade" having to sink in a while? Then again I've always thought 15 or even 20 years is a better measure of US culture than the decade.

[osprey_archer]

I once TAed a class about the sixties and one of the first assignments was "look at this college yearbook from 1961" and it was like every fifties cliche ever. The hourglass silhouettes! The general clean-cutness! The overwhelming heteronormativity!

t wasn't just that all the couples were het, but that it sometimes felt like heterosexual romance was all anyone ever did.

[kore]

Oh yeah EVERYONE is so gender conforming. And there really were nasty battles in the sixties/seventies about men wearing long hair, but you didn't really see women getting very short haircuts IIRC (unless it was to signal they were lesbians). Unless you were Mia Farrow or Twiggy. There are amazing photos in my sisters' yearbooks where every single girl has long straight or slightly wavy hair parted in the middle and worn past their shoulders. It's like a uniform. I almost couldn't pick them out.

[amaebi]

Robertson Davies has pointed out-- Maybe in A Voice from the Attic? maybe in A Mixture of Frailties?-- that up until the Great War USians and Canadians thought of Germans in terms of music and Goethe, and thus Romance.

One of the things I have to remember deliberately about all the United States up till railroads, and much/most of the US until well after the Civil War, how back-woodsy much of the living was, and with footpaths as the major means of transportation most places. Back then revival meetings were major evangelizing events, and very hoot-and-hollery they were, I gather.

Now I need to read FHB's Two Little Pilgrims' Progress-- it's one I own but haven't read, and I had no idea it was set at that World's Fair.

[osprey_archer]

It was weird for me to realize just how positive the pre-World War I view of Germany was in the US, because I'd read a good bit about anti-German sentiment in America after America joined the war in 1917 and I suppose I'd assumed (with no particular proof, mind; it just seemed logical) that there must have been pre-existing anti-German sentiment floating around that the war tapped into.

But if there was, it seems very much drowned out by enthusiastic pro-German "Germans are so good-hearted and home-loving and romantic and they make great music!" sentiments. It's disturbing to see how quickly World War I washed that all away.

[amaebi]

Well, there was this: The German historical school began modern Bible scholarship, treating scripture like documents that were written and revised, and a lot of the people who were to become Fundamentalists absolutely loathed them.

Say, six years ago I ran into Fundamentalist Protestants of today fulminating against the German historical school, and I'm still boggling that that persists at all.

[amaebi]

And here's what kayre is finding in the introduction to The Fundamentals: "“.. .some of the most powerful exponents of the modern Higher Critical theories have been Germans, and it is notorious to what length the German fancy can go in the direction of the subjective and the conjectural.... .. some of the most learned German thinkers are men who lack in a singular degree the faculty of common sense and knowledge of human nature."

[kore]

Yeah, and also Beethoven and Schiller and the German Enlightenment in general. IIRC that had a pretty big influence on the American Transcendentalists, so that's one reason in Little Women why Bhaer and Jo's father (modelled on Alcott's philosopher father) get along so well.

[kore]

....also, ooh, Robertson Davies, he's great.

[duskpeterson]

"The children have found a Psammead, a sand fairy, which has obligingly agreed to grant them one wish a day - now I know where Edward Eager got this structure!"

Yup. Eager is basically a rewrite of Nesbit. (Wait till you get to "The Magic City.") But he's so *good* that I don't mind at all. It's a tribute rather than a stealing, especially when his characters start gushing about Nesbit's books.

[osprey_archer]

I love that Edward Eager is so open in his admiration of other authors - Nesbit of course, but he references a number of other authors in his children's books. It's great.

[duskpeterson]

He's a total fanboy. :)

[technocracygirl]

Hi! I found you through random interest searching, and I wanted to let you know that I love your taste in books!

I just finished Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy by Anne Boyd Rideaux, about the lasting effects of Little Women, which has now motived me to re-read Alcott. And the other older books you mention are interesting too.

For whatever reason, the first book I read by Nesbot wasn't Five Children and It, but the sequel, The Story of the Amulet.

[osprey_archer]

Greetings! Always glad to see new people.

I read a lot of series out of order when I was a kid; I'm sure if I'd stumbled on Nesbit in the library I would have somehow started with the final book in one of her series. The first time I read Tamora Pierce's Alanna series, I started with the third book, and let me tell you, that is not a series where you can jump into book three.