Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“Last year I saw three migrating Canada geese flying low over the frozen duck pond where I stood. I heard a heart-stopping blast of speed before I saw them; I felt the flayed air slap at my face.”

Guess who finished Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek? Me! Me! Me! It remains to be seen whether it was worth wading through it, but at least it is DONE.

I also read Bill Geist’s Lake of the Ozarks: My Surreal Summers in a Vanishing America, which is a fun, fairly breezy memoir about the summers of his youth that he spent working at a hotel by the Lake of the Ozarks. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing: it’s at its best when describing the shenanigans the young seasonal hotel employees got up to.

And I reread Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, on the theory that it might give me some good food details for Honeytrap. It did not (there’s surprisingly little description of actual food), but it was a salutary reminder that the 1950s, for all that they have crystallized in the national memory as a time of stasis (depending on your views, either a golden age or a hell hole), were actually just as complicated and contradictory as any other time and probably only seemed calm in comparison to the massive cultural changes of the sixties.

It also occurred to me that I’m trying to hit notes of both golden age and hell hole in Honeytrap, which perhaps accurately reflects the complicated nature of history but also may be a tall order to pull off.

What I’m Reading Now

On skygiants’ recommendation, I’ve been reading Barbara Michaels’ Someone in the House, the first quarter of which is pretty much a description of an idyllic summer at an English manor that has been transported to America for Reasons (Reasons being Rich People), which has now given way to - well, I think it’s a succubus. We’ll see! Enjoying it so far.

And I’ve begun In the Fifth at Malory Towers! Darrell and company seem to be a little bit drunk on the power of being fifth-formers, capable of handing down any punishment they please to the tykes of the lower forms (I know British schools really ran this way, but… they really ran this way???? I suppose if your goal is to train the young to exercise arbitrary power and social prestige, it probably makes sense), but I am looking forward to the play they’re going to put on. And Mademoiselle’s trick!

What I Plan to Read Next

It turns out that Barbara Michaels is a pseudonym for Elizabeth Peters, who wrote the Amelia Peabody series, (I believe I knew this at one point but it had slipped my mind), so there’s another possibility for a new mystery series to read!

She also wrote the Vicky Bliss series, which is lesser-known but features a professor of art history who investigates international art crime AND ALSO a charming art thief (I’m picturing the Cary Elwes character from Psych, but that might be setting myself up for disappointment) which is EVEN MORE up my alley and also shorter, so I might start with that series instead.

Comments

[kore]

There was one of those giant pop-historical books called The Fifties by....I want to say Halberstam? a while ago, which had many of the flaws of that genre, but it impressed me by how much of the fifties was actually revolutionary, and how a lot of that had been suppressed by the Boomer myths of "the culture was in stasis until we came along" (never mind that a lot of "the sixties" in popular history really started in about, say, 1970 or possibly later). (Or stuff like how frex Kennedy's famous televised funreal was clearly based on Roosevelt's. Which was based on Lincoln's, right? ANYWAY.)

a professor of art history who investigates international art crime AND ALSO a charming art thief

OOOH I'm looking for more sickbed reading so this sounds good!

[osprey_archer]

Yes, a LOT of the big changes in the sixties built on groundwork that had already been laid in the fifties. One of the examples Shapiro uses is The Feminine Mystique: she argues essentially that it found such a receptive audience because it caught a wave that was already cresting, because the number of middle-class women working had actually been climbing throughout the fifties (the great migration back home to the kitchen only lasted two years after World War II) and Friedan distilled their experiences into clear vibrant prose.

As I haven't actually read any of the Vicky Bliss books I can't precisely rec them, but with the art historian and the art thief don't come together for a good story then that's a truly criminal waste of materials.

[oracne]

The Vicky Bliss books are my favorites of hers.

[osprey_archer]

It's hard to see how she could go wrong with an art historian and an art thief.

[taelle]

Elizabeth Peters (her actual name was Barbara Mertz) also wrote the Jacqueline Kirby series which feature a librarian who becomes romance novelist. I think I read the one where she goes to a romance writers' convention and it was rather entertaining.

[osprey_archer]

I'm planning to check out Vicky Bliss first, but if I get hooked on her writing it's certainly not a bad thing to have a back up series waiting in the wings... Although there are six Vicky Blisses so that ought to keep me going for a while.

[conuly]

I think the goal of running schools this way was to do it on the cheap, and all that other justification came later.

[osprey_archer]

I mean, clearly they didn't mind if this was a side effect of running the school on the cheap.

[conuly]

Misery builds character. (And if everybody suffers together, you can convince them that they liked it!)

[ancientreader]

If you're looking specifically for food/cooking details, what about an old edition of "Joy of Cooking," or the "Betty Crocker Cookbook"? God, I wish I had the cookbook that was in my house growing up, with its advice on choosing cuts of meat and so forth. I can't remember the title but it was absolutely a 1950s item and would have been a valuable source for the era's foodways.

ETA: I couldn't resist seeing what 1950-1960 cookbooks the Internet Archive had available. Even if it's unhelpful for "Honeytrap," this is a trip: https://archive.org/details/foodatyourfinger00comp. Supposedly for blind/visually impaired people, but that doesn't matter, and the food stains are ... telling.

[osprey_archer]

I'm looking for something like a food memoir - like Della Lutes' Country Kitchens, except for the 1950s instead of 1870s Michigan. I have faith that it's out there somewhere, despite the 50s reputation as something of a culinary wasteland: you just know there's someone who wants to reminisce about what people were eating when they ignored the weird Jell-O options.

[ancientreader]

Well. I just finished a fun but taxing work project, and a certain bloodhoundiness is creeping into me; will you feel impinged on if I poke around and present you with any finds that seem likely? Fend me off sternly if so, I shan't mind.

[osprey_archer]

You can, although you should probably go into it with the understanding that I may cry "I have so many Russian fairy tales/food memoirs/works of great literature to read! The stack is already teetering! If I add any more books it will tumble like a reverse tower of Jenga!"

[asakiyume]

I am in awe of your Pilgrim at Tinker Creek finishing.

[osprey_archer]

So am I, to be perfectly honest! It felt like it would never happen but it slogged through. Will it add something ineffable to the leaf-mold of my mind over time? We'll see.