Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vivien Alcock’s The Monster Garden would make a delightful anime. Our heroine, Frankie Stein (the name is an unsubtle hint at the books theme), gets a bit of primordial goo from her brother, which gets struck by lightning and begins to grow into a… well, a monster: that’s Frankie’s first reaction. It’s a strange, blob-like, gelid, red-eyed creature that grows at an alarmingly rapid rate.

And yet Frankie comes to love it, and see it as lovable and cute in its very strangeness, and there are a bunch of adorable scenes where she learns how to read its body language (when it’s happy, it sometimes forms its mouth into a figure eight, for instance) and watches it explore its environment. The book is in fact an answer to Frankenstein: “What would have happened if Frankenstein loved his monster?”

I also finished Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, which really hits its stride in its final chapter, when Gates offers his interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance as an attempt to push back against white supremacy through art and go some way to undoing the Redemption, in which white supremacists “redeemed” the South from Reconstruction by reinstituting white supremacy policies.

“Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture… There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.”

I suspect there’s a general human tendency (God knows you can see it in some of the sillier revolutionary pretensions of fandom) to believe that whatever we personally happen to be involved in is not merely important, but the most important thing there is. Gates’ summing up is a useful corrective to this tendency: “While all art, inevitably, is political, one cannot launch a political revolution through art alone.”

After watching Downton Abbey, I felt such enthusiasm that I snagged Jessica Fellowes’ murder mystery, The Mitford Murders, from the library. (Jessica Fellowes is the niece of Julian Fellowes, who created Downton Abbey.) Unfortunately, I found it rather a disappointment: most of the Mitfords are still children for most of the book and don’t seem to have grown into their personalities yet (mind, I don’t know a great deal about the Mitfords, but I know enough to know that they should all have personalities rather than just being an indistinguishable mass of children), and the mystery plot relies on too many coincidences. Won’t be continuing the series.

What I’m Reading Now

I could easily have finished William Dean Howells’ My Literary Passions, but I’ve actually slowed down reading it because I don’t want it to be over yet. Not only am I enjoying spending time with Howells, but his literary reminiscences have added a number of books to my Gutenberg list, too. Of course many of the books he talks about are classics that I was already aware of (Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens), but he also waxes lyrical about a few nineteenth century authors who are no longer widely read. I’m looking forward to trying out Ik Marvel’s Dream Life.

I’ve also been reading Paul Watkins’ Stand Before Your God: An American Schoolboy in England. Paul Watkins is the real name of Sam Eastland, author of the Inspector Pekkala books, and I am beginning to suspect that Watkins felt drawn to Stalinist Russia because its arbitrarily punitive atmosphere reminded him of the days of his youth in an English boarding school.

What I Plan to Read Next

Has anyone read Alys Clare’s The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits? I’ve been eyeing it thoughtfully at the library, but on the other hand I’m not sure I need another Victorian mystery series. The setting might invite unfair comparison to The Most Comfortable Man in London, a.k.a. the Charles Lenox mysteries.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I guess art falls into the necessary-but-not-sufficient category in human existence. We *need* art, but art alone isn't going to do it for us--and you can replace "it" with "sustaining life" or "achieving freedom" or probably bunches of other things.

Revolutions are always going to require hard, awful work--a daunting reality that gets less daunting the more hard and awful the circumstance necessitating the revolution is.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think art is an important part of revolution (and also of reform movements, and really any kind of movement for change) - it's a way to sell the idea of making changes to people The mistake lies in thinking that art alone is *enough*.

Although i think if you point at any one kind of change, none of them are going to be enough on their own. If homosexuality is legalized somewhere but it's still considered too risque to put even same-sex hand-holding on TV, say, that's still a place where some changes need to be made. Lots of things need to change in tandem to really change a society.

[asakiyume]

Absolutely! I started writing something along those lines but got lost in all my caveats and examples and concessives and cut it all out. Yeah: there are all kinds of things that not only contribute but may actually be necessary, even if their necessity isn't clearly realized (or even hazily realized). The thing I'm thinking of is cannabis: how people isolated out THC as the hallucinogen and DBZ as a healing agent, but the complete experience of using the plant-as-plant is more something for people than either chemical thing's effect. Or to take a less contentious example, a meal is more than just X units of protein, carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins. There's how it's cooked, there are the circumstances in which it's eaten, there's the company in which it's eaten--all that.

[osprey_archer]

Yes! I've read that people actually digest their food better - absorbing more calories & vitamins etc. from it - if they enjoy eating it, or if they're in good company when they eat it even if the food isn't that great.

[troisoiseaux]

I haven't read The Mitford Murders, but I've read Nancy Mitford's real-life-with-the-serial-numbers-barely-filed-off novels and Jessica Mitford's memoir, and there is certainly not a dearth of personalities in that family.

[osprey_archer]

My impression is that they're ALL raging eccentrics, and I feel that this should show up even when they're eight years old.

[maplemood]

“While all art, inevitably, is political, one cannot launch a political revolution through art alone.”

YES. I love this quote.

[osprey_archer]

It's pithy, isn't it? I feel like I should put it on Tumblr (with attribution obvs) but I feel like the people who need to see it will not understand it.

[thisbluespirit]

I can't remember if I ever read any Vivian Alcock (I think I did once and found it opaque and confusing), but I used to look at them curiously a lot growing up and wonder if I would like them if I found the courage, but I think the opaque one put my off. The Monster Garden sounds rather great, though.

(I was a very nervous young reader. I mainly stuck to Enid Blyton and then one day I read a marvellous book called I LIke This Story by the legendary Puffin editor Kaye Webb, which was just a collection of extracts from 50 children's books and then further recommendations by Kaye Webb for other books I might like if I liked those and I followed up those leads like it was the Book Bible and I have no regrets. But I don't think there was a Vivian Alcock extract, although she might have been in the recommendations which was why I was curious.)

[osprey_archer]

Every once in a while I'll read a book that I looked at a lot when I was a kid but for some reason never picked up, and sometimes it's fine that I waited and sometimes I'm like "Damn, I should have read that when I was ten," and sometimes I'm like "Ten-year-old me was right, why did I bother reading that at all?"