Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Matt Phelan’s Snow White: A Graphic Novel, a stylishly gothic retelling set in 1930s New York City. Did I love it? Of course I loved it. Everything about that description is made for me.

Snow White is the daughter of a financier; her stepmother is a Ziegfield girl; the seven dwarves are orphaned street urchins, and the glass coffin is the Macy’s department store window, which the street urchins sneak Snow into as, I think, a way of honoring this girl who has been so nice to them.

But of course she turns out not to be dead. As a nod to the original fairy tale, a police detective kisses her cheek, but as there’s been no magic so far, probably the stepmother just miscalculated the dosage when she injected the poison into an apple with a hypodermic needle. And then Snow uses the fortune she inherited from her father to adopt all seven of the urchins. Happy end!

And I dived back into the world of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax with The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax and A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, the latter of which includes the delightful and characteristic line “Her knowledge of army hierarchies had never been very clear and it had always seemed to her that generals tended to multiply like corporative vice-presidents or rabbits.”

Oh! And I read Mary Stewart’s The Little Broomstick, because I was puzzled that I found the recent movie adaptation (Mary and the Witch’s Flower) so underwhelming, because most of Mary Stewart’s work feels like it would be really easy to adapt to a movie. The plots of the book and movie are quite similar - the movie gives Mary’s new friend Peter a bigger role, because of course it does; movies always beef up the boy’s role - but the movie raises the stakes for a big flashy climax, and the book plot that is perfectly serviceable for lower stakes buckles under the strain.

What I’m Reading Now

Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, per evelyn_b’s suggestion. This is an anti-racist novel from 1901 (Chesnutt was an African-American author and lawyer, in case you were wondering) and I am therefore waiting braced for everyone to suffer horribly. There was just a lovefest between Mammy Jane and her former masters, which ended with Mrs. Carteret gushing “We would share our last crust with you,” so I’m pretty much expecting the Carterets to throw poor Jane over and leave her to die in the poor house by the end of the book.

I’ve also begun Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which I tried to read in high school but gave up because it felt so despairing. This time around, it no longer feels like a pit of despair - or maybe I just haven’t gotten to the despair part yet? Will share further thoughts once I’ve finished reading it.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Christmas season is almost upon us! As per thisbluespirit’s instructions, it’s time to put Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch on hold.

Comments

[ancientreader]

Oh, gosh, Charles Chesnutt! I haven't read him extensively but I did do a great deal of skimming in connection with a recent work project; it struck me that he had a remarkably sharp tongue and that he didn't often turn it loose. I noted a couple of lines I especially liked, one from The Marrow of Tradition: "In early life Mrs. Ochiltree had been accustomed to impale fools on epigrams, like flies on pins, to see them wriggle." Another, I found in The Conjure Woman: "My wife and I were seated on the front piazza, she wearily but conscientiously ploughing through a missionary report, while I followed the impossible career of the blonde heroine of a rudimentary novel." "A rudimentary novel," isn't that just great? I also read a couple of the stories in The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line, and those I found leaden -- "worthy," pious. It feels wrong to criticize that quality -- it seems so obvious why he would feel the need to take a serious and humorless tone -- but, speaking at least for myself: how grateful I would have been to read more of his writing in which he deployed that sharp wit. At least as far as I can make out from his Wikipedia entry, it doesn't seem as if his correspondence has been collected -- I wonder what he sounded like when he wrote to friends.

[osprey_archer]

I've noticed that some authors who write perfectly competent novels have trouble in the short story format, often for the very reason you mention - the short stories seem moralistic in a way that their novels don't, perhaps because the novels give them more space to work out their moral ideas? And when they try to cram the same amount of moral thought into a short story, the whole thing becomes top heavy.

Of course, now that I've written this, I can't think of an example author off the top of my head. But I know I have seen it elsewhere.

[marycatelli]

Novels are not only longer but thicker than short stories. It affects things