Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 11th, 2019 07:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition would make an amazing addition to an interdisciplinary course in history and literature. It’s both a good novel and a good social tract - a rare combination! - an interesting story (actually, several intertwining stories, to better cover the many facets of society in the Virginia town of Wellington) peopled by three-dimensional characters, which also serves to demonstrate the whys and hows of white supremacy’s resurgence in the south after the end of Reconstruction.
The ending sequence, in which a race riot engulfs Wellington, is particularly excellent: tense, frightening, chaotic, a whirlwind that swiftly grows beyond the control of its instigators but will nonetheless serve their ends. It leads to a confrontation between Mrs. Carteret, the daughter of a white plantation owner, and her hitherto unacknowledged half-black half-sister Janet Miller, which… well, I won’t spoil it, but it’s stunning.
I also finished Marie Brennan’s Turning Darkness into Light, which after a somewhat slow start (I feel this way about a lot of Brennan’s books) built to a VERY satisfying crescendo, although Lord Glenleigh’s title for the ancient Draconean epic, The Draconeia, is WAY better than Audrey’s Turning Darkness into Light, even if Lord Glenleigh is the Actual Worst. Or actually the third worst, but only because there’s so much competition for worst.
It would have made a better title for this book, too. Turning Darkness into Light is way too generic.
One thing I love about Brennan’s work - this is true of the Lady Trent books, too - is how engaged they are with the process of scholarship, the intricacies and the pleasures of research, that beautiful Eureka! moment when everything clicks into place but also the enormous amount of groundwork that has to be laid before that moment can occur.
A lot of books, even books supposedly about scholars, don’t delve into this topic. I suspect it’s very hard to write, not least because you’ve got to do all of that research yourself or else make up an imaginary subject for your characters to research, which in the end would be almost as much work. And then, of course, you’ve got to parcel all that information out so that the reader is always hungry for more. But Brennan does it very well.
Oh, and I read Hope Larson’s All Summer Long, a graphic novel about a girl’s summer in between seventh and eighth grade, as she navigates changing friendships and delves deeper into her love of music. Sweet! I enjoyed it.
What I’m Reading Now
Thanhha Lai’s Butterfly Yellow is told in alternating POV’s, and at first I didn’t get the point of including LeeRoy the wannabe cowboy who has never actually ridden a horse when clearly Hang, the Vietnamese refugee who is searching for her brother who was brought to the US as an orphan years ago, has a much more interesting story. But then I realized that LeeRoy is like, oh, the whipped cream that you eat with an exceptionally rich flourless chocolate cake. The cake is amazing, but you could eat a bite or two at a time without the whipped cream to cut the intensity.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve just realized that the first four Newbery Honor books are all available on Gutenberg (all the later ones are still under copyright in the US, because American copyright law is The Worst), and now they are all on my Kindle.
Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition would make an amazing addition to an interdisciplinary course in history and literature. It’s both a good novel and a good social tract - a rare combination! - an interesting story (actually, several intertwining stories, to better cover the many facets of society in the Virginia town of Wellington) peopled by three-dimensional characters, which also serves to demonstrate the whys and hows of white supremacy’s resurgence in the south after the end of Reconstruction.
The ending sequence, in which a race riot engulfs Wellington, is particularly excellent: tense, frightening, chaotic, a whirlwind that swiftly grows beyond the control of its instigators but will nonetheless serve their ends. It leads to a confrontation between Mrs. Carteret, the daughter of a white plantation owner, and her hitherto unacknowledged half-black half-sister Janet Miller, which… well, I won’t spoil it, but it’s stunning.
I also finished Marie Brennan’s Turning Darkness into Light, which after a somewhat slow start (I feel this way about a lot of Brennan’s books) built to a VERY satisfying crescendo, although Lord Glenleigh’s title for the ancient Draconean epic, The Draconeia, is WAY better than Audrey’s Turning Darkness into Light, even if Lord Glenleigh is the Actual Worst. Or actually the third worst, but only because there’s so much competition for worst.
It would have made a better title for this book, too. Turning Darkness into Light is way too generic.
One thing I love about Brennan’s work - this is true of the Lady Trent books, too - is how engaged they are with the process of scholarship, the intricacies and the pleasures of research, that beautiful Eureka! moment when everything clicks into place but also the enormous amount of groundwork that has to be laid before that moment can occur.
A lot of books, even books supposedly about scholars, don’t delve into this topic. I suspect it’s very hard to write, not least because you’ve got to do all of that research yourself or else make up an imaginary subject for your characters to research, which in the end would be almost as much work. And then, of course, you’ve got to parcel all that information out so that the reader is always hungry for more. But Brennan does it very well.
Oh, and I read Hope Larson’s All Summer Long, a graphic novel about a girl’s summer in between seventh and eighth grade, as she navigates changing friendships and delves deeper into her love of music. Sweet! I enjoyed it.
What I’m Reading Now
Thanhha Lai’s Butterfly Yellow is told in alternating POV’s, and at first I didn’t get the point of including LeeRoy the wannabe cowboy who has never actually ridden a horse when clearly Hang, the Vietnamese refugee who is searching for her brother who was brought to the US as an orphan years ago, has a much more interesting story. But then I realized that LeeRoy is like, oh, the whipped cream that you eat with an exceptionally rich flourless chocolate cake. The cake is amazing, but you could eat a bite or two at a time without the whipped cream to cut the intensity.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve just realized that the first four Newbery Honor books are all available on Gutenberg (all the later ones are still under copyright in the US, because American copyright law is The Worst), and now they are all on my Kindle.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-11 03:31 pm (UTC)Looking forward to reading about the first four Newbery Honor books, too.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-12 04:05 pm (UTC)I've begun to first of the 1922 Newbery Honor books and it features a small boy smoking magical Chinese tobacco to summon a sailorman who I THINK is going to be kind of like a genie. I think this is all peak 1922.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-12 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-12 04:54 pm (UTC)There's also a hunchback! He's the guy who runs the tobacco shop, who meets our small hero (Freddy) when he tells Freddy that the cigar store statue, which is a statue of a hunchback, sometimes snatches little boys and carries them up to the church tower to eat them. Somehow this leads to Freddy and the tobacco store man becoming friends.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-11 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-12 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-11 04:59 pm (UTC)the first four Newbery Honor books are all available on Gutenberg
Hoo boy, I wonder how many dogges make it out alive.
Also, some NB not on Gutenberg may be available here? https://www.fadedpage.com/index.php
no subject
Date: 2019-12-12 04:11 pm (UTC)I just looked it up and it turns out that Old Yellow is both a Disney film AND a Newbery Honor book. I have so far avoided reading it for my entire life but I guess this means I can no longer escape.
I checked Faded Page for the next year after 1922 that had honor books (1925) and they didn't have either of them, but I haven't done a complete search for all of the twenties. In general getting my hands on the older-but-not-out-of-copyright Honor books may be... tricky.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-12 04:19 pm (UTC)In general getting my hands on the older-but-not-out-of-copyright Honor books may be... tricky.
Yeah, I think that's a lot of books fallen into a kind of limbo -- they're not digitized (so they don't show up on Google engram stuff either) but they're OOP, so they're inaccessible.