Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Jennifer L. Holm’s Penny from Heaven was my favorite of Jennifer L. Holm’s Newbery Honor-winning books based loosely on her family history (she seems to have founded her own tiny subgenre), until the main character, Penny, got her arm caught in a wringer, which chewed through it all the way up to the shoulder, and nearly left her permanently maimed. We have a couple of chapters of “probably permanently maimed,” and then it turns out that Penny is… only semi-maimed, I guess? She regains some motion in her arm, but given that the whole darn thing got chewed up by the wringer, I’m sure there are going to be some long-lasting effects.

I realize that wringer accidents were an actual thing that actually happened and really did chew up kids’ arms. But it doesn’t make for enjoyable reading, and it’s not like the book was short on heavy material beforehand: we’ve got Penny’s dead father, who died in Mysterious Circumstances, her older relatives’ grief over losses sustained in World War II, etc., it’s just that those are balanced out by Penny’s friendship with her cousin Frankie and enormous meals with the Italian side of the family. The wringer injury tips the balance toward Heavy.



Audrey Coloumbis’s Getting Near to Baby is also pretty heavy. I strongly suspect this is another book about children that is actually for adults. There’s a sequence where the neighbor girl shows Willa Jo and Little Sister the underground tunnel she dug with her brothers, which is a proper hideout and would surely appeal to any child - but other than that, there’s not a lot here that I think I would have enjoyed as a kid, although as an adult I can see that some of the writing is lovely.

I also finished Caitlin Fitz’s Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions, a nonfiction book that suffers from the flaw of many nonfiction book: this would have made an excellent article and a pretty good short book, but because of the demands of publishing it’s a full-size book, and there are really only so many ways that you can say “US Americans in the early 19th century were enormously enthusiastic about South American revolutions, in which they saw a reflection of their own revolution, until in 1826 southern Congressman whipped up a frenzy about the racial identity and abolitionist tendencies of the South American revolutions, at which point enthusiasm faded.”

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Elizabeth Peters’ The Mummy Case! I missed this series while I couldn’t get any books from the library. It’s nice to finally have the next book to be getting on with. (I must say that I find Amelia’s son Ramses irritatingly precocious, but maybe that will change as he gets older over the course of the books.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I may slow down on the Newbery Honor books once I finish the books of the 2000s (of which there are… seven more… how can there still be seven left? I’ve read so many!), or at least on the physical books. The ebooks are so convenient to read while I’m playing Island Experiment…

In fact I went through the library catalog and wrote down all the Newbery Honor books that are available as ebooks. The oldest one available is Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived before Achilles, from 1922, so I guess I didn’t need to get that from Project Gutenberg after all… but who would have expected the library to have an ebook of a book published in 1922!

The most recent Newbery Honor book that the library does not have in the catalog at all, even in one of the shared system school libraries, are the three Honor books from 1970, Mary Q. Steele’s Journey Outside, Sulamith Ish-Kashor’s Our Eddie, and Janet Gaylord Moore’s The Many Ways of Seeing: An Invitation to the Pleasures of Art.

1970 must be some kind of internal cut-off date in the library, because there are a whole lot of pre-1970 Newbery Honor books that the library doesn’t have in any capacity. Once I get to that point, I’ll have to decide if I care about this project enough to interlibrary loan them all… but that is many books away, so I won’t worry about that for a while yet.

Comments

[kore]

-- Wait I think I REMEMBER that book. Altho I may be conflating it with an actual story of my dad's about how one of his cousins lost a couple of fingers to a wringer, and how freaked out he was after that watching his mother work hers. He made it sound like something out of Stephen King. WRINGER HUNGRY FOR APPENDAGES MUNCHMUNCH HA HA.

I dunno about 1970, but I think 1976 was the year of the big renewal of US copyright law? I don't know exactly how it would have affected library ebooks that were physically published prior to that, though. //helpful


ETA This might partly explain it for libraries? https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-1923-1964


Apparently lots of books published before 1964 didn't have their second copyrights renewed -- you had to send in a form and a lot of people (even publishers? bzuh. I guess it had to be the author) didn't know about it or didn't bother. A lot of stories published in magazines didn't have their copyrights renewed, but nobody knew exactly how many books hadn't been renewed. The LoC actually published books listing copyright registrations and renewals, which had been scanned but weren't machine-readable so they couldn't be counted in bulk. Then later the digitized records were //wizard did it handwave handwave made machine-readable, so all of a sudden it was possible for people to search for records of books that had been registered originally but not renewed. But post-1974, I think what happened was the renewal was automatic, and so much for that.

(Sorry if you know any/all of this already! I was just curious....)

[sovay]

Altho I may be conflating it with an actual story of my dad's about how one of his cousins lost a couple of fingers to a wringer, and how freaked out he was after that watching his mother work hers.

My grandmother lost no appendages to her wringer, but she did once get slightly bitten by it, which prompted my grandfather to create the following song to cheer and distract her: "My Bunny got caught in the wringer / My Bunny her finger did squash / My Bunny did wringer her finger / But it will come out in the wash / Wring back, wring back / Oh, wring back my Bunny to me, to me . . ."

[kore]

AHAHAHAH I like your grandfather.

[sovay]

AHAHAHAH I like your grandfather.

I was fortunate in my grandparents.

[kore]

Mine all died kind of early-for-me (one before I was born), because I had Aged Parents. :-/

[sovay]

Mine all died kind of early-for-me (one before I was born), because I had Aged Parents.

I only ever mean my mother's parents when I say my grandparents. My father's mother died when I was twelve—I had met her once under controlled circumstances—and my father's father died in 1962.

[osprey_archer]

No, I think 1970 is a library-specific date, like maybe they try to keep at least one copy of each Newbery Honor in the system for fifty years, but anything earlier than that is fair game to be weeded out. It was just very striking that they had at least one copy (these are mostly physical copies, not ebooks) back until 1970... and then none of the 1970s Newbery Honor books, and everything earlier than that is quite sporadic.

Penny from Heaven came out in 2007. Do you think it's likely that you read it after that?

[rachelmanija]

I realize that wringer accidents were an actual thing that actually happened and really did chew up kids’ arms.

I feel like this sentence should not have made me laugh quite so much as it did.

You forgot to mention that the reason they want to get near to Baby in Getting Near to Baby is that Baby is in the wringer DEAD.

[osprey_archer]

Just because you CAN throw in a wringer accident doesn't mean you SHOULD. A lesson to authors everywhere!

I think at this point I just assumed that anyone could guess Baby is dead just by looking at the cover. The grayscale pencil girls! The flat black line beneath them! Obviously someone has died up in here.

[evelyn_b]

I loved a lot of the heavy stuff as a kid - historical maimings, angry foster kids, racial tensions ruining everything (though I also had a grudge against Katherine Paterson because Jacob Have I Loved was TOO SAD), so I might have enjoyed a book where life's a bitch and then you get your arm mangled in a wringer.

You might pare it down to one or two a year if you want to keep going with Newberry Honor books - I'm looking at a list right now and there are A LOT. Sometimes four in a year, but some years in the thirties they just gave up and named EIGHT.

I loved The Tombs of Atuan, though it is a little spooky and sad (a lot), and The Black Cauldron is quality middle-grade fantasy in a perkier key. Once you get down into the 50s and below, there's tons of fascinating-looking stuff I've never heard of. And, of course, the life-changing masterpiece that is The Old Tobacco Shop

[osprey_archer]

I too read many books about historical tragedy ("hiding from the Nazis during the Holocaust" was my very favorite genre for at least two years), but there's sad and there's SAD, I guess, because I too thought Jacob Have I Loved was TOO SAD. (I felt this way about Katherine Paterson's books Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins, too. Then I wised up and stopped reading Katherine Paterson.) I always felt Paterson was trying to teach me a lesson about How Hard Life Is, and I didn't want to learn it.

I read The Black Cauldron! (And in fact, I just recently watched the movie version, which is quite different.) I remember being VERY STARTLED when the guy who had been kind of a jerk for the whole book ended up saving the day by sacrificing himself, like, where did THAT come from?? Have not yet read The Tombs of Atuan, because when I was twelve one of my friends gave me A Wizard of Earthsea and I bounced off it real hard, but maybe I'll feel differently about Le Guin's writing now. I did love Catwings when I was young...

The Newbery committee in the thirties was clearly VERY indecisive, because some of those Newbery Honor lists are just excessive. And it carried over at least a little till the 1950s - couldn't they pick just ONE Meindert De Jong book to receive a Newbery Honor in 1954??

[evelyn_b]

Paterson is an interesting writer. The books that I've read of hers are so thorny and kind of inconclusive, in a way you really don't expect when reading kid's lit. Besides the two you mentioned, there was one about a white kid who gets sent to live with relatives he doesn't know and meets his Vietnamese half-sister - and I don't remember what happened, but I do remember it was messy.

The miserable persistent way that everyone in her life casually betrays and ignores the neglected twin in Jacob Have I Loved, and no one ever has the slightest interest in her whining about it and it never gets any better, and then she grows up and thinks she's made a new life for herself as a midwife but then she delivers twins and it's the EXACT SAME STORY AS BEFORE ONLY STARTING OVER AGAIN - idk, it was too much. I'm sure it was an important story for many people, but bb me just felt like Katherine Paterson was trying to MURDER MY SOUL and my only defense was to hate her.

The Black Cauldron definitely has its own logic, which I think is not quite the logic of adult readers. Tombs (and LeGuin in general?) probably isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it might be worth revisiting! The guy from A Wizard of Earthsea turns up, but I expect it'll make just as much sense if you don't reread Wizard.

The committee does seem to go to the same authors a lot. I like that Laura Ingalls Wilder books got Honored a bunch of years in a row, but then The First Four Years was snubbed, as it deserved to be.

Oh! Meindert De Jong wrote The Wheel on the School! That's one of those books that made a big impression on me because I saw them every time I went to the library, but never actually read.

[osprey_archer]

I was probably Part of the Problem when I read Jacob Have I Loved, because I, like the characters in the book, ignored the neglected twin's suffering because I was so annoyed by her whining. We got to the part where the boy she likes marries her sister and I was all "Well, what did you expect, neglected twin? Of course he prefers your sister! She doesn't whine all the time!"

I was a wee lassie when my mother read us The Black Cauldron, so I think the problem was not I was too old for the logic of the story, but that I'd never before encountered this Sydney-Carton-esque storyline where the bad character Redeems Himself through sacrifice, and I wasn't sure what to make of it. Little!me was not sure that was a legal move in the storytelling game.

Poor Laura Ingalls Wilder! The always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride of the Newbery Award. But her books are better remembered than many that did win, so I suppose she has the last laugh. (Also, IIRC The First Four Years was published posthumously, which is probably why it's rougher than all the other books.)

I did read The Wheel on the School! ...but the only thing I remember is that there are storks involved.

[evelyn_b]

Oh man, I was so mad when what's-his-name married the pretty twin! Dude! Did you ever even hang out? And he was such a dork; it was so clear they were going to be dorks together, but nope, surprise, he's just as much a sucker for the plucky delicate golden child as everyone else on earth. >X(

The weird island setting of Jacob Have I Loved made an impression on me, though. It was so different from what I was used to that I'm not sure I completely understood what was going on.

Aw, baby's first Sidney Carton! I can't remember what the first bad-guy-redeems himself story I- WAIT NO OF COURSE I DO, it was Darth Vader.

It looks like number of the Honor books are more well-known than the medalists, at least within the narrow field of "stuff I've heard of."

[osprey_archer]

I remember the island too! Not anything specific about the island, just - the island. There's just something about a book set on an island, I guess.

My highly scientific opinion is that the best books often get Newbery Honors rather than winning the big medal. I'm not entirely sure why. Of course it might just be an artifact of the fact that there are so many more Honor books than medalists, so there's just that much more likelihood that one of them will be remembered.

[lokifan]

Aren't Newbery books famous for often being INCREDIBLY depressing? Sounds like this follows the trend!

[osprey_archer]

Well, it varies from book to book. This one was surprising because the author has two other Newbery Honor books, neither of which involved SUDDEN MAIMING, so it was a bit startling when it happened. Right when they found a treasure hidden in the walls, too.