Wednesday Reading Meme
Jul. 22nd, 2020 08:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Buckle up, buttercups, because this week I finished MANY books. I had a number of books that were almost done and I thought… might as well knock them all out this week.
First, I finished Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Polly Oliver’s Problem, which despite the title does not feature any cross-dressing. Yes, I know. I was disappointed too.
In fact, Polly Oliver’s problem is how to support herself and her mother now that her mother’s failing health makes it impossible for her to continue taking boarders. Polly starts the book with a plan: she will become a kindergarten teacher. She then… makes no progress toward this plan whatsoever, ends up accidentally taking another boarder when her friend’s older brother falls in with a bad crowd at college and needs to be reformed, and then accidentally makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Bird, a character from Wiggin’s previous novel The Birds’ Christmas Carol (in which Mrs. Bird’s daughter Carol dies a tragic and angelic death), who takes Polly in after her mother dies and sets her up as a professional storyteller.
The book was enjoyable as I read (Wiggin also wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; she knows how to entertain a reader), but looking at it as a whole - what odd plotting. The reformation of the college student in particular gets dropped like a hot potato; it looks like the book’s setting the chap up as Polly’s love interest, but then Polly's mother dies and he writes Polly a nice letter about how much the Olivers helped him and he’d like to help her in return… and that’s the end of it.
I also limped to the end of Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, a Newbery Honor book from 2009, which is about two kittens who are born underneath a battered house in the Louisiana bayou, where they must stay because otherwise the house’s owner Gar Face would use them as alligator bait… but of course one of them disobeys.
I found this hard to get through, not because of the story, but because of the style. “Soon this storm would blow through these piney woods,” it tells you. “And it would pack a punch. Batten your hatches. Close your doors. Do not go out into that stormy night.” And it does this sort of thing quite a lot, and it always jarred me out of the story.
On a brighter note, I read The Moffats and The Middle Moffat, the first two books in Eleanor Estes’ Moffat quartet, which I’ve meant to read for ages. These books were published in the 1940s and set around the time of World War I, which makes for a double dose of nostalgia. Despite being set during the war, these are emphatically not war books: it’s just a quiet affectionate picture of American small town life during the 1910s.
And last! But assuredly not least! I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which surprised me by being quite a funny book, which is perhaps surprising when you consider that it’s telling Penelope’s side of the Odyssey, with particular attention to the twelve maids who are killed at the end of that epic. But much of this book is set in the underworld, after the characters are already dead, and Atwood draws a lot of dark humor for the Greek underworld and Greek mythology in general.
What I’m Reading Now
holyschist clued me in that Gerald Durrell in fact wrote THREE memoirs about his family’s time on Corfu, so I have happily flung myself into the second one, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which kicks off with Gerry’s family berating him for their portrayal in his first memoir, till his mother pipes up, “The only thing I thought [was wrong with the book] was that he hadn’t used all the best stories.”
His mother is absolutely right! It turns out that the TV show The Durrells in Corfu drew almost all its first season stories from this book. You wonder why Gerald Durrell saved them for the second book in his trilogy of family memoirs.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve got Emily Nagoski’s Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, which will be either the perfect book for 2020 or completely useless for 2020. I’m not sure how you get off the stress cycle when the stressor is “the president would sit cheerfully on top of a pile of our corpses.”
Buckle up, buttercups, because this week I finished MANY books. I had a number of books that were almost done and I thought… might as well knock them all out this week.
First, I finished Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Polly Oliver’s Problem, which despite the title does not feature any cross-dressing. Yes, I know. I was disappointed too.
In fact, Polly Oliver’s problem is how to support herself and her mother now that her mother’s failing health makes it impossible for her to continue taking boarders. Polly starts the book with a plan: she will become a kindergarten teacher. She then… makes no progress toward this plan whatsoever, ends up accidentally taking another boarder when her friend’s older brother falls in with a bad crowd at college and needs to be reformed, and then accidentally makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Bird, a character from Wiggin’s previous novel The Birds’ Christmas Carol (in which Mrs. Bird’s daughter Carol dies a tragic and angelic death), who takes Polly in after her mother dies and sets her up as a professional storyteller.
The book was enjoyable as I read (Wiggin also wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; she knows how to entertain a reader), but looking at it as a whole - what odd plotting. The reformation of the college student in particular gets dropped like a hot potato; it looks like the book’s setting the chap up as Polly’s love interest, but then Polly's mother dies and he writes Polly a nice letter about how much the Olivers helped him and he’d like to help her in return… and that’s the end of it.
I also limped to the end of Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, a Newbery Honor book from 2009, which is about two kittens who are born underneath a battered house in the Louisiana bayou, where they must stay because otherwise the house’s owner Gar Face would use them as alligator bait… but of course one of them disobeys.
I found this hard to get through, not because of the story, but because of the style. “Soon this storm would blow through these piney woods,” it tells you. “And it would pack a punch. Batten your hatches. Close your doors. Do not go out into that stormy night.” And it does this sort of thing quite a lot, and it always jarred me out of the story.
On a brighter note, I read The Moffats and The Middle Moffat, the first two books in Eleanor Estes’ Moffat quartet, which I’ve meant to read for ages. These books were published in the 1940s and set around the time of World War I, which makes for a double dose of nostalgia. Despite being set during the war, these are emphatically not war books: it’s just a quiet affectionate picture of American small town life during the 1910s.
And last! But assuredly not least! I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which surprised me by being quite a funny book, which is perhaps surprising when you consider that it’s telling Penelope’s side of the Odyssey, with particular attention to the twelve maids who are killed at the end of that epic. But much of this book is set in the underworld, after the characters are already dead, and Atwood draws a lot of dark humor for the Greek underworld and Greek mythology in general.
I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and a lot of time on their hands. ‘Which prayer shall we answer today?’ they ask one another. ‘Let’s cast dice! Hope for this one, despair for that one, and while we’re at it, let’s destroy the life of that woman over there by having sex with her in the form of a crayfish!’
What I’m Reading Now
holyschist clued me in that Gerald Durrell in fact wrote THREE memoirs about his family’s time on Corfu, so I have happily flung myself into the second one, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which kicks off with Gerry’s family berating him for their portrayal in his first memoir, till his mother pipes up, “The only thing I thought [was wrong with the book] was that he hadn’t used all the best stories.”His mother is absolutely right! It turns out that the TV show The Durrells in Corfu drew almost all its first season stories from this book. You wonder why Gerald Durrell saved them for the second book in his trilogy of family memoirs.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve got Emily Nagoski’s Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, which will be either the perfect book for 2020 or completely useless for 2020. I’m not sure how you get off the stress cycle when the stressor is “the president would sit cheerfully on top of a pile of our corpses.”
