Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What 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.

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.”

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

THE MOFFATS! Oh man, I loved those books as a kid. Is the part where they try to make their own wax museum in the second book or a later one?

I'm so glad you enjoyed The Penelopiad! Atwood is v. good at dark humor and it works really well with this story, especially since the humor runs smack up against the horror of the ending. The last section with the maids haunts me— the faux-academic presentation (iirc?) that ends with the maids being like "it's so much easier to think of us as metaphors than as victims, right?"

[missroserose]

I'm reminded of Hank Green (or was it John Green?)'s tweet just after the election that went something like, "How do you ignore the troll when the troll's just been voted leader of your country? Asking for several million friends." Bleak, but...yeah. Regardless, I enjoyed Come As You Are so much that I'm interested to hear what Nagoski has to say.

I've never read Polly Oliver's Problem, but my mother absolutely adores The Birds' Christmas Carol, and has read bits and pieces of it to me over the years. I admit to some minor satisfaction that, the last time she did so, I was able to respond with this passage from Edith Nesbitt's The Cockatoucan, describing poor Matilda's anticipated day of misery with her great-aunt:

Then she would be sent to walk in the garden—the garden had a gritty path, and geraniums and calceolarias and lobelias in the beds. You might not pick anything. There would be minced veal at dinner, with three-cornered bits of toast round the dish, and a tapioca pudding. Then the long afternoon with a book, a bound volume of the “Potterer’s Saturday Night”—nasty small print—and all the stories about children who died young because they were too good for this world.

[asakiyume]

My mom read me the Moffats book when I was a kid! That was the first place I heard the name Sylvia (second place was Wolves of Willoughby Chase) and I loved it--I loved the sound of it, like silver (at the time I didn't know the woods-meaning). I remember from those books the drawings of a maple leaf in a drawer, Sylvia (Sylvie? Maybe she is Sylvie) practicing her name with a husband's last name, to the narrator's horror, and quarantining for scarlet fever.

[just_ann_now]

*chimes in from The Network* If you liked the Moffats, you will love the Pyes! Ginger Pye and Pinky Pye!

[rachelmanija]

I need to check out The Durrells.

Do the kittens die? At least one of them dies, right? Do other animals die?

[silverusagi]

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.”

Yeeeeeah. So many of the things I find stressful are systematic, and kind of hard to ignore? Covid, for example. I mean, that's not to say that I just sit around dwelling on stressful things, but the U.S in particular is basically a dumpster fire right now, and there's really no getting away from it.

Related: I just finished basically binge watching a YouTube channel by a New Zealander living in France, and my main takeaways were "wow, I wish I lived somewhere with healthcare and vacation time" and "France is pretty!" I'm sure the latter and not the former was the point of the channel, but there's a reason that most European countries rate higher on a happiness scale than the U.S. does.

[osprey_archer]

I bet that happens in The Moffat Museum! Purely based on the title.

And yes! Atwood really is a funny writer, although I think that quality is less pronounced in some of her other books. The skewering sarcasm is delicious.

[osprey_archer]

I think her name is Sylvie, but close enough, right? And it is such a beautiful name - so liquid.

The quarantine part gave me a feeling of connection, even though a quarantine for scarlet fever in 1917 was obviously a fever different thing than everything going on for coronavirus. Still! I feel you, Moffats!

[osprey_archer]

I've read Ginger Pye! Not sure I made it to Pinky Pye, though, so I might have to give that a go once I've read all the Moffats.

[osprey_archer]

I've been meaning to continue on with The Durrells. I drifted away after I finished season one, but I feel like the show would be good 2020 viewing, because you know nothing too terrible will happen to anyone.

The kittens live! ...but the mama cat dies, because of course she does. There is also a thousand-year-old snake who is actually a lamia who has been trapped in a pot under the roots of a tree who dies soon after escaping the pot.

[osprey_archer]

Somebody must have sat on the president and told him "Your handling of the coronavirus is killing your reelection chances!", because he said something vaguely sensible about the pandemic today and we know it's not because he cares about it killing actual people.

I've started thinking about moving to another country. Not super seriously (it would be so hard!), but at the same time... yeah.

[troisoiseaux]

Ah, yeah. That would be it. //facepalm// In fairness, I haven't actually thought about these books since I was about eight. I do remember that the younger sister was given to elaborate daydreams and therefore super relatable!

[troisoiseaux]

Have you read The Curious Adventures of Jimmy McGee? That was another Eleanor Estes book I loved as a kid.

[osprey_archer]

I've always been kind of fascinating by these "angelic child dies angelically" books, because they're so not to the modern taste, and yet they were so popular. Maybe because child mortality was so much higher? Maybe there was something comforting about the idea that the child died of being Too Good for This World when every other family lost a kid to childhood illness.

[osprey_archer]

I have not! But the library has it on ebook, so I might once I finish my sojourn with the Moffats.

[skygiants]

Oh man I used to love Eleanor Estes, but I remember nothing about the Moffats! Was there an island involved? Or was that the Pyes? She also had a witch book, right?

[silverusagi]

It would be hard! And now I'm tied down by stuff! And also I'd have to go somewhere that speaks English, and Canada is just too cold. Living in England is kind of a dream, I suppose. Except that I have no real skills to get like a good job and moving takes money or the potential for money.

[missroserose]

I'd had that thought, too. Context makes all the difference.

Although, come to think of it, some of the change might also be related to the audience's presumed religious faith (or lack thereof)? Because there are definitely still books like that, but they're marketed more towards the evangelical audience. I remember my mother (who's not evangelical but is definitely a bit of a sucker for 'inspirational' stories) reading me a book when I was a teenager that, some years later, I found a bit horrifying—it was about a girl with hydroencephaly, and the increasingly dire lengths her family went to to preserve her life despite her increasing health issues—but it was all framed in that very similar "she was our angel and blessed our family with her presence" language. The chapter that really stuck with me was where the parent described how she became a barometer for someone in the family doing something 'wrong', because when she would get sick they would grill their other kids until one of them confessed and fixed the problem, after which the girl would magically get better. At the time I sorta just accepted it, but in retrospect that family must've sucked to grow up in...

[amaebi]

(He's never cheerful, though.)

I have enjoyed enormous numbers of Gerald Durrell's books, all of which are memoirist, though not all revolving around his birth family. His one-time wife Jacquie Durrell also wrote two or three, which I find rather sad.

I thought the Penelopiad was wonderful, and yes, so wryly funny.

If you haven't already, you might like to read Eleanor Estes's The Alley, and maybe its sequel, The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode.

[amaebi]

I never read it! Nor heard of it!

[osprey_archer]

Wikipedia informs me that she did indeed have a witch book, The Witch Family! And I would certainly believe she wrote an island book as well, but neither of the first two Moffat books involve an island... A little more poking around Wikipedia tells me that Pinky Pye (the sequel to Ginger Pye) takes place on Fire Island and involves the adoption of a cat. Does that ring a bell?

I think her most famous book is The Hundred Dresses.

[osprey_archer]

I had not realized that Eleanor Estes had such a fanbase! Many people have shown up on this entry eagerly recommending their favorite Eleanor Estes book, which is especially fun because everyone seems to have a different favorite.

[katherine]

I re-read The Bird's Christmas Carol every so often so will add Polly Oliver's Problem to the to-read pile (keep the Project Gutenberg text in a browser tab).

Belatedly joining this (speaking of open browser tabs...) because I think you're right on the child mortality angle. I read something related recently, in Hollywood's Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era by Diana Serra Cary. She mentions "the box office-magic of another midcentury craze: the American public's obsession with childhood death. [...] Death had emptied a cradle in virtually every household in America at a time when a mother needed to bear thirteen children if she hoped to see six reach puberty."

[osprey_archer]

Oh! Yes, I think you'll like Polly Oliver's Problem, then. The Birds don't show up for a while but once they do, there's a lot of them.