Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Gerald Durrell’s Fauna and Family (also published under the title The Garden of the Gods), the last of the Corfu trilogy. Has anyone read any of Gerald Durrell’s many, many other books? Any recommendations? (copperfyre mentioned A Zoo in My Luggage, The Bafut Beagles, and Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons as childhood favorites… which naturally means those are the ones the library doesn’t have.) The parts I liked best in the Corfu trilogy were his descriptions of his family, but I imagine he brings any cast of characters alive given half a chance.

I also read Eric Walters & Kathy Kacer’s Broken Strings, a historical fiction novel set right after 9/11 (this made me feel old). When Shirli’s high school puts on a production of Fiddler on the Roof, she checks her grandfather’s attic to see if he has any old clothes suitable for the production… and ends up finding a violin with broken strings, which leads Shirli to learn about how her grandfather survived the Holocaust.

This all sounds quite heavy, but the novel is pleasant and ultimately forgettable, although I feel kind of bad saying that about a novel that clearly has such an earnest desire to do good in this world.

I also read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of those books I’ve heard about for years and osmosed mostly incorrectly. It’s about Rochester’s marriage to his first wife, Bertha, mostly from her point of view, and I thought it was about Rochester taking mixed-race tropical flower Bertha (whose real name is Antoinette; Rochester just renames her because he’s a dick) to England where the climate and possibly also repressive sexual mores drove her mad, but in fact (1) Antoinette is white (although a less posh type of white than Rochester), (2) they don’t go to England till the very end of the book, after all the madness has happened, and (3) the book is very odd and dreamlike and it’s not entirely clear why Antoinette went mad or indeed sometimes what’s happening at all, although let’s be real, Rochester’s dickishness clearly did not help.

Rochester really does just start calling her Bertha instead of Antoinette because he’s a dick, though.

What I’m Reading Now

I expected Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder to focus on the composition of the Little House books, but in fact that’s only the last third of the book; the first two thirds are sort of a joint biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who (at the part of the book I have reached) has just built Laura and Almanzo a fancy and fantastically expensive new house that they didn’t particularly want… just in time for the Great Depression (combined with little-d personal depression) to make it almost impossible for Rose to pay back the debt. ROSE.

I’ve also learned lots of exciting background information about American history, particularly about the ecological disasters caused by the various homesteading programs. I had not realized that the government knew (or should have known) that this was inevitable: John Wesley Powell warned them that almost all the land west of the 100th meridian was too arid for grain farming (or indeed much farming at all aside from cattle) and it would inevitably destroy what little topsoil the land had, and Congress and the newspapers basically responded “LOL, the people want farms so farms will totally work!”

As you can imagine, this gave me a sort of deja vu to current events.

Another thing that struck me is how much information nineteenth century newspapers carry about perfectly ordinary people’s illnesses. When Mary Ingalls was sick with the illness that eventually took her sight, the local newspaper issued daily reports on the progress of the disease, as did the De Smet paper in later years when Laura and her husband Almanzo came down with diphtheria.

I think this could become a cute detail in a novel: a teacher goes out to visit a pupil who has been ill and takes along the paper so the pupil can have the pleasure of seeing her name in print.

What I Plan to Read Next

I wanted to read Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, but the library doesn’t have it. Has anyone read it? Is it worth going to the bother of an interlibrary loan?

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

just in time for the Great Depression (combined with little-d personal depression) to make it almost impossible for Rose to pay back the debt. ROSE.

One of my takeaways from this book is that Rose never made a decision that history didn't make look terrible in retrospect.

As you can imagine, this gave me a sort of deja vu to current events.

Yup.

[osprey_archer]

Rose's ability to make the worst possible decision at the worst possible time is really quite stunning. The house thing particularly baffles me because her parents clearly didn't want it, and Rose herself didn't have a house at that point, so why not build the house for herself?

[legionseagle]

I like The Girls of Slender Means but I probably wouldn't have gone out of my way to read it.

With Durrell, my favourite of the non-Corfu ones is probably Two Singles to Adventure. Fillets of Plaice is also pretty good. I used to enjoy The Bafut Beagles, but I strongly suspect it'll have been visited by the suck fairy, and even at the time I found his portrayal of the Cameroonians a bit cringey.

[osprey_archer]

Possibly I'll keep The Girls of Slender Means in a sort of mental reserve. I'm sure I'll come across it one day or another.

My library has Fillets of Plaice! I'll have to try that one first, then.

[rachelmanija]

The African books have some great stories but the portrayal of Africans is extremely cringey. I remember really enjoying the South American books, which are The Whispering Land, The Drunken Forest, and Three Singles to Adventure aka Three Tickets to Adventure.

Fillets of Plaice is the one that has that fucking terrifying horror story, right? YES, I rec that. I told that story from memory at a summer camp once and scared the living daylights out of everyone. It's also a Yuletide staple.

[amaebi]

Agreed about the portraits of Cameroonians there and elsewhere. (The Bafut Beagles being the best.) It definitely displays the limitations of White men's thinking about Africans, despite the friendship and the recognition of the Fon's (was it the Fon?) power.

[kore]

That would be a great detail!

I liked that book but I kind of came out of it thinking a lot less of everyone involved in writing the books, especially Rose. (Who I first found out about in a totally different historical environment, 1920s literary New York, because she was friends with Isabel Paterson, a very influential book critic then.)

[osprey_archer]

I remember when I was a child I got my name in the paper for winning a poetry contest and that was THE MOST EXCITING THING EVER. Surely a nineteenth century child would also find this thrilling.

Rose seems to have gone everywhere and met everybody (and if she didn't meet everyone, she was happy to lie about it! I've just gotten to the part where she lies in a pamphlet about meeting John Reed just as he was in the process of forming the Communist party in America) and I bet she was rather bitter that ultimately she's been remembered as an adjunct to her mother's incredibly successful children's book series.

[evelyn_b]

Local newspapers were absolutely the social medium of the late 19th century. So many items about Miss Eufala Whosit going to visit her aunt Emily in Fall City, and "anyone knows where I can find Mr. Hiram Coffin please write to this address" and all kinds of miscellaneous details about parties and so on. Even when the town isn't as tiny as De Smet you find a lot of news about ordinary people doing ordinary things like recovering from illness or coming back from a two-week visit to Toledo, OH.

I loved The Girls of Slender Means and think it's very good, but if you have a lot on your reading plate already I wouldn't say you absolutely need to call on the ILL.

[osprey_archer]

Local Newspaper Drama must have been the Facebook Drama of the 19th century. "They had a garden party without me!" cries Miss Eufala Whosit, aghast, her eyes glazing with tears as she reads the description of Miss Penny Ashworth's mauve dress with lace insertion.

I currently have a stack of thick books which I am making very little progress reading, but also don't want to turn in because what if lockdown comes again? WHAT WILL I READ THEN? So the temptation of The Girls of Slender Means is partly that the book itself is slender... although of course if lockdown comes again, it may get stuck in some sort of interlibrary loan limbo.

[kore]

IIRC there's a very funny Shirley Jackson bit in Raising Demons about her publishing a book, and the local newspaper reports it as her publisher visiting or something! and that was in the late fifties or early sixties, in New Hampshire. Garrison Keillor was tapping into that as late as the 1980s in Lake Wobegon, I think.

[oracne]

One of these days I will read PRAIRIE FIRES. It sounds great.

[osprey_archer]

It's been having a Moment on my flist recently. Definitely worth reading!

[sovay]

I thought it was about Rochester taking mixed-race tropical flower Bertha (whose real name is Antoinette; Rochester just renames her because he’s a dick) to England where the climate and possibly also repressive sexual mores drove her mad, but in fact (1) Antoinette is white (although a less posh type of white than Rochester), (2) they don’t go to England till the very end of the book, after all the madness has happened

I had also osmosed incorrectly, then, but then again I have read Kipling's Kim several times since childhood and I never, ever remember that Kim is actually white.

[osprey_archer]

It's also possible that I'm not reading Rhys's racial cues correctly and Antoinette is meant to be mixed-race, but my impression is that she is in fact white - just the wrong kind of white, as far as Rochester is concerned. Clearly some French heritage (just look at that name!), etc. etc.

[silverusagi]

Another thing that struck me is how much information nineteenth century newspapers carry about perfectly ordinary people’s illnesses.

YES! My mom has been doing genealogy, and searching for names on Ancestry's newspaper site. Even up to the 1960s, she found a TON of stuff just on daily doings. Apparently my great grandma wrote a lot into the social column of the paper.

[osprey_archer]

I bet this caused so much of an old-timey counterpart to Facebook drama. "What do you MEAN that you gave a garden party and DIDN'T INVITE ME? I saw it in the Post-Courier!"

[anna_wing]

Re Gerald Durrell, Two In The Bush is very good. About a six-month expedition with his first wife to Malaysia (then still Malaya, just, I think), New Zealand and Australia for a BBC Nature series.

[osprey_archer]

Did Gerald Durrell ever sleep? He wrote so many books... and he was involved in so many nature TV series... and he founded a zoo, and collected loads of animals for it himself! What a dynamo.

[amaebi]

Wow, you got a lot of comments while I was failing to make the comment I wanted to. :D I will read them after. So in the meantime, I'm probably saying nothing much new, but that's life.

I first read Wide Sargasso Sea during my first year of of my first marriage, when we had mononucleosis and I was in Canada on a tourist visa. Waiting. My first husband had it and recommended it, but emphasized repeatedly that he liked it for the prose. I thought it was a fantastic palimpsest, though I didn't know the term at the time, and I told him so. He had not known, had never heard of Jane Eyre, and reemphasized that he liked it for the prose. He had issues with fiction, and with its role in societies he had known.

I'm sure someone has mentioned The Madwoman in the Attic?

So cool about John Wesley Powell, and so sad. And as you say, so contemporary. I am reminded as well about an initiative of Rocky Springs, Wyoming government to rationalize and pave the course of the river that sporadically flowed through town. A member of my congregation, a water scientist, warned them that the whole course of the river ws against them, so that it would be a waste of money. They replied that they would be Inspiring Others to measure up. (I don't know what happened.)

I was really startled when I learned that the Little House series was an icon of Randists and libertarians. I know about Rose's political commitments. But the books themselves are about the importance of community and network, particularly in jams.

There are still local newspapers, though dwindling in number, that not only publish hyperlocal stories of illness, but hyperlocal stories of who is visiting whom. As a teenager, way back when, I thrilled to stories in the Summersville Beacon about visits, especially Ivora and Izora Vincent's busy visiting, but most of all the visitations of Ollie Beasley. "Oh, Ollie Beasley," said my friend Cyn's aunt Olin, "she's always calling the Beacon about her visits." Cyn named a piglet Ollie Beasley. She was scratching its back one day when a small round woman turned up and asked the pig's name. With unwonted caution Cyn said it was called Hamlet. The woman was of course Ollie Beasley.

[osprey_archer]

The Madwoman in the Attic is one of those books that I have been aware of... for years... without ever actually sitting down to read it. Someday!

"You can't always bend nature to your will" is one of those lessons that the US government probably ought to have learned by now, if only by the sheer number of times that nature has pointed this out, but thus far the government has proven determined not to learn.

And yeah, isn't it weird that the Randians have glommed so hard on the Little House books? Obviously the Rose Wilder Lane connection explains a lot of it, but still, shouldn't they be shocked and appalled by things like the joyous scene near the end of The Long Winter where the Ingalls family rapturously opens up their Christmas barrel? The dreaded specter of philanthropy!

[littlerhymes]

I was not expecting the segueway in the comments from Little House on the Prairie to Ayn Rand and Mussolini, but you know what, I'm here for it.

I was JUST dropping by to say I enjoyed Durrell's The Talking Parcel as a child, but it is a whimsical fantasy ala CS Lewis or ES Nesbit so perhaps not what you're looking for. Also, taught me the word 'cockatrice'!

[osprey_archer]

Oh my God, he wrote whimsical fantasy too?? I am increasingly convinced that Gerald Durrell had a time turner because otherwise HOW did he have the time to complete all of this?

[lokifan]

The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium is very funny, until the last story which is HAIR-RAISING horror. But yeah I read several of his as a kid and they were all great.

[osprey_archer]

The library has schlepped me Drunken Forest! So that's next on my list.