Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 23rd, 2020 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. At some point I’ll read The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, but first I need some emotional recovery time. (She also has a book called Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II. Had I known it existed, I could have used the material to make Gennady’s childhood even more heartbreaking, so possibly it’s just as well for everyone that I didn’t.)
I also got back in the saddle with Newbery Honor books with Jane Leslie Conly’s Crazy Lady!, which I thought was going to be a story about a misunderstood zany neighbor, but in fact turned out to be a story about junior high student Veronon’s wildly alcoholic neighbor, Maxine. Maxine tries to control her drinking in order to care for her disabled son Ronald, whom she loves deeply, but neither her love for her son nor the support of her neighbors (one of whom takes Ronald in for two weeks while Maxine is in jail on drunk and disorderly charges) are enough. In the end, she sends Ronald away to live with a kindly aunt and uncle.
It’s a well-written and well-observed book, but bleak - bleak - bleak; the tragedy of watching someone try as hard as they can, and fail.
Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Shameless: A Sexual Reformation is an argument against American Evangelical Christian beliefs about sexual purity: purity rings and pledges not to even kiss until one’s wedding day and so on and so forth. Eh, it’s fine. There’s nothing particularly new here, and also nothing that seems likely to convince a reader who isn’t already on board with the book’s basic message.
What I’m Reading Now
Keeping on keeping on with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope. Another quote:
Food for thought in a time when many of us (myself very much included) would like nothing more than for the course of history to be made smooth.
What I Plan to Read Next
DID YOU KNOW that there’s a new American Girl? She is a 1980s girl and I suspect her books are horrible because all the books have been horrible since American Girl got too cheap to pay for illustrations… but I’ll probably read them anyway because I have an American Girl problem.
I finished Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. At some point I’ll read The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, but first I need some emotional recovery time. (She also has a book called Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II. Had I known it existed, I could have used the material to make Gennady’s childhood even more heartbreaking, so possibly it’s just as well for everyone that I didn’t.)
I also got back in the saddle with Newbery Honor books with Jane Leslie Conly’s Crazy Lady!, which I thought was going to be a story about a misunderstood zany neighbor, but in fact turned out to be a story about junior high student Veronon’s wildly alcoholic neighbor, Maxine. Maxine tries to control her drinking in order to care for her disabled son Ronald, whom she loves deeply, but neither her love for her son nor the support of her neighbors (one of whom takes Ronald in for two weeks while Maxine is in jail on drunk and disorderly charges) are enough. In the end, she sends Ronald away to live with a kindly aunt and uncle.
It’s a well-written and well-observed book, but bleak - bleak - bleak; the tragedy of watching someone try as hard as they can, and fail.
Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Shameless: A Sexual Reformation is an argument against American Evangelical Christian beliefs about sexual purity: purity rings and pledges not to even kiss until one’s wedding day and so on and so forth. Eh, it’s fine. There’s nothing particularly new here, and also nothing that seems likely to convince a reader who isn’t already on board with the book’s basic message.
What I’m Reading Now
Keeping on keeping on with Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope. Another quote:
What we wanted was for the course of history to be made smooth, all the ruts and potholes to be removed, so there should never again be any unforeseen events and everything should flow along evenly and according to plan. This longing prepared us, psychologically, for the appearance of the Wise Leaders who would tell us where we were going. And once they were there, we no longer ventured to act without their guidance and looked to them for direct instructions and foolproof prescriptions.
Food for thought in a time when many of us (myself very much included) would like nothing more than for the course of history to be made smooth.
What I Plan to Read Next
DID YOU KNOW that there’s a new American Girl? She is a 1980s girl and I suspect her books are horrible because all the books have been horrible since American Girl got too cheap to pay for illustrations… but I’ll probably read them anyway because I have an American Girl problem.
