osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2020-09-23 08:10 am
osprey_archer) wrote2020-09-23 08:10 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What 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.
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I don't know anything about her books, but my friend sent me the trailer for the stop motion animation movie for the new doll that they're apparently making with actual American Girl dolls, and it's extremely uncanny valley.
(Also, have you seen the artist on Tumblr who's doing a series of the American Girls, all grown up? She does a cool job of adapting their "meet" outfits to the fashions of 10 years later.)
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There is SO MUCH amazing American Girl doll art on Tumblr, most of which I have probably seen thanks to your reblogs, A++ I love it all. (Also love that Felicity has her hands on her hips in that picture, because OF COURSE.)
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But yeah, unexpected side effect of 2020 is that I care about American Girl again.
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Your fave Svetlana is on my Nobel Prize reading list! I'm happy to have an excuse to get to her eventually.
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Also LOOKING FORWARD to hearing your Svetlana Alexievich thoughts!
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Curiosity led me to the American Girl Fandom Wiki, which suggests that the illustrations were removed to make e-book formatting easier "and to 'age up' the books to the desired eight-to-twelve age range (as most children of those age ranges have or will soon transition into chapter books of considerable length with few to no illustrations)." Apparently illustrations are back for the most recent abridged editions, but not necessarily the same illustrations.
I wonder, too! I mean, the human mind is miraculously capable of developing nostalgia about any garbage at all, but those post-rebrand cover designs are dreary as balls. They don't look like a richly detailed Real Historical Document; they look like print on demand trying to look like Scholastic.
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I would also like to state that "BeForever" is a terrible series name and the entire creative team at Mattel should resign in embarrassment. They changed it later, but still.
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It's true, the human mind seems to be a nostalgia machine. (In fact, one of the recurring themes in the Alexievich book was nostalgia for the Soviet Union, often from people who said outright that at the time they hadn't liked the Soviet Union at all). So maybe people will look back with nostalgia on these dreary books, after all. But they could have been looking back nostalgically on books with charm and class!
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As someone who grew up with American Girl circa 1999 to, say, 2008-09-- I don't think it was an immediate decline, but definitely once they started retiring and re-releasing dolls willy-nilly, and then BeForever just jumped the shark. The thing I hate about the whole rebranding - the abridged books and the new clothing, in particular - is that it feels like they've sort of... dumbed it down? Like, what, little girls won't like historical doll dresses unless they're candy-colored?
(According to my parents, I literally learned to read from my older cousins' American Girl catalogues. The little vingettes about each dress/item!!!)
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(Samantha's rebooted "meet outfit" is hideous and I do not respect the lack of respect for a rich brown taffeta check and quality accessories. I know it's a cliche to wave a cane around and trill about what we had In My Day, but just look from the "classic" over to the reboot and tell me that isn't a knee-high pile of trash)
I loved the little item descriptions! The lunch boxes with tiny food items in them were probably my favorite of all. I can still see them in my mind's eye, even though I only ever saw them in catalog form and not in real life (those dolls being hella expensive).
*Do non-oldsters know what I mean by Disney-like? I grew up during a period when Disney was constantly chucking their "masterpieces" into the vault and re-releasing them to great money-grabbing fanfare - though I guess today's "live-action" remakes of popular animated movies are an analogous moneygrab.
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Oh, believe me, I've In My Day'ed over the difference between the classic and BeForever version of the outfit. Fortunately, the constant reshuffling/rebranding happened just after I aged out of being interested in the brand, but a few years ago I met up with a friend of mine in NYC and we went to the American Girl store there for nostalgia's sake and were shocked.
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That's a good quote from Hope against Hope. And yeah, re: Shameless, sounds like a definite preaching-to-the-choir story. Re: Crazy Lady just ... why?
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I really wonder what the author/publishers of Crazy Lady! were thinking. Children love suffering, maybe? I feel that certain child readers DO enjoy a tearjerker, but this seems like the wrong kind of sadness for that.
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