Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 30th, 2020 09:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I never really gelled with Bruce Brooks’ What Hearts, a 1993 Newbery Honor winner. It’s telling you about the characters rather than telling you a story about them, and this has the counterintuitive effect of making you feel that you don’t know the characters at all, like how suddenly in part three we discover out of the blue that Asa’s mother suffers depressions so deep that they sometimes result in month-long hospitalizations. I feel that this should have been hinted at in parts one and two.
I also never gelled with Gregory Manchess’s Above the Timberline, which was too bad because I’ve been intending to read this book for years. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous - think Dinotopia meets the tundra - but the story just never caught fire for me. Maybe if I had struck while the iron was hot (or ice-cold, as it were) and read it a few years ago when I first heard about it? There is something to be said for following one’s whims in the reading life.
In support of this theory, I picked up Anne Blankman’s The Blackbird Girls on a whim: “That looks Soviet!” I said, catching sight of the cover across the library, and indeed, it’s a children’s book set during the aftermath of Chernobyl. When anti-Semitic schoolyard bully Oksana and her frequent victim Valentina are accidentally evacuated from Pripyat together, they become unlikely friends.
I could have done with a shorter Overcoming Prejudice plotline (do you KNOW how many historical fiction children’s books I’ve read about a character Overcoming Prejudice? DO YOU KNOW?), but once we got to the unlikely friends part (which takes place in Leningrad! There’s a whole chapter of sightseeing in Leningrad!!!!), I was sold. And it was so great to read a children’s book set in the Soviet Union, partly because this aligns so spectacularly with my interests, but also because it’s a little off the beaten path for American historical fiction and it’s just nice to see variety.
What I’m Reading Now
Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam, set off by a reminiscence about a kind landlady she and her husband stayed with while in exile in the mid-1930s:
In a way this is a paraphrase of La Rochefoucauld: “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” I think the idea of this sort of realist literature is that exposing hypocrites might encourage honest and sincere kindness, but perhaps this aim is fundamentally flawed; maybe most humans can only offer forth so much sincerity.
Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun is a chonk of a book, and I’m only about halfway through. I’m enjoying the world-building of the land of the fae (Arcadia, as the book calls it), but wow, this is going in a more incestuous direction than I anticipated.
And I’ve begun Mary Renault’s The Charioteer! Fairly sure that I am going to drown in feelings.
What I Plan to Read Next
Waiting to continue my hobo journey with Nels Anderson’s On Hobos and Homelessness. Come on, interlibrary loan!
I never really gelled with Bruce Brooks’ What Hearts, a 1993 Newbery Honor winner. It’s telling you about the characters rather than telling you a story about them, and this has the counterintuitive effect of making you feel that you don’t know the characters at all, like how suddenly in part three we discover out of the blue that Asa’s mother suffers depressions so deep that they sometimes result in month-long hospitalizations. I feel that this should have been hinted at in parts one and two.
I also never gelled with Gregory Manchess’s Above the Timberline, which was too bad because I’ve been intending to read this book for years. The illustrations are absolutely gorgeous - think Dinotopia meets the tundra - but the story just never caught fire for me. Maybe if I had struck while the iron was hot (or ice-cold, as it were) and read it a few years ago when I first heard about it? There is something to be said for following one’s whims in the reading life.
In support of this theory, I picked up Anne Blankman’s The Blackbird Girls on a whim: “That looks Soviet!” I said, catching sight of the cover across the library, and indeed, it’s a children’s book set during the aftermath of Chernobyl. When anti-Semitic schoolyard bully Oksana and her frequent victim Valentina are accidentally evacuated from Pripyat together, they become unlikely friends.
I could have done with a shorter Overcoming Prejudice plotline (do you KNOW how many historical fiction children’s books I’ve read about a character Overcoming Prejudice? DO YOU KNOW?), but once we got to the unlikely friends part (which takes place in Leningrad! There’s a whole chapter of sightseeing in Leningrad!!!!), I was sold. And it was so great to read a children’s book set in the Soviet Union, partly because this aligns so spectacularly with my interests, but also because it’s a little off the beaten path for American historical fiction and it’s just nice to see variety.
What I’m Reading Now
Another quote from Nadezhda Mandelstam, set off by a reminiscence about a kind landlady she and her husband stayed with while in exile in the mid-1930s:
There were once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality - it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth.
In a way this is a paraphrase of La Rochefoucauld: “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” I think the idea of this sort of realist literature is that exposing hypocrites might encourage honest and sincere kindness, but perhaps this aim is fundamentally flawed; maybe most humans can only offer forth so much sincerity.
Jeannette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun is a chonk of a book, and I’m only about halfway through. I’m enjoying the world-building of the land of the fae (Arcadia, as the book calls it), but wow, this is going in a more incestuous direction than I anticipated.
And I’ve begun Mary Renault’s The Charioteer! Fairly sure that I am going to drown in feelings.
What I Plan to Read Next
Waiting to continue my hobo journey with Nels Anderson’s On Hobos and Homelessness. Come on, interlibrary loan!
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Date: 2020-09-30 01:33 pm (UTC)My sister described a clear example of that on FB the other day. People in her town forum were on a downward spiral of criticizing teens for not being on-board enough with mask wearing, and this was leading to criticizing the parents and general sniping back and forth, and she apparently wrote a thing talking about how she was such an excellent parent before she had kids, and still a good parent when she could physically lift the kids out of a situation, but that once her boys got big enough and independent enough to act on their own, she became a humble parent, because though she tried to set a good example and teach them good values, they didn't always act in ways that she was proud of. She said it really does take a village, and that she's grateful for people who correct bad behavior but in a kindly way. ---And then her tone reset led to bunches of people chiming in saying yeah, it's a good community; yes, parenting is hard; yes, we need to work on these things together.
The people hadn't changed, and the mix of things they felt hadn't changed, but with everyone liking the post, etc., it suddenly became important to be taking a positive tone.
... This comes across like I'm boasting about my sister, which embarrasses me, but I use the example because it literally happened yesterday, and because FB can be such a caustic, toxic place.
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Date: 2020-09-30 01:51 pm (UTC)//SCREAMS//
I can't wait to hear what you think!!! I had A Lot of feelings about that book when I read it a few years ago and have been meaning to re-read it since.
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Date: 2020-09-30 03:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2020-09-30 05:00 pm (UTC)I really love a lot of that book (the hero is great, the language is beautiful) but parts of it also drive me crazy because I think Renault's modern novels highlight her flaws in a way the historical novels let her gloss over. It's interesting to me now that Charioteer is like a queer classic! In my day The Persian Boy was definitely in that slot.
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Date: 2020-10-02 04:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2020-10-02 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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