Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 25th, 2020 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Bill Brittain’s The Wish-Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree, a Newbery Honor book in which a salesman rolls up at a church social, sells four wishes (a mere fifty cents a pop), and then rolls out of town, leaving his customers to deal with the chaos that their poorly conceived wishes create. I felt a little bit that the wishes were intentionally badly worded so as to have the most dramatic effects (a girl wishes that a traveling salesman would “put down roots,” which ends up turning him into a tree, when what she really wants is for him to fall in love with her - why wouldn’t she just wish for that?) - but I did enjoy the down home country narrative voice, which was flavorful without being over the top.
I also read Sally Belfrage’s Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties, which is more introspective than her other books that I’ve read (A Room in Moscow, Freedom Summer) and suffers for it: Belfrage is oddly opaque in describing herself, unable to dig beneath the surface as she can in describing 1950s Moscow or 1964 Mississippi. She talks about the split consciousness of her childhood, learning about American democracy and freedom in school while at home her father (who edits a leftist newspaper, The National Guardian) is under constant surveillance by the FBI for his political views, but it comes to feel repetitious, like we’re circling around some greater truth without ever really zeroing in on it.
The book is effective at evoking the terror of the 1950s Red Scare, however, and the way that it decimated progressive circles, by destroying some progressives’ lives and careers (through arrest or employment blackballing) and frightening the rest into silence. What struck me, as I read this, is that the culture war in America is not anything new; the only thing that’s changed is that progressives finally have the numbers to effectively fight back. (They certainly didn’t in the 1950s, when “78 percent of Americans said they thought it was a good idea to report relatives or acquaintances suspected of being Communists.” A nation of stool pigeons!)
I also liked this quote: “My father lived on hope, and made hope his chief bequest to me: a lifetime’s basic faith in people, which must be disabused daily, when every morning’s newspaper comes as a blow to the naive optimism that somehow grew again in the night as you lay helpless to defend yourself.”
What I’m Reading Now
Other people keep hogging door duty at work so I haven’t had as much time to read Gerald Durrell’s Fillets of Plaice as I would have liked. :( On the other hand, this means that I get to savor it for longer, so that’s nice??? This book is actually five mini-memoirs stuck together; I just finished the one where the Durrells settle briefly in London after leaving Corfu in advance of World War II, and young Gerry fills his time by getting a job in a reptile pet shop. He accidentally befriends a colonel after dropping a box of terrapins on a bus, and it turns out the colonel has filled the attic of his house with meticulously painted model soldiers for use in hours-long war games.
I’m also reading Jeff Dickey’s Rising in Flames: Sherman’s March and the Fight for a New Nation, from which I learned (1) German and Irish immigrant identity in the 1860s were both A Big Deal (actually I knew this already, but it’s easier to ignore when you don’t have a book shoving it in your face), so I can’t just give Russell a German father and an Irish mother (what church did they marry in, by the way? Are they both Catholic?) and skip merrily onward giving it ne’er a further thought, and (2) I almost certainly have Russell marching with the whole entire wrong army for the backstory I’ve given him. If he joins up from an Eastern college, he would march with the Army of the Potomac, not the Army of the Tennessee.
(I can’t make him Catholic and let him keep a fiancee with the incredibly WASPy name “Julia Gage.” Surely the Gages would collapse in prostration at the prospect of their daughter marrying a Papist.)
I strongly suspect that I’ve Dunning-Krugered myself. “Oh, I definitely know enough about the Civil War to write a book about a Civil War veteran who wakes up in 1964!” I cried, knowing next to nothing about the Civil War, in which happy state of ignorance I’ve already written a book featuring TWO Civil War veterans. At least The Threefold Tie has no historical pretensions (at least about the Civil War, it definitely has historical pretensions about Non-Monogamous Nineteenth Century American Marriage Customs) and simply uses the Civil War as an excuse for Jack and Everett to make out in a barn.
What I Plan to Read Next
A footnote in Emily Mayhew’s Wounded (I’m still working my way through) has led me to Jeffrey S. Reznick’s Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War, which I hope might be more helpful in answering my question “So what were the prospects for a double leg amputee following the Great War?” than Wounded, although it will almost certainly be less mind-blowing and unbedizened by poetry.
Bill Brittain’s The Wish-Giver: Three Tales of Coven Tree, a Newbery Honor book in which a salesman rolls up at a church social, sells four wishes (a mere fifty cents a pop), and then rolls out of town, leaving his customers to deal with the chaos that their poorly conceived wishes create. I felt a little bit that the wishes were intentionally badly worded so as to have the most dramatic effects (a girl wishes that a traveling salesman would “put down roots,” which ends up turning him into a tree, when what she really wants is for him to fall in love with her - why wouldn’t she just wish for that?) - but I did enjoy the down home country narrative voice, which was flavorful without being over the top.
I also read Sally Belfrage’s Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties, which is more introspective than her other books that I’ve read (A Room in Moscow, Freedom Summer) and suffers for it: Belfrage is oddly opaque in describing herself, unable to dig beneath the surface as she can in describing 1950s Moscow or 1964 Mississippi. She talks about the split consciousness of her childhood, learning about American democracy and freedom in school while at home her father (who edits a leftist newspaper, The National Guardian) is under constant surveillance by the FBI for his political views, but it comes to feel repetitious, like we’re circling around some greater truth without ever really zeroing in on it.
The book is effective at evoking the terror of the 1950s Red Scare, however, and the way that it decimated progressive circles, by destroying some progressives’ lives and careers (through arrest or employment blackballing) and frightening the rest into silence. What struck me, as I read this, is that the culture war in America is not anything new; the only thing that’s changed is that progressives finally have the numbers to effectively fight back. (They certainly didn’t in the 1950s, when “78 percent of Americans said they thought it was a good idea to report relatives or acquaintances suspected of being Communists.” A nation of stool pigeons!)
I also liked this quote: “My father lived on hope, and made hope his chief bequest to me: a lifetime’s basic faith in people, which must be disabused daily, when every morning’s newspaper comes as a blow to the naive optimism that somehow grew again in the night as you lay helpless to defend yourself.”
What I’m Reading Now
Other people keep hogging door duty at work so I haven’t had as much time to read Gerald Durrell’s Fillets of Plaice as I would have liked. :( On the other hand, this means that I get to savor it for longer, so that’s nice??? This book is actually five mini-memoirs stuck together; I just finished the one where the Durrells settle briefly in London after leaving Corfu in advance of World War II, and young Gerry fills his time by getting a job in a reptile pet shop. He accidentally befriends a colonel after dropping a box of terrapins on a bus, and it turns out the colonel has filled the attic of his house with meticulously painted model soldiers for use in hours-long war games.
I’m also reading Jeff Dickey’s Rising in Flames: Sherman’s March and the Fight for a New Nation, from which I learned (1) German and Irish immigrant identity in the 1860s were both A Big Deal (actually I knew this already, but it’s easier to ignore when you don’t have a book shoving it in your face), so I can’t just give Russell a German father and an Irish mother (what church did they marry in, by the way? Are they both Catholic?) and skip merrily onward giving it ne’er a further thought, and (2) I almost certainly have Russell marching with the whole entire wrong army for the backstory I’ve given him. If he joins up from an Eastern college, he would march with the Army of the Potomac, not the Army of the Tennessee.
(I can’t make him Catholic and let him keep a fiancee with the incredibly WASPy name “Julia Gage.” Surely the Gages would collapse in prostration at the prospect of their daughter marrying a Papist.)
I strongly suspect that I’ve Dunning-Krugered myself. “Oh, I definitely know enough about the Civil War to write a book about a Civil War veteran who wakes up in 1964!” I cried, knowing next to nothing about the Civil War, in which happy state of ignorance I’ve already written a book featuring TWO Civil War veterans. At least The Threefold Tie has no historical pretensions (at least about the Civil War, it definitely has historical pretensions about Non-Monogamous Nineteenth Century American Marriage Customs) and simply uses the Civil War as an excuse for Jack and Everett to make out in a barn.
What I Plan to Read Next
A footnote in Emily Mayhew’s Wounded (I’m still working my way through) has led me to Jeffrey S. Reznick’s Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain During the Great War, which I hope might be more helpful in answering my question “So what were the prospects for a double leg amputee following the Great War?” than Wounded, although it will almost certainly be less mind-blowing and unbedizened by poetry.
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Date: 2020-11-25 02:19 pm (UTC)I wonder what the larger truth might have been that the author couldn't manage to zero in on. Maybe it was something personal--unrelated to her main thesis--but in trying to write about her thesis, she kept on being drawn near to it.
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Date: 2020-11-25 03:11 pm (UTC)I think you're probably wise to be careful about getting the history right (Civil War history being such an identity-maker in our culture). Brian points out (with the saltiness of a person of an oft-mischaracterized ethnic background who works in an oft-mischaracterized field—"Sure, I summon the ancestral spirits while I hack the Gibson! Every other Thursday!") that the immigrant identity part is probably going to have relatively fewer people who care about it. Which isn't to say it's not worth getting right, but maybe don't beat yourself up too much about almost missing it.
I swear, writing history is like picking your way through a minefield at times. If only we had some way of knowing whether the things we're missing are squibs, or full-on claymores...
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Date: 2020-11-25 05:08 pm (UTC)I love that quote about hope. And really interesting and sobering to think about how much less potential there was for fighting back in the 50s.
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Date: 2020-11-25 05:37 pm (UTC)I haven't thought about this book in literally decades! I read it in elementary school. There are at least two other Coven Tree books. All have that folkloric quality.
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Date: 2020-11-25 06:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2020-11-25 10:54 pm (UTC)She was sufficiently dim and naive that she thought he was in love with her, just ever-so-slightly more in love with the road.
Also, I think it's a key of the wish-giving genre that people in these stories have never once heard a story in which wishes go wrong, or else they would have planned out their wishes better. IRL, I like to imagine most of us, like the protagonist of Time at the Top, have already planned out our three wishes to provide maximum benefit with a minimum of risk. (Alas for her, she didn't get three wishes! She got three trips into the past. It works out well enough anyway.)
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