Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 23rd, 2020 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
My Christmas reading has continued with L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which I found quaintly delightful. This surprised me, because I didn’t enjoy The Wizard of Oz as a book: I felt it rather splintered into a series of disconnected anecdotes about halfway through. However, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus has a strong throughline: the titular life and adventures provide a central thread to tie together Baum’s lively inventiveness.
Charles Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth is also supposedly a Christmas story, or so at least I had been led to believe; I can only assume this is a misconception fanned by the Rankin Bass adaptation. The book in fact takes place in January, and contains no mention of Christmas at all, although there is a lot of cozy sitting by the hearth so I suppose I can see how people got confused.
I also finished a non-Christmas book: Janice P. Nishimura’s Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, research for the college girls books I’m working on (there are now two… one more and we can make it a hat trick?), but also delightful in its own right. In the 1870s, five Japanese girls (one only seven years old!) were sent to the United States to get American educations and bring back what they learned to Japan. Two were sent home early for ill health, but after an initial period of culture shock the other three thrived, and when they returned home to Japan, they eventually (again, after a period of culture shock) became instrumental in transforming Japanese women’s education. An absorbing, engagingly written history.
What I’m Reading Now
Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography. This is not grabbing me like some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England was more or less the book that got me hooked on the nineteenth century when I was a wee teenager, so it’s probably expecting too much for anything to live up to that), but I was intrigued to learn that people have been complaining that Christmas has lost touch with its earlier, pious roots, and now revolves around secular merry-making, essentially since Christmas was a thing.
I’m rushing to finish my final reading challenge for the year: for “a book by a local author,” I’m reading Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles, another book about Gene Stratton-Porter’s beloved Limberlost swamp, also (like A Girl of the Limberlost) featuring a lonely, neglected child whose life is transformed by a love of natural history.
What I Plan to Read Next
The library is clearly not going to bring me Betty MacDonald’s Nancy and Plum this Christmas (sulky about this; the library had plenty of copies last year, I know because I shelved them with my own two hands, so I don’t know why they have only two now), but I have one last Christmas book to succor me: a mystery, Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg.
My Christmas reading has continued with L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which I found quaintly delightful. This surprised me, because I didn’t enjoy The Wizard of Oz as a book: I felt it rather splintered into a series of disconnected anecdotes about halfway through. However, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus has a strong throughline: the titular life and adventures provide a central thread to tie together Baum’s lively inventiveness.
Charles Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth is also supposedly a Christmas story, or so at least I had been led to believe; I can only assume this is a misconception fanned by the Rankin Bass adaptation. The book in fact takes place in January, and contains no mention of Christmas at all, although there is a lot of cozy sitting by the hearth so I suppose I can see how people got confused.
I also finished a non-Christmas book: Janice P. Nishimura’s Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, research for the college girls books I’m working on (there are now two… one more and we can make it a hat trick?), but also delightful in its own right. In the 1870s, five Japanese girls (one only seven years old!) were sent to the United States to get American educations and bring back what they learned to Japan. Two were sent home early for ill health, but after an initial period of culture shock the other three thrived, and when they returned home to Japan, they eventually (again, after a period of culture shock) became instrumental in transforming Japanese women’s education. An absorbing, engagingly written history.
What I’m Reading Now
Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography. This is not grabbing me like some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England was more or less the book that got me hooked on the nineteenth century when I was a wee teenager, so it’s probably expecting too much for anything to live up to that), but I was intrigued to learn that people have been complaining that Christmas has lost touch with its earlier, pious roots, and now revolves around secular merry-making, essentially since Christmas was a thing.
I’m rushing to finish my final reading challenge for the year: for “a book by a local author,” I’m reading Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles, another book about Gene Stratton-Porter’s beloved Limberlost swamp, also (like A Girl of the Limberlost) featuring a lonely, neglected child whose life is transformed by a love of natural history.
What I Plan to Read Next
The library is clearly not going to bring me Betty MacDonald’s Nancy and Plum this Christmas (sulky about this; the library had plenty of copies last year, I know because I shelved them with my own two hands, so I don’t know why they have only two now), but I have one last Christmas book to succor me: a mystery, Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg.
