Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What 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.

Comments

[sovay]

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.

How are you finding it? I remember liking it and several others of her novels as a child, but I haven't read any of them in years.

[osprey_archer]

I'm enjoying it so far! All of Gene Stratton Porter's books feel like she's mainlined them straight from the id, and sometimes her id is pretty strange, but at the same time it means the reader is never, ever bored.

[sovay]

All of Gene Stratton Porter's books feel like she's mainlined them straight from the id, and sometimes her id is pretty strange, but at the same time it means the reader is never, ever bored.

I meant to re-read The Keeper of the Bees (1925) after being reminded of it earlier this year, which I thought was last year, because 2020.

[osprey_archer]

I don't exactly have a plan to read all of Gene Stratton-Porter's books, but all the same whenever I hear about a one I haven't heard of before, I always end up thinking "Gosh, I ought to read that."

Did you know she started her own movie production company? Sadly, it looks like none of the movies she made survived (there weren't very many; she died soon after creating the company). I would have loved to see one of them.

[evelyn_b]

MAN I keep remembering that Gene Stratton Porter exists and is nuts, and thinking I should read more of her. How is Freckles so far? I remember when the character poked his head into Limberlost and everyone was supposed to know who he was and clap like the studio audience for a new Norman Lear show.

(When I was a child I consistently could not keep straight The Cricket on the Hearth vs. A Cricket in Times Square. I don't remember very much about either, only that I was perpetually disappointed)

ETA TWO COLLEGE GIRLS BOOKS IN PROGRESS? *excited*

[troisoiseaux]

ETA TWO COLLEGE GIRLS BOOKS IN PROGRESS? *excited*

Seconding the *excited*!!!

[osprey_archer]

One of them is accidentally a Christmas book, so I'm working on that one first.

[osprey_archer]

Yes! Don't he and the Swamp Angel show up at the end of Limberlost, a married couple with adorable hoodlum children? And of course the Bird Woman is in the book too - and Freckles' case full of moths, which I somehow envisioned as an entire room when really it's just a sort of wooden trunk.

Anyway. Freckles is a lonely but noble waif, much like Elnora, although without Elnora's pepperiness or her Terrible Mother (Elnora's Terrible Mother might actually be my favorite character in A Girl of the Limberlost? She's just so interestingly awful). It's a lot of fun in that delicious slightly batshit Gene Stratton Porter kind of way. (I did consider reading The Harvester, because I remembered you'd read it and found it even more bonkers than usual for GSP, but it was much longer than Freckles so I put it aside for a more convenient season.)

There may actually be three college girls books if I decide to do the "Goblin Market" retelling at a women's college circa 1900. Everyone will enjoy having a historical fantasy alongside two non-fantasy historical romances, right?

[evelyn_b]

WHAT

WOMEN'S COLLEGE GOBLIN MARKET RETELLING ?!!?!

YES obviously this is a VERY GOOD IDEA (people who mind random goblin intrusions into non-fantasy historical romance series can follow less interesting authors or learn to deal)

Elnora's mother is definitely the best character in Limberlost! I also like Boring Rich Love Interest Dude's neurotic Bad Girlfriend. But I haven't actually read The Harvester, just read about it in a book of essays! Someday, maybe, when I start going to the library again.

(also, speaking of fantasyland lesbians, I started watching the new She-Ra and it's basically the best thing ever to cross my path; I need to go back and read your posts about it).

[osprey_archer]

To be fair it's not exactly a series - they're not at the same college (although... maybe I could make them at the same college? I could move the Big City scene from NYC to Chicago and then both of books could be set at a women's college in Wisconsin, definitely not based on the women's college that eventually merged forces with my alma mater...)

Um, anyway, even if I do make the books all take place at the same college, there won't be enough continuity that people have to read them in order or anything. Goblin loving readers can read Come and Kiss Me without bothering with the others.

YES, the Bad Girlfriend is delightful, definitely ten times more interesting than the Boring Love Interest. Good on her for getting out tbh, he probably would have bored her silly in two years. Hopefully Elnora will be too busy being interested in moths etc to realize that he's boring?

Also HOORAY I'm so glad that you're enjoying She-Ra! I wish I had posted about it more regularly than I did, but I know there are at least a few posts on here.

[amaebi]

Think you'll also get a tremendous bang out of Edith Carr.

Have you read A Daughter of the Land? For my money it's the strangest (and whoa so picaresque) Stratton Porter. And it's hard to beat Her Father's Daughter for period racism yowza.

I await the college girl books eagerly. And want to read Daughters of the Samurai.

[osprey_archer]

I haven't read A Daughter of the Land, but Her Father's Daughter was the first Gene Stratton Porter book I read, and as you might imagine it took me a long time to read any of the others. Although actually as far as I can tell none of the others are like that at all? It seems like she moved to California and Discovered Racism and it became her new favorite hobby.

[amaebi]

Yes, despite the wildness of the adoption and wicked-sister themes, the women's architecture, the applause of murder as a domestic duty, and the desirable spawning of Brigand Beef-eating cannon fodder, if it were my first I don't think I'd be looking for more. :D

A Daughter of the Land is a delicious, largely shapeless soap opera.

[troisoiseaux]

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

This came up in a class I took in college, although not in any particular depth. I will have to check out this book!

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 always tickled by proof that people have, throughout history, been complaining about the exact same things. I'm obsessed with this article from the 1930s about how an editorial from the 1800s made the exact same arguments about Girls These Days as people did in the 30s, and wouldn't you know it, it's a complaint that hasn't still died out, in vibe if not in content.

[osprey_archer]

I also read about the first female Japanese exchange students in America very briefly when I was working on my college thesis (which involved some stuff about women's colleges around 1900) and have yearned to find out more ever since. At last the time came!

There really is nothing new under the sun, is there? Every generation repeats the same complaints.

[asakiyume]

I think Wakanomori has mentioned Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back--I need to re-ask him and find out if he's actually read it or only just acquainted with it by hearsay.

[osprey_archer]

I'll be curious to hear!

[asakiyume]

Okay, so it turns out that there's another book, Daughter (singular) of the Samurai, and that's what he's talked about to me, but he had also heard of this one. We had trouble finding the author of your one--turns out she's Nimura, not Nishimura. She's not Japanese herself, but she has an MA in East Asian studies from Columbia and a Japanese husband, and an interest in "the forgotten lives of border-crossing nineteenth-century women." (link)

[osprey_archer]

Nooo, I got the name wrong. Oh well. Glad you managed to track the book down anyway!

Daughters of the Samurai has quotations from Daughter of the Samurai as epigraphs for the different sections of the book. It also looks fascinating!

[brigdh]

Daughters of the Samurai sounds incredibly fascinating, and I'm totally putting it on my own TBR list. Though I'm still hoping someone will write a book about the women in this photo (one each from India, Syria, and Japan, who attended medical college in the US in the 1880s).

[osprey_archer]

Oh man, that would be such a kickass book! It would be so hard to write, though: the author would need at least a working knowledge of so many different languages, or else a VERY dedicated research assistant or two who can supply the lack.