Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A profitable week in the Newbery department. I finished Russell Freedman’s Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery, a 1994 Newbery Honor book. I mention the year because the book is very tactful about Eleanor Roosevelt’s possible romantic involvements with women. If you are primed to see romantic potential in her series of very close woman friends who sometimes lived with her, the evidence is certainly here. But if I had read this in the 90s, the possible implications would absolutely have flown over my head.

This struck me particularly hard because in the 2021 winner (When You Trap a Tiger), the narrator’s older sister gets a girlfriend, who is expressly referred to as such in the text. That just would not have been possible in a 1994 book; the world has changed so much and so quickly.

I also read Jean Fritz’s Homesick: My Own Story, a childhood memoir about the author’s life in China in the late 1920s, when her father directed the YMCA in Hankow (which later merged with two other cities to become modern-day Wuhan). On a scale of happiness to misery ranging from Cheaper by the Dozen to Angela’s Ashes, this one is solidly in the middle: the political situation is tense (the family ultimately flees Hankow on an armored gunboat) and the family faces personal tragedy when Jean’s baby sister dies, but the overall focus is much more on Jean’s everyday life and friendships.

Oddly, given the title, the book doesn’t deal with homesickness at all. Perhaps it’s a retrospective title? Given the subsequent history of China, I suspect that Fritz could never revisit her childhood home.

What I’m Reading Now

Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, which I expected to love but am actually finding something of a slog. I first read about in the context of a ludicrously rich fish pie and therefore expected it to be about luxury and opulence and instead it’s mostly about slums.

Also Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, which I’m enjoying, although I wish the author would stop apologizing for non-murder digressions about Roman history. I submit that anyone geeky enough to read a book about Roman murder is also interested in other things Roman and will not go “God, why do we gotta talk about political intrigue? Ugh.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I am creeping toward the top of the hold list for Fugitive Telemetry. Any day now!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

a 1994 Newbery Honor book

...okay, I don't think this was the Eleanor Roosevelt biography I had my eye on, then. Hm. I will have to figure out which one I was thinking of.

[osprey_archer]

I was a little surprised to hear that you had this exact book in queue, to be honest. I hope you can find the one that you did have in mind!

[troisoiseaux]

Okay, so, after some quick googling, I was in fact thinking of David Michaelis' Eleanor. Possibly I'd subconsciously made the connection because you'd mentioned FDR's affair with his secretary, which as it turns out is featured prominently in the blurb of Eleanor, but honestly I think my brain was like "well we can't have two men writing about Eleanor Roosevelt" and assumed it was the same book. //facepalm

Oddly enough, though, I realized when I googled Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery that I have in fact read it! Probably several times, actually; I had a copy when I was in elementary school (circa 4th grade, maybe?). I have no memory of it discussing her romantic involvement with women, but good for him!

[osprey_archer]

There's never explicit mention that any of these involvements are romantic. But Freedman does mention a series of very close women friends, some of whom Eleanor lived with for extended periods of time, and I've seen at least one of these women mentioned in other contexts as possible romances... it's very much a case where it's there if you look for it but surpassingly easy to overlook if you don't.

[kore]

I really really enjoyed Fatal Thing, but I LOVED her earlier book on Agrippina, which I read right afterwards. I love her depiction of Roman culture and how she describes the sources we have and what they're telling us about Rome, besides what the historians meant to say.

[osprey_archer]

I checked out the Agrippina book as soon as I finished Fatal Thing, and I am distraught to learn that Agrippina the Younger evidently wrote a MEMOIR (quoted in Tacitus), which is no longer extant. WHAT I WOULD GIVE FOR THAT MEMOIR. What I would give for a selection of any works written by Roman women, honestly.

[kore]

I KNOW RIGHT. Or her speeches! Or some letters! Any little thing.

[osprey_archer]

It would give us SUCH a different view of the Roman world to be able to read something - anything! - actually written by Roman women. It would be such a corrective to all these bloviating men. The current situation with ancient Rome is as if we were trying to understand Victorian women with no extant sources but Dickens and Ruskin - and because we do have Gaskell and the Brontes, we KNOW what a strange lopsided view such a situation would give us!

[landofnowhere]

I remember reading the Jean Fritz when I was a kid and liking it! I don't think I realized that Hankow had merged into Wuhan (which I have been to).

[osprey_archer]

I learned this by reading a Wikipedia article as I wrote this review. The more you know!

[skygiants]

I just read Fatal Thing last week and I was like, this is objectively a great book! the information and analysis are top-notch! PLEASE STOP TELLING ME WHAT I DO AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT. I promise I am NOT bored by the politics! I do not need a meme a minute to keep myself invested!

[osprey_archer]

Surely MANY of us were drawn to this book by a long-standing interest in the assassination of Julius Caesar, and if you here for Caesar then the politics are in fact a large part of the POINT.

This makes it sound like I didn't care about the non-Caesar parts, which is not true; I was fascinated to learn that the Roman state didn't really have anti-murder laws for most of its existence, and what that tells us about the Roman conception of the point of law and the state etc. But Southon wasn't needlessly apologizing for those parts.