Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A bonanza of Newbery books this week! Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (fun, but not as good as A Girl Named Disaster, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Sign of the Beaver (a white boy is left alone to hold the claim while his father fetches the rest of the family; befriended by local Indian boy. It was written in the 1980s and is very eighties), Paul Fleischman’s Graven Images (a collection of three short stories, each one prominently featuring a statue. I have just now realized that Sid and Paul Fleischman are different people; Sid was Paul’s father), AND FINALLY Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (a ghost story, although the ghost is almost beside the point; very sad).

I also finished Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I wish I had read back when I was writing Captain America fanfic, as it could have added interesting new depth to the minor plotline of Bucky vs. The SHIELD Therapists… although really I suspect the SHIELD vision of “therapy” is to apply a twisted version of CBT to browbeat agents into submission. These are the people who recruited Skye by kidnapping her, after all.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment and I’m going to read all of Mary Renault’s books. (Well, maybe not all. I understand there are some early works about heterosexuals, which I probably won’t bother with.)

Speaking of heterosexuals, I’ve also begun Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality, by which he means not male-female bonking in general but the specific cultural construction where it is VERY IMPORTANT that men and women direct every single iota of their erotic energy entirely at opposite-sexed people at all times.

I haven’t gotten very far in this yet, but it has a delightfully acid forward by Gore Vidal, who gets distracted from actually discussing the book in question to pursue a decades-old feud with his frenemy James Baldwin. Apparently Baldwin said some mean things about Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, and now Vidal is returning the favor by calling Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room “a perfect panic of a book that ends with the beloved one’s head chopped off in Paris.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I was going to say “I think I should take a break from the Newbery Honor books for a while,” but actually I’m on a roll right now, so why cut myself short?

Comments

[oracne]

Nancy Farmer has written some cool books.

[osprey_archer]

Yes! I was actually kind of dreading her 1990s Newbery books, because I found her later book The House of the Scorpion a slog, but actually they were both delightful.

[sovay]

(Well, maybe not all. I understand there are some early works about heterosexuals, which I probably won’t bother with.)

Her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939), is a still-unusual attempt to represent a m/f relationship between two bisexual people and therefore worth reading in my experience, even though it is made to collapse with infuriating artificiality in the third act. Return to Night (1947) has the peculiar fault of a closing narration that runs counter to the internal evidence of the rest of the text, but I tell myself it's an unreliable tight third person and the rest of the novel is interestingly genderqueered het; I like both the protagonist and her love interest. You already put yourself through The Friendly Young Ladies (1944). I don't recommend bothering with The North Face (1948). I have never actually seen a copy of Kind Are Her Answers (1940), but have also never received the impression from anyone the impression that I need to seek it out.

[osprey_archer]

This may turn out to be a lifelong project, as I seem to need a few months recovery time after each Renault book (although this estimated recovery time may be skewed by The Friendly Young Ladies. Still not over it tbh). But I'll keep this in mind next time I'm on the hunt.

[sovay]

(although this estimated recovery time may be skewed by The Friendly Young Ladies. Still not over it tbh).

I last read The Friendly Young Ladies in 2006 and I'm not over it. It may not be psychologically possible. I think it's the kind of book that promotes bonding by screaming over it.

But I'll keep this in mind next time I'm on the hunt.

I genuiney enjoy and re-read while arguing with Return to Night. If you are embarking on Renault's classicals, my favorite is The Mask of Apollo (1966) and it's held up every time I've revisited it, regardless of the accuracy of its understanding of fourth-century Athenian theater. It formed a lot of my feelings about the Bacchae.

[osprey_archer]

It's true, The Friendly Young Ladies does provide a great service in this way. How can anyone avoid screaming about the character transplants both Joe and Leo receive when they become Heterosexual? (Technically Joe was heterosexual for the whole book. The big-H Heterosexuality arrives when he and Leo both transform into archetypes of 1930s heterosexuality.)