Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

When I was in elementary school my friend Micky and I bonded over our mutual loathing of Cynthia Voigt’s Dicey’s Song, so it was with some dismay that I realized I was enjoying the sequel, A Solitary Blue. Who even am I as a person? Maybe it’s just that I’m an adult now; maybe Voigt is one of those children’s book authors adults tend to enjoy more than children.

A Solitary Blue gives us the backstory of Dicey’s boyfriend, Jeff Greene. Jeff’s mother Melody abandoned the family when Jeff was seven, leaving Jeff with his emotionally distant absentminded professor father and a boatload of abandonment issues. A few years later, Melody invites Jeff to come stay with her for the summer, and at first Jeff is bowled over by her warmth and charm and ability to make him feel like the center of the universe just by looking into his eyes. Slowly, however, as instances of Melody’s selfishness and unreliability mount, Jeff realizes that the ability to make someone feel seen and loved in the moment is not the same as actually seeing and loving them as a whole person, and that Melody does not and perhaps cannot love him that way.

The rest of the book is about Jeff slowly learning how to trust and reach out to other people again. It’s also about Jeff’s father realizing that he’s been emotionally absent from Jeff’s life, and learning how to be present. He has a dramatic wake-up call when he almost fails to notice that Jeff has come down with a virulent fever, but his reformation afterward is understated. He simply begins making an effort to be present, to pay attention to Jeff, and he does this so calmly and quietly and reliably that slowly both Jeff and the reader come to understand that this change is here to stay.

I also knocked off Wayne Vansant’s The Red Baron: A Graphic History of Richthofen’s Flying Circus and the Air War of WWI, which was meant to be research for… a book I am not writing right now after all… but time spent reading about World War I fighter pilots is always time well spent, I suppose.

What I’m Reading Now

Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic! I’ve had a long Mary Stewart hiatus, because I save Mary Stewart books for trips (that way I know I’ll have something enjoyable, fast-paced, and reasonably light to read on the journey) and of course there haven’t been many trips for the past year and a half… but over Labor Day weekend I went to Tennessee to visit a penpal, so Mary Stewart has returned! This book is set in Greece, and I always think that Stewart’s books in Greece (The Moon-Spinners, My Brother Michael) are particularly strong. She must have found the country inspiring.

For a few months I took a break on Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, because I couldn’t handle anymore about the poor civilians of Stalingrad (the evacuation, such as it was, was extremely late and half-hearted), but now I’m back in the saddle. The tide of battle has turned: the Soviet armies have encircled the Germans, who are clinging to the thought that Hitler will save them by Christmas, unaware that Hitler doesn’t even intend to try.

What I Plan to Read Next

On my trip I spent a happy hour trawling a used bookstore, and found Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. A Zilpha Keatley Snyder I haven’t read yet! So excited.

Comments

[oracne]

THIS ROUGH MAGIC and THE MOON-SPINNERS are two of my very favorite Stewarts. They survived the recent cull.

[osprey_archer]

IIRC The Moon-Spinners was my first Stewart, and it's a fantastic place to start. The whole sequence where the heroine and the wounded hero have to snuggle for warmth while he is hiding from the bad guys! Truly classic.

[konstantya]

I remember I got out Dicey's Song from the library when I was thirteen or so, but couldn't actually get into it. At the time I blamed it on not having read the previous book, Homecoming, but maybe it was more than that? Interestingly enough, I actually have A Solitary Blue on my bookshelf, as I picked it up from a used bookstore when I was in college--partly because the back summary sounded interesting, and maybe because I also wanted to give Cynthia Voigt another try, now that I was older and more learned? (Alas, I never actually got around to reading it, pfft. Reading your take on it, though, makes me think I shouldn't yet put it on the giveaway pile? It seems like the sort of thing I'd definitely have to be in the right mood for, but could, in fact, probably appreciate these days.)

[osprey_archer]

I've never read Homecoming either, and I do wonder if that contributed to the way I bounced off Dicey's Song, but I also think I just found Dicey's Song overall too grim. I probably would have had the same reaction to Homecoming and never even gotten to Dicey's Song at all if I tried to start at the beginning.

Anyway, you might like A Solitary Blue! At very least, I don't think it would suffer at all from your not having read Homecoming and Dicey's Song; Dicey and her family don't show up till quite a ways into the book.

[landofnowhere]

I enjoyed Homecoming as a kid, and enjoyed it as a survival/adventure sort of story, like the Boxcar children -- the problems the kids face are pretty grim, but they are able to use their agency to face them.

Dicey's song I read but didn't love -- I wouldn't have recommended it as a place to start.

[kore]

I've never even heard of that Snyder!

[osprey_archer]

She wrote a LOT of books, and the quality can be kind of uneven, but naturally I hope this one is a secret gem.

[genarti]

I loved Homecoming, and had slightly mixed feelings about Dicey's Song, but overall I loved it too. (Mixed mostly because I was young enough to want Homecoming's complicated happy ending to end uncomplicatedly there, and instead got all the uncomfortable thorny complexity of Dicey and all her siblings carrying on with life and growing up, having put down some of her burdens but still being a person who was just carrying them; I was old enough to be aware that it was a better and truer book for that thorniness, but nonetheless kept kind of wanting it to be a simpler one.) I never really fell in love with any of the other books of the Tillerman cycle in the same way, though. I read and liked some, but they didn't stick with me as much. I'm sure I read A Solitary Blue, but I don't remember it at all!

I should give them another try, now that I'm an adult instead of a teenager, and see how my opinions have shifted.

I'm also trying to remember how old I was when I read them. I don't think it was elementary school, but maybe? Maybe middle school, though.

[genarti]

Oh, and also I love This Rough Magic! I bounced off it the first time I read it because it had a dolphin on the cover and the title it has, and I had read A Ring of Endless Light not all that long ago in addition to a lot of books with psychic animal companions, and thus I wanted it to be a VERY different book than it was. But when I went back later and reread it for the book it is, I really enjoyed it. It's not quite my favorite Mary Stewart, but it's definitely a top-tier one!

[osprey_archer]

Oooooh, yeah, going into This Rough Magic hoping for psychic animal companions is absolutely going to ruin the book for you. But the word "Magic" is right in the title, though! Psychic animal companions is not an unreasonable expectation.

[sovay]

It's not quite my favorite Mary Stewart, but it's definitely a top-tier one!

I read it for the first time in high school and immediately pictured Julian Gale as Derek Jacobi, even though I have been assured that Stewart probably meant him to be played by John Gielgud.

[asakiyume]

The dolphins in A Ring of Endless Light <3 <3 <3 <3

It was because of that book that I took a course in college on the metaphysical poets.

[osprey_archer]

I think I was in fifth grade or something like that when I read Dicey's Song, and I think I was just not mature enough to appreciate the thorniness of it all. I wanted Dicey's crotchety grandma to reveal a heart of gold, a la Marilla in Anne of Green Gables, or Dicey to stop being so angry all the time, or SOMETHING, some kind of movement towards less emotional complication and more happiness, and it just never moved that way at all.

[asakiyume]

What you say about appreciating the thorniness of it all... What is it where sometimes we can appreciate that and sometimes we can't? I don't think it's *just* maturity, although maybe we need a little maturity.

... I know there are some lives I just don't want to spend time inhabiting, and others where I'm okay with it, even if, to another person's eye, the situations in the books are similar.

[osprey_archer]

I do think that my tolerances have changed with maturity, and there are characters/books I've appreciated now that I wouldn't have as a child... but there are definitely still some that I don't appreciate. It's hard to predict, though, exactly what I won't like.

I remember getting so irritated in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix because Harry was so ANGRY all the time (usually in CAPITAL LETTERS), and people defended that choice as realistic given the trauma he had gone through... but you know what, who cares about realism? It's a series set at a goddamn magical school. He's a fictional character and he wasn't fun to read about anymore.

[sovay]

He simply begins making an effort to be present, to pay attention to Jeff, and he does this so calmly and quietly and reliably that slowly both Jeff and the reader come to understand that this change is here to stay.

That sounds really nice. I must have read A Solitary Blue because I remember reading all the Voigt I could find after a fifth-grade teacher read us Homecoming, but I have no memory of it beyond the heron-metaphor of the title.

Mary Stewart’s This Rough Magic!

It's one of my favorites.

[osprey_archer]

I think often books where parents have a redemption arc like this really have them turn it around overnight, and then everything is hunky-dory, and the more gradual approach here felt more earned and real. Although apparently it's not very memorable over the long-term, because you aren't the only one who has commented that they THINK they read this book but can't actually remember anything about it.

Mary Stewart is an incredibly reliable author and I really appreciate that about her. You always know you're going to get a good read, and the only question is will this one be merely good, or REALLY good?

[sovay]

Although apparently it's not very memorable over the long-term, because you aren't the only one who has commented that they THINK they read this book but can't actually remember anything about it.

Ouch. Especially if it has such well-done emotional growth. To be fair, I couldn't summarize other books in the Tillerman cycle off the top of my head, but at least I know that I read Seventeen Against the Dealer; it's the one with the boatbuilding.

You always know you're going to get a good read, and the only question is will this one be merely good, or REALLY good?

She has exactly one where atypically I wanted to shove the romance off a cliff, but it also has out-of-left-field almost-folk-horror, so I accept its existence even if I don't re-read it.

[osprey_archer]

Is that one Wildfire at Midnight? My impression of the book is rather vague at this point, but IIRC the romance didn't work for me.

Generally speaking I find mid-twentieth-century romance plots a barren wasteland, and Stewart is using many of the common tropes (the hero and the heroine almost always dislike each other at the beginning, etc.), and yet somehow the way Stewart puts it together usually makes it work for me. I think it's because there usually is a moment where the hero and the heroine start working together, and at that point you can see that they do like and respect each other.

[sovay]

Is that one Wildfire at Midnight? My impression of the book is rather vague at this point, but IIRC the romance didn't work for me.

It is. I was fine with the divorced couple running into one another again, but I thought they should have stayed that way.

and yet somehow the way Stewart puts it together usually makes it work for me. I think it's because there usually is a moment where the hero and the heroine start working together, and at that point you can see that they do like and respect each other.

Agreed on both fronts. Also they are usually each interesting people in their own right, and putting them together does not make them less so.

[rachelmanija]

I love A Solitary Blue but I also love Dicey's Song (and did when I was twelve.) It might be worth a revisit. I didn't find it grim despite the mother's death, as everyone's obviously in a much better situation. The one I thought was depressing was Seventeen Against the Dealer, which unfortunately is also the last book in the series.

[osprey_archer]

I think I was expecting something a bit more Boxcar Children from Dicey's Song, and then the book was, like, dealing with psychological consequences of bereavement, and Dicey's grandmother was WAY more hardcore than Grandpa Alden, and I was just not there for it. I would probably appreciate it more now.

[cyphomandra]

My favourite of the Tillerman books is The Runner, about Dicey’s uncle when he was a teenager, but if you’re looking for more cheerful it is also not your book.

I went through a phase of trying to track down all the Zilpha Keatlry Snyders I could, and although I drifted off at some point (as I tend to do with closed canon authors due to a deep underlying fear of having read everything they’ve written, cf Georgette Heyer, Dick Francis etc) I do have And Condors Danced somewhere. I thought it was solid but not outstanding.

[osprey_archer]

Dicey's uncle who died tragically in Vietnam and plunged Dicey's grandmother into despair and sorrow? Even if the book itself is a barrel of laughs I think knowing his eventual fate might make it rough going.

In college I swooped through all of Jane Austen and then realized there were NO MORE, and ever since I have felt a similar leeriness about reading all an author's books, although I do manage it occasionally - usually with less prolific authors, though. And I'm not anywhere close on Zilpha Keatley Snyder!

[scintilla10]

This Rough Magic is one of my faves, too! Her Greece books are all particularly good.

[osprey_archer]

I think this is the last of the Greece books I haven't read! But I do still have a few other Mary Stewarts to go, including the entire Merlin quartet.