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.

[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.)

[kore]

I've never even heard of that Snyder!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[scintilla10]

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