Wednesday Reading Meme
Sep. 22nd, 2021 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
David Kherdian’s The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl, the 1980 Newbery Honor winner, is sometimes shelved as biography and sometimes as a novel. It’s based on Veron’s memories of fleeing the Armenian massacres as a girl in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and told in the first person as if narrated by Veron, but given that Veron’s original narrative only filled eleven pages, her son must have added to it considerably.
Still, it’s a fascinating book, and very informative if (like me) you didn’t know a whole lot about the Armenian genocide. I was particularly distressed to learn that smaller massacres continued for years after 1916, which I’ve generally seen listed as the end date for the genocide. Veron nearly dies in a massacre in Smyrna in 1922.
There are definitely distressing parts of the book, but overall I didn’t find it a distressing read. As one of Veron’s teachers tells her, Veron is blessed with a good disposition, which gives her the ability to focus on whatever is good in the current situation instead of dwelling on the tragedies of the past.
I continued the Newbery Honor theme with Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms and Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller. I know lots of people love Raskin’s work (particularly The Westing Game, so I was hoping that this book might prove my entry point into her oeuvre, but alas, I still find her writing style distancing. This book is trying to be whimsical and serious at the same time and the balance just doesn’t work for me.
Old Yeller I didn’t expect to enjoy, but actually I quite liked it! It tells you right on the first page that the hero’s going to have to shoot the dog in the end, which I feel is a good place to give readers a chance to bail out, and I enjoyed all the adventures where the hero and his folks nearly get killed by one wild animal or another. (Aslittlerhymes and I have remarked many times while reading the Little House series, it's amazing anyone survived the nineteenth century.)
Moving off the Newbery theme (this week has been a bonanza of books), I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. It has certain charming and Snyder-typical qualities (the California setting; the imaginative heroine), but I can see why it’s not one of her better-known books, because the dog dies. Now, if I had read the back cover I would have been forewarned, as the description mentions that Carly’s dog gets bitten by a rabid coyote, and I know what THAT means in a 1980s children’s book… But I was so excited to find a new-to-me ZKS book that I snapped it up without actually looking at anything but the author's name.
Oh well. As far as I can remember this is the only ZKS book where the dog dies, and maybe she just needed to get it out of her system. I guess in every life a few dead dog books must fall. (I actually read this book before Old Yeller, and decided I might as well get Old Yeller out of the way too, it being well known as a dead dog book.)
Last but not least! I finished Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, a rollicking, tongue-in-cheek adventure novel with a plucky heroine and an EXTREMELY 1920s romance, with a hero who is repeatedly compared to a caveman. Nothing says “I love you” like the possibility of thunking your girl over the head and dragging her off to your cave, I guess! Normally I find these romances aggravating, but here it was oddly charming, perhaps because Christie seems perfectly aware that it’s ridiculous and is revelling in the ridiculousness of it all.
Although about half the book takes place in Rhodesia, our heroine Anne Beddingfield informs us rather warmly that there will be NO local color in this book, and she’s absolutely right; there’s a whole entire background revolution in which the book has no interest at all. My impression is that this is and remains about par for the course in Christie’s handling of race throughout her career, so I may henceforth confine myself to her books about people dying in that most deadly of English customs, the country house party.
What I’m Reading Now
Approaching the end of Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad. This week in petty Nazi fuckery, when the Nazis realized that they were about to lose the battle, they gave their soldiers one last chance to write home - then destroyed the letters. The only reason Beevor can quote the letters at all is that they were originally quoted in some bureaucrat’s “We should destroy these letters! They’ll be bad for homefront morale!” report.
Once the battle was lost, the Red Army captured twenty-two German commanders, including one who had ordered his soldiers to fight “to the last cartridge but one” (the last bullet of course is meant for the stalwart warrior to kill himself at the last: death before surrender!). The other generals are ribbing him about it and he’s all, well I tried to kill myself but my chief of staff prevented me. SIR. Do you think the stalwart warriors of old let their chiefs of staff get in the way?
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m coming up on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan on my Newbery list. Do I need to read A Wizard of Earthsea first? (I tried to read A Wizard of Earthsea in my youth and Did Not Care For It, but I suppose by now I might have outgrown that aversion.)
For as long as I knew the sky and the clouds, we lived in our white stucco house in the Armenian quarter of Azizya, in Turkey, but when the great dome of Heaven cracked and shattered over our lives, and we were abandoned by the sun and blown like scattered seed across the Arabian desert, none returned but me, and my Azizya, my precious home, was made to crumble and fall and forever disappear from my life.
David Kherdian’s The Road from Home: The Story of an Armenian Girl, the 1980 Newbery Honor winner, is sometimes shelved as biography and sometimes as a novel. It’s based on Veron’s memories of fleeing the Armenian massacres as a girl in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and told in the first person as if narrated by Veron, but given that Veron’s original narrative only filled eleven pages, her son must have added to it considerably.
Still, it’s a fascinating book, and very informative if (like me) you didn’t know a whole lot about the Armenian genocide. I was particularly distressed to learn that smaller massacres continued for years after 1916, which I’ve generally seen listed as the end date for the genocide. Veron nearly dies in a massacre in Smyrna in 1922.
There are definitely distressing parts of the book, but overall I didn’t find it a distressing read. As one of Veron’s teachers tells her, Veron is blessed with a good disposition, which gives her the ability to focus on whatever is good in the current situation instead of dwelling on the tragedies of the past.
I continued the Newbery Honor theme with Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms and Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller. I know lots of people love Raskin’s work (particularly The Westing Game, so I was hoping that this book might prove my entry point into her oeuvre, but alas, I still find her writing style distancing. This book is trying to be whimsical and serious at the same time and the balance just doesn’t work for me.
Old Yeller I didn’t expect to enjoy, but actually I quite liked it! It tells you right on the first page that the hero’s going to have to shoot the dog in the end, which I feel is a good place to give readers a chance to bail out, and I enjoyed all the adventures where the hero and his folks nearly get killed by one wild animal or another. (As
littlerhymes and I have remarked many times while reading the Little House series, it's amazing anyone survived the nineteenth century.)Moving off the Newbery theme (this week has been a bonanza of books), I finished Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s And Condors Danced. It has certain charming and Snyder-typical qualities (the California setting; the imaginative heroine), but I can see why it’s not one of her better-known books, because the dog dies. Now, if I had read the back cover I would have been forewarned, as the description mentions that Carly’s dog gets bitten by a rabid coyote, and I know what THAT means in a 1980s children’s book… But I was so excited to find a new-to-me ZKS book that I snapped it up without actually looking at anything but the author's name.
Oh well. As far as I can remember this is the only ZKS book where the dog dies, and maybe she just needed to get it out of her system. I guess in every life a few dead dog books must fall. (I actually read this book before Old Yeller, and decided I might as well get Old Yeller out of the way too, it being well known as a dead dog book.)
Last but not least! I finished Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, a rollicking, tongue-in-cheek adventure novel with a plucky heroine and an EXTREMELY 1920s romance, with a hero who is repeatedly compared to a caveman. Nothing says “I love you” like the possibility of thunking your girl over the head and dragging her off to your cave, I guess! Normally I find these romances aggravating, but here it was oddly charming, perhaps because Christie seems perfectly aware that it’s ridiculous and is revelling in the ridiculousness of it all.
Although about half the book takes place in Rhodesia, our heroine Anne Beddingfield informs us rather warmly that there will be NO local color in this book, and she’s absolutely right; there’s a whole entire background revolution in which the book has no interest at all. My impression is that this is and remains about par for the course in Christie’s handling of race throughout her career, so I may henceforth confine myself to her books about people dying in that most deadly of English customs, the country house party.
What I’m Reading Now
Approaching the end of Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad. This week in petty Nazi fuckery, when the Nazis realized that they were about to lose the battle, they gave their soldiers one last chance to write home - then destroyed the letters. The only reason Beevor can quote the letters at all is that they were originally quoted in some bureaucrat’s “We should destroy these letters! They’ll be bad for homefront morale!” report.
Once the battle was lost, the Red Army captured twenty-two German commanders, including one who had ordered his soldiers to fight “to the last cartridge but one” (the last bullet of course is meant for the stalwart warrior to kill himself at the last: death before surrender!). The other generals are ribbing him about it and he’s all, well I tried to kill myself but my chief of staff prevented me. SIR. Do you think the stalwart warriors of old let their chiefs of staff get in the way?
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m coming up on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan on my Newbery list. Do I need to read A Wizard of Earthsea first? (I tried to read A Wizard of Earthsea in my youth and Did Not Care For It, but I suppose by now I might have outgrown that aversion.)
no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 03:53 pm (UTC)(I have been arachnaphobic all my days and I still love Charlotte!)
no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-23 04:53 pm (UTC)AS A PRESENT
He also read me Of Mice and Men. He loved Steinbeck. Somehow, I went on to love Steinbeck too in spite of this introduction.