Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Bill Peet: An Autobiography in hope of picking up some tidbits about Indianapolis in the 1920s and 30s for Tramps and Vagabonds - and not only did I pick up some tidbits for that project, but also loads of interesting information about making it as an artist in the mid-twentieth century that I might just be able to use in another book.

Peet got his start doing paintings and department store ads, found a stable but stultifying job coloring greeting cards, and then ended up at Disney animation (where he based the character of Merlin in The Sword and the Stone on Disney himself!) before breaking free to write and illustrate his own picture books, which he did to great acclaim, as this one won a Caldecott honor.

I also finished Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, which is such an unusual book. It focuses not on any specific character as an individual - in fact, any individual nun whose head bobs above the surface of the narrative is pretty sure to see her ambitions and desires frustrated - but on the persistence of the community of nuns at Oby, and on the lives that intersect with the nunnery, like the wandering clerk who shows up during the Black Death, passes himself off as a priest more or less on a whim, and then just… stays… for decades.

In a way it’s kind of a downer, what with all these individual hopes and desires being thwarted left and right, but it’s also a hypnotic read: the wheel of the seasons, the passing of the years, all these things have happened before and will happen again, and yet there are a few events that break the passage of time, like the Black Death, and their aftereffects ring and ring and ring through the books like the ripples on a pond. It is a book where you can see time passing, and the shape of history.

What I’m Reading Now

After a long hiatus, I’m back at work on Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman! John and Phineas’s golden boyhood friendship - they call each other David and Jonathan, because of course they do - is about to be interrupted when John Holifax falls in love with a girl. Phineas recalls a glorious Sunday ramble together, and then muses, “that Sunday was the last I ever had David altogether for my own - my very own. It was natural, it was just, it was right. God forbid that in any way I should have murmured.”

Complaining about one’s friend’s romantic attachments never does anyone any good, I suppose - it only drives the friend away - but OH MY GOD DUDE.

I’ve also begun Violet Jacob’s Flemington, a tale of the ‘45 in which young Archie Flemington, masquerading as an itinerant painter, has undertaken to spy on James Logie. Only they have become FAST FRIENDS, and James has told Archie the tragic tale of the treachery that cost him his wife and baby son, and of course Archie is now EATEN ALIVE with guilt for his own treacherous spying on James…

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been reorganizing my book tag and it reminded me how much I like series, so I am giving new thought to three serieses that I have long meant to read! James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small books (I suppose those aren’t technically a series…), Horatio Hornblower, and the Aubrey-Maturin books.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I remember reading Bill Peet picture books as a kid--I remember liking The Pinkish, Purplish, Bluish Egg. I had no idea that he also worked at Disney!

their aftereffects ring and ring and ring through the books like the ripples on a pond. It is a book where you can see time passing, and the shape of history. --that's beautiful.

[oracne]

Oooh, Herriot is great! I read them more than once, but it's been a looooooooong time. The WWII one is my favorite.

[regshoe]

The Corner That Held Them is a strange and beautiful book (like everything Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote, really—have you read any of her other books?). I like your observations on the sense of history it gives—I really must revisit it sometime.

Oh dear, all that with Phineas is rather a lot, isn't it... poor Phineas.

Flemington has some excellent DRAMA and—without spoilers—it gets even more emotionally dramatic for Archie later on. Great fun—I hope you enjoy it :D

I've been watching the new adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small, which inspired me to start re-watching the 1970s adaptation (much better, really), and now I'm considering a re-read of the books, which it's been ages since I read.

[sovay]

I read Bill Peet: An Autobiography in hope of picking up some tidbits about Indianapolis in the 1920s and 30s for Tramps and Vagabonds - and not only did I pick up some tidbits for that project, but also loads of interesting information about making it as an artist in the mid-twentieth century that I might just be able to use in another book.

I read this book almost constantly out of the Cambridge Public Library as a child, long before I saw any of the Disney fims he had worked on and sometimes even before I had read the books which he wrote and illustrated. I love it.

[philomytha]

Bill Peet! I knew the name was familiar and I googled and realised he wrote Jethro and Joel Were A Troll which was a staple of my childhood.

And oh, Phineas! Have you got to the theatre sequence yet?

[luzula]

Flemington! \o/ It's so much fun to trace the influence from that to Flight of the Heron, not that Broster wasn't a slash writer before that. Looking forward to hearing your further thoughts on it.

Also I second regshoe’s rec for Lolly Willowes! It's a lovely and intriguing book. Oh, and if you want more STW, there's also Summer Will Show, where a Victorian wife follows her cheating husband to Paris, ditches the husband, and gets together with his mistress during the 1848 revolution!

And finally, I'm very fond of the Aubrey-Maturin books, which I read spread out over many years. After a while they get sort of like fanfiction of themselves, but they’re always very enjoyable.