Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 10th, 2022 08:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I have read MANY books this week, because my housemate tested positive for Covid, which means I also am stuck at home (currently I’m all right… just waiting to see what happens…) without much to do but read.
The Traveling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel, with an adorable cat illustration at the beginning of each chapter by Yoco Nagamiya. I picked this up on a whim because the cover enchanted me, and I’ve enjoyed a number of Japanese novels in translation (maybe I should have a tag for that?), and it did not disappoint. Our narrator, Nana, is a cat with a crooked tail shaped like a seven (whence comes his name), and the story tells of his travels with his owner Satoru. Satoru is looking for a new home for Nana, and on the way we not only take a tour through Japan, but through Satoru’s past as he visits old friends.
It turns out that Satoru needs a new home for Nana because Satoru has cancer. If I had known this, I would not have picked up the book, because usually I hate cancer books… but it’s not really a book about cancer; it’s about Satoru’s life and his bond with Nana and with his friends and family, and his cancer is really just a catalyst to explore the history that Satoru shares with these people and of course his cat.
Satoru’s death reminded me (in terms of emotional impact, not actual details) of Charlotte’s death in Charlotte’s Web: it’s sad, but it’s treated as part of the natural order of things rather than a tragic rupture. Obviously with any fictional death your mileage may vary, but I found it cathartic rather than depressing.
William Dean Howells’ The Flight of Pony Baker is a book for boys in the style of Tom Sawyer, and it draws so heavily on Howells’ memoir A Boy’s Town that one really only needs to read one of the two books. Personally I found The Flight of Pony Baker much weaker: the plotting is clunky, and Howells has pruned back a lot of the detail that made A Boy’s Town so fascinating.
Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion is a series of interlinked short stories about Jess and Eliza Birdwell and their brood, a Quaker family in southern Indiana during and after the Civil War. Earlier this year I happened to visit their neck of the woods (Clifty Falls and the town of Vernon) and it was thrilling to see these locales in fiction, although I expect that they’re much changed.
Mostly these are tales of incidents from ordinary life: the time that Jess brought home an organ (when Quakers aren’t supposed to have musical instruments), a daughter of the family getting her first crush, a son breaking with Quaker pacifism to join the Vernon militia to defend the town against Morgan’s Raiders (only for the Raiders to pass Vernon by)... Of course in some ways a raid, even one that never comes off, is a big break from ordinary life, but West writes it as an extension thereof. Ordinary life stretched out to its edges.
AND FINALLY, Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Escape to Persia, sequel to The Far-Distant Oxus. As often happens with sequels, this is not quite as good as the first, although in this case the fall-off is very slight: none of the children’s adventures are as epic as their week-long trek to the sea in the first book, but they still have lots of fun. It’s easier perhaps to write a good sequel when the first book was episodic: all you have to do is come up with more fun episodes, not a whole new plot just as good as the first.
What I’m Reading Now
In Dracula Daily, Dracula has spent the last couple of weeks eating the crew of a ship one by one, as chronicled in the captain’s log. It builds up such dread to read this as it happens, and makes it so sad when the ship crashed at Whitby, with the heroic captain lashed to the helm, dead… the journalist writing up the incident hints darkly that perhaps the captain killed his crew, but fortunately the townsfolk know better and are planning a hero’s funeral.
What I Plan to Read Next
Through carefully laid plans to abuse my parents’ library privileges, I have cut the number of Newbery Honor books I will need to interlibrary loan down from seventy-two to a mere forty!
I have read MANY books this week, because my housemate tested positive for Covid, which means I also am stuck at home (currently I’m all right… just waiting to see what happens…) without much to do but read.
The Traveling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, translated by Philip Gabriel, with an adorable cat illustration at the beginning of each chapter by Yoco Nagamiya. I picked this up on a whim because the cover enchanted me, and I’ve enjoyed a number of Japanese novels in translation (maybe I should have a tag for that?), and it did not disappoint. Our narrator, Nana, is a cat with a crooked tail shaped like a seven (whence comes his name), and the story tells of his travels with his owner Satoru. Satoru is looking for a new home for Nana, and on the way we not only take a tour through Japan, but through Satoru’s past as he visits old friends.
It turns out that Satoru needs a new home for Nana because Satoru has cancer. If I had known this, I would not have picked up the book, because usually I hate cancer books… but it’s not really a book about cancer; it’s about Satoru’s life and his bond with Nana and with his friends and family, and his cancer is really just a catalyst to explore the history that Satoru shares with these people and of course his cat.
Satoru’s death reminded me (in terms of emotional impact, not actual details) of Charlotte’s death in Charlotte’s Web: it’s sad, but it’s treated as part of the natural order of things rather than a tragic rupture. Obviously with any fictional death your mileage may vary, but I found it cathartic rather than depressing.
William Dean Howells’ The Flight of Pony Baker is a book for boys in the style of Tom Sawyer, and it draws so heavily on Howells’ memoir A Boy’s Town that one really only needs to read one of the two books. Personally I found The Flight of Pony Baker much weaker: the plotting is clunky, and Howells has pruned back a lot of the detail that made A Boy’s Town so fascinating.
Jessamyn West’s The Friendly Persuasion is a series of interlinked short stories about Jess and Eliza Birdwell and their brood, a Quaker family in southern Indiana during and after the Civil War. Earlier this year I happened to visit their neck of the woods (Clifty Falls and the town of Vernon) and it was thrilling to see these locales in fiction, although I expect that they’re much changed.
Mostly these are tales of incidents from ordinary life: the time that Jess brought home an organ (when Quakers aren’t supposed to have musical instruments), a daughter of the family getting her first crush, a son breaking with Quaker pacifism to join the Vernon militia to defend the town against Morgan’s Raiders (only for the Raiders to pass Vernon by)... Of course in some ways a raid, even one that never comes off, is a big break from ordinary life, but West writes it as an extension thereof. Ordinary life stretched out to its edges.
AND FINALLY, Katharine Hull & Pamela Whitlock’s Escape to Persia, sequel to The Far-Distant Oxus. As often happens with sequels, this is not quite as good as the first, although in this case the fall-off is very slight: none of the children’s adventures are as epic as their week-long trek to the sea in the first book, but they still have lots of fun. It’s easier perhaps to write a good sequel when the first book was episodic: all you have to do is come up with more fun episodes, not a whole new plot just as good as the first.
What I’m Reading Now
In Dracula Daily, Dracula has spent the last couple of weeks eating the crew of a ship one by one, as chronicled in the captain’s log. It builds up such dread to read this as it happens, and makes it so sad when the ship crashed at Whitby, with the heroic captain lashed to the helm, dead… the journalist writing up the incident hints darkly that perhaps the captain killed his crew, but fortunately the townsfolk know better and are planning a hero’s funeral.
What I Plan to Read Next
Through carefully laid plans to abuse my parents’ library privileges, I have cut the number of Newbery Honor books I will need to interlibrary loan down from seventy-two to a mere forty!
