Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 15th, 2023 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Mary Stolz’s Good-by My Shadow is an intimate, interior book, just a few days in the life of a teenager in a midwestern town. To be honest, it was a little bit more navel-gazy than I personally prefer, although this is very much the point: our heroine, fifteen-year-old Barbara, suffers from the all-consuming self-consciousness that sometimes afflicts adolescents, which means that she’s constantly overthinking her interactions in a way that means she often fixates on minutia while missing the blatantly obvious. My favorite example: a boy calls Barbara on the phone, and she’s so busy monitoring her own meta-analysis of the conversation that she almost doesn’t notice him asking if he can escort her to a party that evening.
Although Barbara admits to herself, somewhat grumpily, that her family is really pretty terrific, she’s so self-absorbed that she feels cut off from them, simply because it’s hard for her to get out of her own head enough to communicate effectively. There’s no dramatic character arc here, just a wisp of a realization that perhaps, after all, the problem is that she’s not present enough in her own life, followed by a few stumbling baby steps toward getting out of her head to pay attention to other people.
Also Mary Gould Davis’s The Truce of the Wolf and Other Tales of Old Italy, an enchanting collection of Italian folktales that got a Newbery Honor in 1932. I particularly liked the title tale, in which St. Francis of Assisi brokers a truce between a wolf and the town the wolf has been terrorizing, and the story of the heroic if sometimes ornery donkey Nanni, who doesn’t like to cross bridges but instead wades through the stream while his owner sighs and rolls his eyes and smokes a pipe. Now that is a theory of time management I can get behind!
What I’m Reading Now
Mary Stolz’s short story collection The Beautiful Friend and Other Stories. So far I’ve read the title story, which I have to say that I approached with some trepidation, because there are so many ways a story with a title like “The Beautiful Friend” could collapse in a heap of misogynistic tripe.
I should have trusted Mary Stolz more. She is one of the naturally feminist writers, who not only likes women but also understands that women - that all humans - can be complicated and contradictory; that Ella can be genuinely fond of her beautiful friend Madi and also have an attack of insecurity when Madi meets Ella’s fiance for the first time. Her society is so steeped in a particular spun-gold ideal of beauty that Ella struggles a little to accept that her fiance can truly love and want her even though she doesn’t meet it.
What I Plan to Read Next
PINING for the library to bring me Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday. What is up with the holds system! It’s gotten so slow in the months that I was away!
Mary Stolz’s Good-by My Shadow is an intimate, interior book, just a few days in the life of a teenager in a midwestern town. To be honest, it was a little bit more navel-gazy than I personally prefer, although this is very much the point: our heroine, fifteen-year-old Barbara, suffers from the all-consuming self-consciousness that sometimes afflicts adolescents, which means that she’s constantly overthinking her interactions in a way that means she often fixates on minutia while missing the blatantly obvious. My favorite example: a boy calls Barbara on the phone, and she’s so busy monitoring her own meta-analysis of the conversation that she almost doesn’t notice him asking if he can escort her to a party that evening.
Although Barbara admits to herself, somewhat grumpily, that her family is really pretty terrific, she’s so self-absorbed that she feels cut off from them, simply because it’s hard for her to get out of her own head enough to communicate effectively. There’s no dramatic character arc here, just a wisp of a realization that perhaps, after all, the problem is that she’s not present enough in her own life, followed by a few stumbling baby steps toward getting out of her head to pay attention to other people.
Also Mary Gould Davis’s The Truce of the Wolf and Other Tales of Old Italy, an enchanting collection of Italian folktales that got a Newbery Honor in 1932. I particularly liked the title tale, in which St. Francis of Assisi brokers a truce between a wolf and the town the wolf has been terrorizing, and the story of the heroic if sometimes ornery donkey Nanni, who doesn’t like to cross bridges but instead wades through the stream while his owner sighs and rolls his eyes and smokes a pipe. Now that is a theory of time management I can get behind!
What I’m Reading Now
Mary Stolz’s short story collection The Beautiful Friend and Other Stories. So far I’ve read the title story, which I have to say that I approached with some trepidation, because there are so many ways a story with a title like “The Beautiful Friend” could collapse in a heap of misogynistic tripe.
I should have trusted Mary Stolz more. She is one of the naturally feminist writers, who not only likes women but also understands that women - that all humans - can be complicated and contradictory; that Ella can be genuinely fond of her beautiful friend Madi and also have an attack of insecurity when Madi meets Ella’s fiance for the first time. Her society is so steeped in a particular spun-gold ideal of beauty that Ella struggles a little to accept that her fiance can truly love and want her even though she doesn’t meet it.
What I Plan to Read Next
PINING for the library to bring me Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday. What is up with the holds system! It’s gotten so slow in the months that I was away!
