Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 29th, 2023 07:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking, a cookbook/food memoir about Lewis’s childhood during the Great Depression in Freetown, Virginia, a small agricultural hamlet founded by freedmen after the Civil War. A classic, full of succulent descriptions of food as it changed with the rhythms of the seasons. I read this on Thanksgiving and it is indeed a perfect Thanksgiving book.
Also Mary Stolz’s To Tell Your Love, another one of her young adult novels. (I briefly described it as a YA novel, but mid-century young adult is so different from modern that it feels misleading to use the acronym.) In this summer story, the POV drifts between 23-year-old Theo, a hospital nurse; her 14-year-old brother Johnny; and the middle sister, 19-year-old Anne, broken-hearted over a boyfriend who has just ghosted her.
But Anne begins to wonder if it might be just as well to lose the boyfriend when she meets up with her friend Nora, who gave up college last year to make a glorious romantic marriage at the age of seventeen… and now feels trapped in her new life, which she can’t admit to Anne but which Anne nonetheless can see. (At one point Nora leaves the baby with a sitter and feels “like a prisoner released from jail.”)
There is a tag scene where Nora calls her husband at his job at the garage (he had to quit college to support the growing family) and he’s happy to talk to her and Nora feels a warm glow, suggesting the marriage might work out after all, but the overall effect is to warn the young reader that perhaps getting married so very young is not so romantic after all.
What I’m Reading Now
Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White! Marian Halcombe sure is the kind of girl who bonds with men by chattering about how silly women are, huh. (And Wilkie Collins sure is the kind of writer who can write great individual female characters without having any very high opinion of women as a whole.)
I've also just begun D. K. Broster's Sir Isumbras at the Ford! Truly JUST begun it: our hero is still a little boy, who has just been put to bed.
What I Plan to Read Next
Still Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday! Simply ambushed by Laura Amy Schlitz earlier this week… not my fault.
Edna Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking, a cookbook/food memoir about Lewis’s childhood during the Great Depression in Freetown, Virginia, a small agricultural hamlet founded by freedmen after the Civil War. A classic, full of succulent descriptions of food as it changed with the rhythms of the seasons. I read this on Thanksgiving and it is indeed a perfect Thanksgiving book.
Also Mary Stolz’s To Tell Your Love, another one of her young adult novels. (I briefly described it as a YA novel, but mid-century young adult is so different from modern that it feels misleading to use the acronym.) In this summer story, the POV drifts between 23-year-old Theo, a hospital nurse; her 14-year-old brother Johnny; and the middle sister, 19-year-old Anne, broken-hearted over a boyfriend who has just ghosted her.
But Anne begins to wonder if it might be just as well to lose the boyfriend when she meets up with her friend Nora, who gave up college last year to make a glorious romantic marriage at the age of seventeen… and now feels trapped in her new life, which she can’t admit to Anne but which Anne nonetheless can see. (At one point Nora leaves the baby with a sitter and feels “like a prisoner released from jail.”)
There is a tag scene where Nora calls her husband at his job at the garage (he had to quit college to support the growing family) and he’s happy to talk to her and Nora feels a warm glow, suggesting the marriage might work out after all, but the overall effect is to warn the young reader that perhaps getting married so very young is not so romantic after all.
What I’m Reading Now
Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White! Marian Halcombe sure is the kind of girl who bonds with men by chattering about how silly women are, huh. (And Wilkie Collins sure is the kind of writer who can write great individual female characters without having any very high opinion of women as a whole.)
I've also just begun D. K. Broster's Sir Isumbras at the Ford! Truly JUST begun it: our hero is still a little boy, who has just been put to bed.
What I Plan to Read Next
Still Caroline B. Cooney’s Goddess of Yesterday! Simply ambushed by Laura Amy Schlitz earlier this week… not my fault.
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