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Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 17th, 2018 08:23 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
The next two Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels, The Truth about Stacey and Mary Anne Saves the Day. You know, I read a lot of BSC back in the day, but I guess I never read any of the first few books in the series, so it’s been kind of delightful to meet my favorite old characters again in a new format in new-to-me stories.
I’ve also reread Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America as research for my next book - or rather the parts of it that are about the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair chapters and the murder chapters are quite separate: you can read one without the other. This book is so good at creating that “you are there” feeling that is so delicious in reading about history. I suppose the book would have been less of a success this way, but I wish he’d dropped the murder chapters entirely and filled the book with even more description of the fair: a fuller description of a performance at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a walk around the Algerian Village, more detail about the exhibits on view in the great white palaces.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Chimney-corner. During a chapter about public amusements (Stowe is in favor, and feels that church censoriousness tends to turn amusements that could be innocent into corrupting influences), Stowe talks a bit about public amusements in Germany, which people attend with “their faces radiant with that mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be characteristic of the nation.”
I’m always a little startled when 19th century people say this sort of thing (you can see it in Alcott, too, when she’s talking about Professor Bhaer); it’s so different than the 20th & 21st century ideas about Germany.
Other things this chapter taught me: Sunday school fetes and picnics (like the one Anne is so wild to attend in Anne of Green Gables were an innovation of the 1860s. Who knew? It strikes me that when we talk about “the nineteenth century,” at least in America, what we’re really talking about is the last half - even the last third of the nineteenth century, and the earlier part of it has quite a different character.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve started E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, which I’m enjoying more than the Bastables. (Sorry, Bastables.) The children have found a Psammead, a sand fairy, which has obligingly agreed to grant them one wish a day - now I know where Edward Eager got this structure!
I’ve also just begun Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress: A Story of the City Beautiful. This is research for my World’s Fair book - but it should be very pleasant research indeed! I can’t wait to find out what FHB made of the World’s Fair.
We haven’t gotten to the fair yet, though; right now the Two Pilgrims (Meg and Robin) are stuck at their Aunt Matilda’s farm, a large and successful operation that she manages on her own as a female farmer.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve discovered that my library has a copy of Dorothy Gilman’s A Nun in the Closet. Well, clearly my fate is sealed! I must read it!
The next two Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels, The Truth about Stacey and Mary Anne Saves the Day. You know, I read a lot of BSC back in the day, but I guess I never read any of the first few books in the series, so it’s been kind of delightful to meet my favorite old characters again in a new format in new-to-me stories.
I’ve also reread Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America as research for my next book - or rather the parts of it that are about the Chicago World’s Fair. The fair chapters and the murder chapters are quite separate: you can read one without the other. This book is so good at creating that “you are there” feeling that is so delicious in reading about history. I suppose the book would have been less of a success this way, but I wish he’d dropped the murder chapters entirely and filled the book with even more description of the fair: a fuller description of a performance at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a walk around the Algerian Village, more detail about the exhibits on view in the great white palaces.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Chimney-corner. During a chapter about public amusements (Stowe is in favor, and feels that church censoriousness tends to turn amusements that could be innocent into corrupting influences), Stowe talks a bit about public amusements in Germany, which people attend with “their faces radiant with that mild German light of contentment and good-will which one feels to be characteristic of the nation.”
I’m always a little startled when 19th century people say this sort of thing (you can see it in Alcott, too, when she’s talking about Professor Bhaer); it’s so different than the 20th & 21st century ideas about Germany.
Other things this chapter taught me: Sunday school fetes and picnics (like the one Anne is so wild to attend in Anne of Green Gables were an innovation of the 1860s. Who knew? It strikes me that when we talk about “the nineteenth century,” at least in America, what we’re really talking about is the last half - even the last third of the nineteenth century, and the earlier part of it has quite a different character.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve started E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It, which I’m enjoying more than the Bastables. (Sorry, Bastables.) The children have found a Psammead, a sand fairy, which has obligingly agreed to grant them one wish a day - now I know where Edward Eager got this structure!
I’ve also just begun Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress: A Story of the City Beautiful. This is research for my World’s Fair book - but it should be very pleasant research indeed! I can’t wait to find out what FHB made of the World’s Fair.
We haven’t gotten to the fair yet, though; right now the Two Pilgrims (Meg and Robin) are stuck at their Aunt Matilda’s farm, a large and successful operation that she manages on her own as a female farmer.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’ve discovered that my library has a copy of Dorothy Gilman’s A Nun in the Closet. Well, clearly my fate is sealed! I must read it!
