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Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 14th, 2023 11:28 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns! This is a big chonk of a book with some heavy material (especially the lynching descriptions in the chapters about the Jim Crow South), so it took me a while to get through, but if you’re interested in the history of the Great Migration (the exodus of Black Americans from the South to the North from roughly 1915-1970), this gives a good overview and also a recounts in detail the life stories of three of the migrants.
Wilkerson often compares the experience of the migrants to the immigrant experience: like immigrants from across the sea, the migrants from the South brought traditional foods and stories, clubbed together with other migrants from the same area, loved to talk about life in the Old Country, etc. Although the comparison is illuminating, Wilkerson notes that many of the people she interviewed disliked the framing, because it made them sound as if they weren’t already Americans when their ancestors had been in this country for hundreds of years.
I also read W. E. Johns’ Worrals in the Wastelands, a delightful book! Worrals and Frecks embark on a mission to capture escaped Nazi Anna Schultz, who is hiding away at a remote lake in Canada panning for gold. Tense, pacy, that amazing Johns plotting where he sets up so many moving parts that everything follows logically and yet you know can guess what will happen next, evocative scenery descriptions, the obligatory menacing wildlife encounters.
And I finished Maria Louisa Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, a Victorian children’s fantasy beloved by Nancy and her friends in Jennie Lindquist’s The Golden Name Day. When orphaned Griselda is sent to live with her kindly but fusty great-aunts, her quiet days are enlivened by the cuckoo from the clock, who takes her on a series of magical adventures. My favorite was the bit where they visit the sea on the dark side of the moon, a strange quiet sea, so peaceful that it wraps around to eerie.
Newbery book for the week: Marguerite de Angeli’s Black Fox of Lorne, in which twin Viking brothers shipwreck on the coast of Scotland, swear vengeance on the treacherous Scottish lairds who killed their father and his crew, then forswear vengeance after they convert to Christianity and also Scottishness. (But don’t worry, both treacherous Scottish lairds get their just deserts! One betrays and kills the other and is then in turn executed by the king.)
Another 1950s Newbery Honor book with intense religious themes! As I go back, I’ll be curious when this theme starts to show up, as it wasn’t present at all in the 1920s books. Current hypothesis: this is a 1950s special, part of the God and country craze accompanying McCarthyism and the Red Scare. We’ll see if I’m right.
What I’m Reading Now
Gretchen Rubin’s Life in Five Senses, which is about living a fuller, richer life by the thoughtful deployment of one’s five senses. I just finished the chapter about sight, which already made my life richer and fuller with this photograph of a bowl with feet.
What I Plan to Read Now
In Jennie Lindquist’s The Little Silver Tree, Nancy and her friends fall in love with Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Mary’s Meadow, so of course I intend to read that as a follow-up to The Cuckoo Clock.
Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns! This is a big chonk of a book with some heavy material (especially the lynching descriptions in the chapters about the Jim Crow South), so it took me a while to get through, but if you’re interested in the history of the Great Migration (the exodus of Black Americans from the South to the North from roughly 1915-1970), this gives a good overview and also a recounts in detail the life stories of three of the migrants.
Wilkerson often compares the experience of the migrants to the immigrant experience: like immigrants from across the sea, the migrants from the South brought traditional foods and stories, clubbed together with other migrants from the same area, loved to talk about life in the Old Country, etc. Although the comparison is illuminating, Wilkerson notes that many of the people she interviewed disliked the framing, because it made them sound as if they weren’t already Americans when their ancestors had been in this country for hundreds of years.
I also read W. E. Johns’ Worrals in the Wastelands, a delightful book! Worrals and Frecks embark on a mission to capture escaped Nazi Anna Schultz, who is hiding away at a remote lake in Canada panning for gold. Tense, pacy, that amazing Johns plotting where he sets up so many moving parts that everything follows logically and yet you know can guess what will happen next, evocative scenery descriptions, the obligatory menacing wildlife encounters.
And I finished Maria Louisa Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, a Victorian children’s fantasy beloved by Nancy and her friends in Jennie Lindquist’s The Golden Name Day. When orphaned Griselda is sent to live with her kindly but fusty great-aunts, her quiet days are enlivened by the cuckoo from the clock, who takes her on a series of magical adventures. My favorite was the bit where they visit the sea on the dark side of the moon, a strange quiet sea, so peaceful that it wraps around to eerie.
Newbery book for the week: Marguerite de Angeli’s Black Fox of Lorne, in which twin Viking brothers shipwreck on the coast of Scotland, swear vengeance on the treacherous Scottish lairds who killed their father and his crew, then forswear vengeance after they convert to Christianity and also Scottishness. (But don’t worry, both treacherous Scottish lairds get their just deserts! One betrays and kills the other and is then in turn executed by the king.)
Another 1950s Newbery Honor book with intense religious themes! As I go back, I’ll be curious when this theme starts to show up, as it wasn’t present at all in the 1920s books. Current hypothesis: this is a 1950s special, part of the God and country craze accompanying McCarthyism and the Red Scare. We’ll see if I’m right.
What I’m Reading Now
Gretchen Rubin’s Life in Five Senses, which is about living a fuller, richer life by the thoughtful deployment of one’s five senses. I just finished the chapter about sight, which already made my life richer and fuller with this photograph of a bowl with feet.
What I Plan to Read Now
In Jennie Lindquist’s The Little Silver Tree, Nancy and her friends fall in love with Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Mary’s Meadow, so of course I intend to read that as a follow-up to The Cuckoo Clock.
