osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Emmy-Lou: Her Book and Heart, which ends when Emmy-Lou (who has reached the exalted state of a high school student) quits the school literary society in favor of a new dancing society that has started up. Now normally I am not in favor of characters forgoing intellectual development in favor of romance, but this is probably the only early twentieth century children’s book I’ve read that puts a positive spin on flirting, so that’s interesting, at least.

I also finished up the Odyssey, which ended quite abruptly: the father of one of the suitors Odysseus killed leads a crowd of townsfolk against him, but Athena intervenes and tells both sides to stand down, and bang, that’s it. I guess it’s nice to know that people have been struggling with endings almost as long as they’ve been telling stories.

In more exciting news, I’ve discovered that my alma mater - actually, let me back up a minute here. My alma mater owns a retreat on the shores of Lake Michigan in Door County, where they give weeklong seminar classes over the summer which alumni (indeed, presumably anyone who can pay the fee?) can attend. Next fall, they’re holding one about Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, which I could pay for using the proceeds of Briarley (provided I stop spending all the proceeds of Briarley on stationary), and… I’m tempted.

What I’m Reading Now

Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, which is reminding me strongly of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series, even though the first is a memoir set in British East Africa and the second is a series of children’s books set in Australia. But both books are set in British colonial possessions in the first half of the twentieth century, and both involve children (en entire section of Markham’s memoir is devoted to her childhood) on remote farms pluckily facing the perils of the local wildlife. Young Markham got mauled by a supposedly-tame lion.

They’ve also both got the same sudden pops of racism, which I suppose it to be expected but nonetheless is jarring.

I’ve also begun Shaun Tan’s Tales of the Inner City, which is actually tales - often very short tales, the perfect size to read while you wait for your tea to steep - of magical or surrealist animals in the city.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2019 Newbery Awards have been announced! There are only two honor books this year, Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary and Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s The Book of Boy, and the big winner is Meg Medina’s Merci Suarez Changes Gears.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, which scratched the Boxcar Children sized itch in my soul: four children escape an untenable home situation to create for themselves a delightful home in the wilderness.

I also completed Unnatural Death, which has only reaffirmed my belief that the non-Harriet Lord Peter novels are not nearly as good, although I plan to plow ahead regardless.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m nearing the end of The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Lots of good stuff here about illegitimacy rates in Revolutionary War-era New England; lots of women giving birth within a few months (sometimes a few days) of their wedding, and not an insignificant quantity who have an illegitimate child and get married a few years later, maybe to the father and maybe not. Often women from comfortable families, too, including one of Martha’s daughters - this wasn’t just a matter of the poverty-stricken.

It’s interesting how at odd this pattern is not only with modern views of the monolithic past, but even from the popular novels of seduction at the time. Ulrich notes that many of these novels were published in the US, written by American authors, following the English model that assumes the seduction will destroy the seduced girl - and people ate it up even though it was at odds with the lived reality in America, or at least in New England. Was it even the reality in England? Perhaps just among the gentry?

It occurs to me that these novels may in fact have made the plight of the seduced girl worse, by making everyone expect that her plight would be wretched and therefore making that fate harder to escape.

I’ve already begun research for my next essay about female literary friendship (this time: Annie Fellows Johnston, writer of the Little Colonel books, and her Louisville writing group), which means that I’ve dived into George Madden Martin’s children’s book Emmy Lou: Her Book and Heart, first published in 1902. (George Madden Martin was a penname for a woman whose given name may have been Georgia May, but the internet is not quite clear about this.

Naturally what I’d really like is a book with a dedication like “To my writing group! You guys are great!” (only more Edwardian and flowery). This is not that book, but I’m enjoying (in a horrified way) this tale of Emmy Lou’s school days: she’s in a class of seventy and they spend their days droning through the primer in unison, mat, cat, bat, etc.

Oh! And Odysseus just slaughtered the suitors and also the maids who slept with them (which seems kind of hard on the maids, I mean you slept with Calypso for seven years, Odysseus), and it was way more violent than Wishbone led me to expect. And now he’s all “People are going to be mad about how I slaughtered all the suitors” and it’s like… well, if even the people in your own culture don’t approve, why did you do it, Odysseus? Why not just kick them out of the house and demand they send you herds of cattle to replenish your stock and maybe raid them if they don’t comply?

What I Plan to Read Next

Now that I’ve listened to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I’m contemplating whether I should give the Aeneid a go too… although I did lose some enthusiasm for this plan when I realized that Dan Stevens hasn’t read it for audiobook. Still, it might be worth doing? There’s an audiobook read by Simon Callow.

(I realized only as I was looking up Simon Callow that for years I have conflated him and Simon Cowell. Sorry, Simon Callow! You’ve probably never berated a reality TV contestant in your life.)
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, about which I babbled AT LENGTH in a comment to a previous post, which I won’t copy here because otherwise it will take over my entire Wednesday Reading Meme. But it’s there if you’re interested.

Katherine Applegate’s Crenshaw, which is good as all of Katherine Applegate’s books are. (I think I probably missed out by not reading Animorphs. Not enough to actually read Animorphs now, though.) This one is about an economically insecure family that may be on the verge of homeless - not something that you see very often in children’s books - but in a way that is light enough to be readable without glossing over the difficulties of homelessness.

Crenshaw is the hero’s imaginary friend, a giant cat who likes to stand on his head, a la the giant bunny in Harvey. In fact, Applegate references the movie in the book’s epigraph.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on with The Odyssey! Odysseus has arrived back in Ithaca and will at any moment rain down unholy vengeance on the suitors. (I remember this part from the Wishbone version. I’m looking forward to the bit where Odysseus shoots his arrow through twelve axes.) Although right now he’s chatting with his son Telemachus while pretending to be just some random beggar dude, which I’m sure is killing him inside.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. One of the things I find particularly interesting about this book is that Ulrich not only has Martha Ballard’s diary, but also the remarks of commentators from later in the nineteenth century, and it’s so interesting to see what these readers considered worthy of note. They’re surprised, for instance, that Ballard spent so much time gadding about to visit her neighbors.

I wonder if it’s actually that nineteenth-century women actually spent less time gadding - or if it was actually pretty comparable, but the ideal was that women should be the heart of the home and rarely stir from the hearthside, and so people just kind of failed to see how much time women (even respectable married women) spent outside of the home. But the written record of Martha Ballard’s movements made it plain and impossible to ignore.

I’ve also begun Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death. I find the way she talks about spinsters kind of annoying, especially considering that she married late herself - but maybe that just makes increases the temptation toward condescending magnanimity.

Oh! And I’m working on Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island (having run out of Mallory Towers for the moment), which has a very Boxcar Children-type appeal: four kids on their own figuring out how to provide themselves with shelter and food and so forth.

AND FINALLY (deep breath) (I’m reading a lot of books this week) (too many maybe?) I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, about Smarsh’s childhood among poor white farmers in Kansas, which I can only read in small doses because it’s so infuriating reading about how thoroughly the government has undermined the middle and working classes.

Not least by pretending that the working classes don’t exist. Everyone is middle class in America! What do you mean you’re working 60 hours a week not to get by? Everyone is middle class in America. If we say it enough times that will make it true even as we enact policies that dismantle worker protections and favor large companies and factory farms.

It occurred to me - this is not a point Smarsh makes, just something that came to mind - that maybe part of the reason the “fake news” narrative has gained traction is that the media has in fact systematically ignored or misrepresented working class experiences for decades, so there are a lot of people in this country who don’t trust the media because… why would they? What has the media done to deserve it?

What I Plan to Read Next

The library for some reason has loads of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in Spanish. I’ve been thinking I should polish up my Spanish, and the Famous Five is probably about the difficulty level I can take after letting my Spanish go to seed for so long, so maybe I’ll give them a go.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which is quite brilliant. Why did I wait so long to read it?

No, actually I know exactly why I waited so long to read it: I’ve been avoiding it because Angelous was raped when she was eight and that’s a pivotal event in the book. But it’s not drawn out or graphic, although the after-effects linger, and there are so many other things going on in the book that it never feels like misery born. There’s a chapter where the entire black community where Angelou grew up gathers round her grandmother’s radio to hear Joe Louis fight which is particularly lyrical, and evokes the sense of community and the horrors of the Jim Crow south. The listeners go wild when he wins - but Angelou notes that everyone who walked into the countryside to listen to the match made arrangements to stay in town that night, because it would be dangerous to walk home at night with whites angry about Louis’s victory.

On a lighter note, I also finished Enid Blyton’s Third Term at Malory Towers. How has Gwendoline held out so long against the boarding school spirit? You’d think she’d break down and have some character growth eventually, but so far she’s immune.

What I’m Reading Now

Still listening to Dan Stevens’ read The Odyssey, which I’m enjoying a lot. Odysseus has finally left captivity on Calypso’s island (...someone’s written the fic about Odysseus the sex slave, right?) and made his way to the island of the Phaeacians. If I recall correctly from ninth-grade English, he’s going to tell the Phaeacians his whole sad story before he sets out for Ithaca, but we’ll see.

In high school I got kind of annoyed because Penelope spent so much time crying, but reading the book a second time round, I’ve noticed the parallel between Penelope’s situation and Odysseus’s. Penelope is beset by unwanted suitors; Odysseus is beset by Calypso. Penelope cries in her room; Odysseus has an actual crying chair where he sits and weeps as he looks at the sea every day. If anything, Penelope is more proactive than Odysseus: she promised to wed once she finished weaving a particular shroud, so each night she secretly unweaves what she wove that day. Odysseus just cries.

Of course Odysseus is up against a goddess, so there’s probably not much he can do.

I’ve also begun Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Nothing much to say about it so far, but will keep you posted on developments.

What I Plan to Read Next

In years past, I’ve always done one challenge per month for my yearly Reading Challenge, but I’m thinking this year I might barrel on through (at least for a while; I may lose steam and space the challenges out more by and by). Unnatural Death isn’t going to read itself, you know.

The Newbery awards for 2018 will be coming out this month! Probably not till the end of the month, but still, something to look forward to.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Smith College Stories. These never quite came together for me, I’m afraid; Bacon doesn’t have the skill, so important in a school story, of swiftly differentiating loads of characters. Even in the last story I was still getting characters confused with each other.

Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages, a lighthearted domestic memoir about life with her young children (sort of like Cheaper by the Dozen, only from the mother’s point of view), which is a rather odd reading experience when you’re coming to it from her novels. The two share some common themes - houses that have a mind of their own, for instance - but the treatment is totally different. It’s like an illustration of the idea that if you give two writers the same starting point, they’ll come up with totally different stories, except in this case the two writers are actually… the same writer.

I also finished the 2018 Reading Challenge just under the wire with Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Unfortunately I don’t have much to say about this book otherwise: I enjoyed it but it didn’t leave a huge impression. But I guess you never know beforehand whether something will or not.

What I’m Reading Now

Now that I’ve wrapped up the 2018 Reading Challenge, it’s time… to start the 2019 Reading Challenge! And I’ve come out of the gate running with Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for “a book you’ve been reading to read.” It’s been on my list, uh, since I read Angelou’s poem of the same name in my high school English textbook. I just started yesterday, but so far the writing is beautiful, as you might expect from a poet.

Oh! And I’ve begun to listen to Dan Stevens reading The Odyssey, which so far I’m enjoying much more than the Iliad. Telemachus is trying to convince his mother Penelope’s suitors to leave her alone and stop eating all the cattle, and the suitors are like “HA, or we could continue eating you out of house and home, that sounds like fun.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got a hold on Jeff Speck’s Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

The Iliad

Jun. 16th, 2018 02:27 pm
osprey_archer: (Default)
I finished the Iliad! Actually I finished it a bit ago, but I’ve spent some time mulling over the best way to explain the weird experience that is listening to this ancient epic, and finally hit on this one: it’s like watching someone playing a video game. Occasionally there’s a cut scene where some plot happens, but mostly it’s just fight scene after fight scene and “then his eyeballs popped out of his head because Diomedes hit him with a rock so hard.”

They hit each other with rocks a lot. Also, no one’s armor works unless a god is literally standing there going “Function, armor!”

You know which Iliad character has been totally shafted by history? Diomedes. There’s a cleaner named after Ajax, a tendon named after Achilles, and a word based on Odysseus’s name (admittedly, for the Odyssey and not the Iliad, but still), but Diomedes makes like 50% of the kills in this book (not a scientific estimate) and have I ever heard of him before? NO. The unfairness. He actually wounded the goddess Aphrodite! And lived to tell the tale!

There does not appear to be a follow-up story where Aphrodite gets her revenge by making Diomedes fall in love with someone totally unsuitable, like a ninety-year-old swineherd or something. How can you let this insult stand, Aphrodite? Athena turned a lady into a spider for way less.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frances Little’s Jack and I in Lotus Land, in which the intrepid heroine of The Lady of the Decoration and her husband Jack return to Japan to recuperate after the stresses of the Great War. Jack manages to relax for approximately two days before the Red Cross summons him to Vladivostok to care for Russian war orphans, leaving the Lady on her own to gallivant through Japan. I often get a bit bored with landscape descriptions but Little’s are so clear and lovely (and, it must be said, concise) that I enjoy them. You could imagine this scenery in a Studio Ghibli film.

Little’s book also shares with many Ghibli films a fascination with work, particularly woman’s work. The Lady meets a female motor bus conductor, tours a paper run by women (“In the book binding business, the printing business, and in typesetting, Japanese women hold their own with the men of their kind,” (131) she comments), and admires the hard work and good spirits of country women picking tea or looking after the silkworms in a factory.

I also read another Newbery Honor book, Amy Timberlake’s One Came Home, which I didn’t particularly like because it follows a plot I rarely enjoy, wherein the hero or heroine’s (heroine, in this case) loved one (sister) supposedly dies, only the heroine is convinced that she is ACTUALLY ALIVE and sets out on a quest to prove it

This is a quest with two possible endings and IMO neither are very satisfying. It’s a bummer if the loved one turns out to be dead and the whole point was to teach a lesson about The Finality of Death, but it’s also sort of irritating if the protagonist is 100% right and the loved one is in fact alive. I mean come on.

However, One Came Home does at least avoid the most annoying ending, where the loved one purposefully faked their own death and is therefore basically a psychopath (somehow, no one ever takes this in a “so in a way they ARE dead! The decent human being the protagonist always loved never really existed!” direction), and there is a lot of stuff about passenger pigeons, so there are enjoyable elements.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m still thrashing through the Iliad. I am so bored of descriptions of soldiers dying gory deaths. As far as I can tell their armor only actually works if a god purposefully strengthens it right at the moment of impact.

I’m also reading Susan Coolidge’s Eyebright, which starts out as a tale of young Isabella Bright (I. Bright… Eyebright) who lives in a small town in New York and entertains her friends with imaginative adventure stories. At one point her school takes a field trip to the local Shaker settlement, a turn of events that delighted me beyond words.

And then I guess Susan Coolidge got bored because she killed off the heroine’s invalid mother, bankrupted her father (the bankruptcy is unrelated to the mother’s death; it just kind of all happens at once), and now Eyebright and her father have moved to his one remaining possession, a tiny farm on a small island off the coast of Maine.

I always find nineteenth-century plotting sort of fascinating because authors will just do stuff like this. You start off reading one book and it takes a completely weird turn and then suddenly the author is resolving a difficult plot problem with a volcano eruption, as Frances Little Does in Jack and I in Lotus Land. (Don’t worry. It’s a small eruption - just large enough to show the comparative mettle of the heroine’s protegee’s two suitors.)

What I Plan to Read Next

Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn! I am excited because (1) Daphne du Maurier!!!, and (2) there is a miniseries based on this book which is directed by a woman (and therefore fits my project) AND stars Jessica Brown Findlay, who played Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey. I quit the show mid-episode when it became clear that Sybil was about to die. Nothing I have heard about it since has made me regret this decision.
osprey_archer: (books)
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished The Time Traveler’s Guide to Restoration Britain, which I found a bit of a slog to get through. Is it because I’m just not that interested in the Restoration period, or is it really not quite as interesting as The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England?

And I finished Gabor Mate’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which I wanted to write about at more length - I selected a bunch of quotes and everything! - but I’ve run out of time, so for now I’m just going to share this one: “A therapist once said to me, ‘When it comes to a choice between feeling guilt or resentment, choose the guilt every time.’” (401)

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time, a pleasingly arch fairy tale parody, which is also a parody of history books (Milne has invented a historian of this imaginary country, with whom he often politely disagrees). It’s fun but it’s also very clear why Milne achieved immortality for the Winnie the Pooh books instead.

I’ve also begun listening to the Iliad! Which has an entire benighted chapter just listing all the captains who fought at Troy and their lineages and hometowns, good lord, and then all the captains on the Trojan side, just for parity, although thank God there are not nearly as many of them.

Now Paris and Menelaus have attempted to end the war through single combat, only for Aphrodite to spirit Paris away to Helen’s bedchamber at the crucial moment. Oh, Aphrodite. That seems short-sighted - which I suppose love often is.

And I am continuing onward with Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure! This week, Duncan has shared a number of dry observations about travel cliches, including this gem: “somebody had told us that the proper and usual thing for strangers with a couple of hours in Hong Kong to do was to go up the Peak. Although Orthodocia reminded me that we had not come to China in search of hackneyed commonplaces, we also went up the Peak. It was one of the things that we did which convinced us that the travelling public quite understands what it is about, and that the hackneyed commonplace exists only in the minds of people who stay at home.” (186)

What I Plan to Read Next

I have hopes that the library will soon hook me up with the next Edward Eager book, The Well-Wishers.

Profile

osprey_archer: (Default)
osprey_archer

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   1 2 345
67 8 9101112
13 1415 16 17 1819
20 21 22 23242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 26th, 2025 07:55 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios