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

As generally happens when I’ve got just a few books left before I finish a decade of the Newbery honor books, it’s all Newbery all the time up in here. This week I finished three, starting with a special trip to the Indiana State Library to read Katherine Shippen’s Men, Microscopes, and Living Things. (Sadly the book-reading part of the library is not in the beautiful old building with the dark wood panel walls and the murals and the stained glass, but after I finished reading I took a stroll through the library to admire.) The book is a history of the science of biology, starting with Aristotle and Pliny, with beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations by Anthony Ravielli.

I also read Clara Ingram Judson’s Abraham Lincoln: Friend of the People, a biography of Abraham Lincoln. (The early decades of the Newbery are heavy on Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.) Very much struck by this letter, which Lincoln wrote in the 1830s or 40s announcing his bid for re-election to the state legislature: “I go for all sharing the privileges of government, who assist in bearing its burthens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).”

Just a little surprised to see the inclusion of women! (Albeit only tax-paying white women.)

And finally, Mary & Conrad Buff’s Magic Maize, which like Dorothy Rhoads’ The Corn Grows Ripe is about a modern-day Mayan boy who is planting corn with his family. Was there a big upsurge of interest in the Maya in 1950s America? Maybe some new archaeological discoveries? (One of the side characters in this book is an American archaeologist, who makes the happy ending possible when he pays big bucks for a jade earplug that our hero found while planting some experimental corn kernels.) I realize two books is not a trend, but it’s still weird that it happened twice.

Two 1950s Newbery Honors left to go!

What I’m Reading Now

Still trucking in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. We’ve reached the North now, and are discovering that while the North is better than the South, it still falls far short of a Promised Land.

What I Plan to Read Next

Letters from Watson has inspired Letters from Bunny, a readthrough of all the Raffles stories! It doesn’t start till March 2024, which is good because it won’t overlap with Letters from Watson, but also bad because it’s so long to wait…
osprey_archer: (books)
Back from another trip to the Lilly Library! It was such a beautiful day in Bloomington that I was almost sorry to spend it in the library rather than wandering, but of course in the end I buckled down to my Newbery Honor books.

From the title, you might expect Katherine Shippen’s New Found World to encompass all the Americas, but in fact it focuses almost solely on Central and South America. The United States shows up in a brief blip to issue the Monroe Doctrine (which was originally meant to keep European powers from interfering in the western hemisphere but later, Shippen notes disapprovingly, was used by the United States as an excuse to meddle in Central and South American affairs), then again with regard to Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy and the earnest attempts of just about every other country in the hemisphere to convince Argentina that perhaps, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to be friendly with the Nazis. (Argentina was undeterred.)

At some point I may post at more length about the Newbery award as a reflection of history. For now I will just note that this is often more visible in general trends, rather than in any individual book - but this individual book is an exception to that rule: it feels like a literary embodiment of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, indeed a crystallization of the New Deal spirit. Great things happen when people work together, and, as Shippen writes in ringing conclusion, “We will work. We will create the needed precepts. Rich and poor, brown, black, and white, together we are building a glorious new world.”

Julia Davis Adams’ Mountains Are Free is a retelling of the William Tell story, told through the eyes of Bruno, a young boy who just happens to be present at all the major events in the William Tell cycle: the apple, the escape from Geller’s custody, the uprising, etc. In and around these happenings, Bruno and a jester named Kyo help a noble Austrian girl named Zelina escape from an arranged marriage, (and YES I kept envisioning Kyo from Fruits Basket, and that DID make this extra-funny), and then of course Switzerland is free and Bruno and Zelina fall in love. HAPPY END.

Finally, in under the wire (I finished five minutes before the Reading Room closed!), Alida Malkus’s The Dark Star of Itza, a lively retelling of the fall of Chichen Itza based, IIRC, on a brief account in one of the three remaining Mayan codices: the impulsive king of Chichen Itza kidnapped the bride of a neighboring king, who then razed Chichen Itza. Very Trojan War. Our heroine Nicté is a Cassandra figure, daughter of a priest and a seeress in her own right, whose warning of Chichen Itza’s impending doom goes unheeded.

Briefly it looked like the book was going to end Sutcliff-style with the heroine offering herself as a human sacrifice to relieve a drought, and I was deeply impressed: despite the Newbery Award’s later reputation for grimness, the early books pretty much universally have happy endings! And so it is with this one: after Nicté jumps into the sacrifice pool, her boyfriend fishes her out, and they escape Chichen Itza and head off to start a new life elsewhere. HAPPY END! Sort of. Is any end really happy if your whole city has been razed?

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