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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 23rd, 2018 08:00 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
A boatload of books. To be fair, many of these are books that I’ve been patiently working my way through, and a couple of the others were short children’s books, but… still a lot of books.
Third time’s the charm. I didn’t think much of Kevin Henkes’ Junonia or Olive’s Ocean, both of which struck me as a trifle sententious, but The Year of Billy Miller has a Ramona Quimby-ish charm.
Speaking of Ramona Quimby, a different Beverly Cleary book fell my way! Socks, a tale told from the point of view of a cat, which I quite enjoyed. It’s in third person rather than first (like Ralph S. Mouse) and I feel that makes it sound more genuinely cat-like somehow.
I also read Alastair Bonnett’s Unruly Places: Lost Places, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies, which is an interesting catalog of places that defy easy categorization (like the city of Baarle-Nassau, which is a patchwork of border enclaves between Belgium and the Netherlands) but for the most part less memorable than one feels a book with this topic ought to be.
And I finally finished Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure! I must admit it flags in the middle: I thought we might never get out of India.
In fact, I got so bogged down that I took a break to read Susan Coolidge’s A Little Country Girl, in which said country girl spends the summer with her cousins in Newport, which was once a sturdy New England fishing village but has become an immensely fashionable seaside resort where the inhabitants order their sponge-cakes express from New York City. A sign of moral turpitude if there ever was one!
Really, though, Coolidge deploys these contrasts skillfully, and by no means are all the advantages on either side. Candace may have learned good sturdy values in her rural Connecticut home, but her life is immeasurably more cheerful in Newport, and cheerfulness is not a virtue to be sneezed at.
Refreshed by the sea breezes and dulcet descriptions of election cake, I returned to where I had left Duncan in India, and we finally managed to sail for Egypt and the Sphinx, and thence to Malta, where our intrepid heroines visit the tombs of the Capuchin monks, who are entombed sitting up and gazing at the visitors out of their hollow eye sockets. “One was confined behind a wire netting, doubtless not without good reason — probably for the enormity of his puns.” (414)
What I’m Reading Now
My mother lent me Rich Bragg’s The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Kitchen, which is a memoir/family history about working-class Southern cooking and pretty excellent so far.
What I Plan to Read Next
Summer reading is coming! Which means lots of children’s books coming through check-in, which means that I shall let serendipity be my guide. And hope that during the summertime the children will branch out a little from their standard chapter book fare of Geronimo Stilton and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
A boatload of books. To be fair, many of these are books that I’ve been patiently working my way through, and a couple of the others were short children’s books, but… still a lot of books.
Third time’s the charm. I didn’t think much of Kevin Henkes’ Junonia or Olive’s Ocean, both of which struck me as a trifle sententious, but The Year of Billy Miller has a Ramona Quimby-ish charm.
Speaking of Ramona Quimby, a different Beverly Cleary book fell my way! Socks, a tale told from the point of view of a cat, which I quite enjoyed. It’s in third person rather than first (like Ralph S. Mouse) and I feel that makes it sound more genuinely cat-like somehow.
I also read Alastair Bonnett’s Unruly Places: Lost Places, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies, which is an interesting catalog of places that defy easy categorization (like the city of Baarle-Nassau, which is a patchwork of border enclaves between Belgium and the Netherlands) but for the most part less memorable than one feels a book with this topic ought to be.
And I finally finished Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure! I must admit it flags in the middle: I thought we might never get out of India.
In fact, I got so bogged down that I took a break to read Susan Coolidge’s A Little Country Girl, in which said country girl spends the summer with her cousins in Newport, which was once a sturdy New England fishing village but has become an immensely fashionable seaside resort where the inhabitants order their sponge-cakes express from New York City. A sign of moral turpitude if there ever was one!
Really, though, Coolidge deploys these contrasts skillfully, and by no means are all the advantages on either side. Candace may have learned good sturdy values in her rural Connecticut home, but her life is immeasurably more cheerful in Newport, and cheerfulness is not a virtue to be sneezed at.
Refreshed by the sea breezes and dulcet descriptions of election cake, I returned to where I had left Duncan in India, and we finally managed to sail for Egypt and the Sphinx, and thence to Malta, where our intrepid heroines visit the tombs of the Capuchin monks, who are entombed sitting up and gazing at the visitors out of their hollow eye sockets. “One was confined behind a wire netting, doubtless not without good reason — probably for the enormity of his puns.” (414)
What I’m Reading Now
My mother lent me Rich Bragg’s The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Kitchen, which is a memoir/family history about working-class Southern cooking and pretty excellent so far.
What I Plan to Read Next
Summer reading is coming! Which means lots of children’s books coming through check-in, which means that I shall let serendipity be my guide. And hope that during the summertime the children will branch out a little from their standard chapter book fare of Geronimo Stilton and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
