Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 24th, 2020 08:12 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
The cover copy on Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton is a little misleading; I fully expected the eponymous Elijah’s picaresque adventure in the United States to occupy a large proportion of the book, but in fact it doesn’t even begin till the book’s nearly over. This was actually great! I loved spending most of the book hanging out in the free Black settlement of Buxton and learning about its history and the daily rhythms of life! But I feel that someone who picked up this book for the adventure the cover copy seems to promise would be like “Literally the most exciting thing that has happened so far is fishing, WHY.”
Kirby Larson’s Hattie Ever After is a sequel to her book Hattie Big Sky. Hattie, having failed to prove up her uncle’s claim in Montana, heads for San Francisco with big dreams of becoming a reporter. This second book is not quite as compelling as the first, but I do love “plucky girl reporter” stories so it was still good fun.
And finally! I finished Eva Ibbotson’s The Reluctant Heiress. I now feel a little bereft: what shall I doooooo without more Eva Ibbotson?? (Actually there is still a short story collection, which the library possesses, which I could put on hold if/when I get my pile of books under control. I ran a bit mad when the library reopened and stocked like I expected lockdown to shut everything down again at any moment. Which it still might! I keep seeing news stories about how “We don’t have the political will to impose lockdowns again,” but if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that political winds can change drastically at any moment, so who the fuck know what we’ll have the political will for next week..)
I feel like I made a sort of mistake in holding off on this book for so long? I still enjoyed it, but I feel that I really should have read it during my Year of Eva Ibbotson, which was clearly Peak Ibbotson season in my life and I would have loved it then. Perhaps there is something to be said for trusting that you will find the books you need when you need them, and not saving things just in case.
What I’m Reading Now
Marian Hurd McNeely’s The Jumping-Off Place, a Newbery Honor book from 1930. Four orphaned children, aged 10 to 17, travel to South Dakota to prove up on their dead uncle’s claim. The premise reminds me of Hattie Big Sky, and so far The Jumping-Off Place has a similar charm: friendly neighbors, gorgeous countryside, young people stalwartly facing down hardships. (Well, that last one is an extrapolation. They have not met many hardships yet, but I’m sure they will face them stalwartly once they have a chance.)
The books are also similar in that neither engages at all with the fact that the claims are only available because the US government stole the Indians’ lands. And Hattie Big Sky was published in 2006, even! I found it especially odd in that book because it does engage with anti-German sentiment during World War I.
What I Plan to Read Next
Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom has come in at the library! I now have all the books that I need to complete reading all the Newbery Honor books of the 2000s. Only three left! (The Surrender Tree, Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, and Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion, if you’re curious.)
I’m going to keep reading the Newbery Honor books that the library has on ebook, because they’re so convenient to read while I play my computer game, but otherwise I’m going to give myself a bit of a breather from the project for a while once I’ve finished those three.
ALSO ALSO,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
littlerhymes sent me Elizabeth Wein’s latest White Eagles, a short novel about a Polish girl pilot in World War II… and despite what I said above about not saving books, I have been saving it a bit, because I read Elizabeth Wein’s earlier book Firebird in the gardens at the art museum and I’d like to read this one somewhere special too. However, I think saving a book a few weeks as one sorts out the perfect reading spot is perhaps a little different than saving a book for six years.
The cover copy on Christopher Paul Curtis’s Elijah of Buxton is a little misleading; I fully expected the eponymous Elijah’s picaresque adventure in the United States to occupy a large proportion of the book, but in fact it doesn’t even begin till the book’s nearly over. This was actually great! I loved spending most of the book hanging out in the free Black settlement of Buxton and learning about its history and the daily rhythms of life! But I feel that someone who picked up this book for the adventure the cover copy seems to promise would be like “Literally the most exciting thing that has happened so far is fishing, WHY.”
Kirby Larson’s Hattie Ever After is a sequel to her book Hattie Big Sky. Hattie, having failed to prove up her uncle’s claim in Montana, heads for San Francisco with big dreams of becoming a reporter. This second book is not quite as compelling as the first, but I do love “plucky girl reporter” stories so it was still good fun.
And finally! I finished Eva Ibbotson’s The Reluctant Heiress. I now feel a little bereft: what shall I doooooo without more Eva Ibbotson?? (Actually there is still a short story collection, which the library possesses, which I could put on hold if/when I get my pile of books under control. I ran a bit mad when the library reopened and stocked like I expected lockdown to shut everything down again at any moment. Which it still might! I keep seeing news stories about how “We don’t have the political will to impose lockdowns again,” but if we’ve learned anything this year, surely it’s that political winds can change drastically at any moment, so who the fuck know what we’ll have the political will for next week..)
I feel like I made a sort of mistake in holding off on this book for so long? I still enjoyed it, but I feel that I really should have read it during my Year of Eva Ibbotson, which was clearly Peak Ibbotson season in my life and I would have loved it then. Perhaps there is something to be said for trusting that you will find the books you need when you need them, and not saving things just in case.
What I’m Reading Now
Marian Hurd McNeely’s The Jumping-Off Place, a Newbery Honor book from 1930. Four orphaned children, aged 10 to 17, travel to South Dakota to prove up on their dead uncle’s claim. The premise reminds me of Hattie Big Sky, and so far The Jumping-Off Place has a similar charm: friendly neighbors, gorgeous countryside, young people stalwartly facing down hardships. (Well, that last one is an extrapolation. They have not met many hardships yet, but I’m sure they will face them stalwartly once they have a chance.)
The books are also similar in that neither engages at all with the fact that the claims are only available because the US government stole the Indians’ lands. And Hattie Big Sky was published in 2006, even! I found it especially odd in that book because it does engage with anti-German sentiment during World War I.
What I Plan to Read Next
Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom has come in at the library! I now have all the books that I need to complete reading all the Newbery Honor books of the 2000s. Only three left! (The Surrender Tree, Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, and Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion, if you’re curious.)
I’m going to keep reading the Newbery Honor books that the library has on ebook, because they’re so convenient to read while I play my computer game, but otherwise I’m going to give myself a bit of a breather from the project for a while once I’ve finished those three.
ALSO ALSO,
littlerhymes sent me Elizabeth Wein’s latest White Eagles, a short novel about a Polish girl pilot in World War II… and despite what I said above about not saving books, I have been saving it a bit, because I read Elizabeth Wein’s earlier book Firebird in the gardens at the art museum and I’d like to read this one somewhere special too. However, I think saving a book a few weeks as one sorts out the perfect reading spot is perhaps a little different than saving a book for six years.
