osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: margaret atwood

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.”

I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Tent, a book of short stories - flash fiction, really, in many cases, some of them are barely more than a page. I must admit that I often wanted them to be longer, for there to be more to sink my teeth into - but they do share with Atwood’s novels that razor-edged humor, the wry dark way of looking at the world.

I was hoping that Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom would be something along the lines of a detailed fandom wank guide: allll about the Fanny Price wars! Not to mention a more critical attitude toward Arnie Perlstein, whom she notes is such an obnoxious commentator that message board moderators have been forced to warn each other about him, but this is mentioned almost as an aside. Instead it’s more of a general tour of the many different types of Austen fandom, dipping a toe into the worlds of Austen cosplay, Austen fanfic, Austen profic etc, without getting very detailed about any of it.

However, I did like Yaffe’s summation of Austen’s widespread appeal. “The rich diversity of responses to Austen captures something real about her - the depth and complexity of her writings, which, like diamonds held up to sunlight, reflect something different from every angle. Her stories are not blank canvases onto which we project ourselves; they are complicated, ambiguous pictures of lived reality. We all find ourselves in her because, in a sense, she contains us all.”

I’ve returned to the Eleanor Estes’ Moffat books, continuing the series with Rufus M.It’s poignant to realize that Estes was writing this retrospective about the end of World War I while the world was still in the thick of World War II.

“Look!” he exclaimed in excitement. And all the Moffats drew around the stove and looked in. They looked at the word that stood out on the burnt sheet of newspaper. In tremulous, glowing letters lit by the last glow from that burning paper, as though it were seen through the water of an ocean, was the one word PEACE, the headline of Joey’s newspaper.

Mama looked at the word and the children looked too, silently. Then Mama said again, “Yes, you know what that means, don’t you? It means better times are coming now, for all the people.”

And she took the poker and gently scattered the charred fragments of the newspaper and of the papers on which the children had written, so that all the dreams and wishes and plans of the Moffats were gathered in a little pile in the middle of the stove where they soon were wafted up the chimney and became part of the air.

What I’m Reading Now

Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History languished on my to-read pile for ages, but I’ve finally begun it and I’ve learned so much not only about Disney’s female animators, but also about the sheer process of animation, which I must confess I always vaguely envisioned working like one of those flip books where you turn the pages real fast and the sketches appear to move.

(Also, there were at least two different female Disney animators in the 1930s & 40s with powerful interests in aviation. Someone ought to inform Elizabeth Wein.)

I’ve also begun Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, a memoir about Norris’s time as copy-editor at the New Yorker and also general musings about grammar. “Sing to me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been beavering away at the story I mentioned last week, the one with the boarding school friends who reconnect after much suffering in World War I, and I have decided that in this pursuit I obviously must read the sequel to David Blaize (although apparently David Blaize and the Blue Door is in fact a prequel and also a fantasy novel even though David Blaize had no fantasy elements? Weird flex, but okay), and also I have REALIZED that this is the perfect opportunity for me to read all sorts of books that I’ve meant to read for ages because they influenced Tolkien and/or C. S. Lewis. Obviously what the readers of m/m romances want is for the characters to have vociferous opinions about William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Buckle up, buttercups, because this week I finished MANY books. I had a number of books that were almost done and I thought… might as well knock them all out this week.

First, I finished Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Polly Oliver’s Problem, which despite the title does not feature any cross-dressing. Yes, I know. I was disappointed too.

In fact, Polly Oliver’s problem is how to support herself and her mother now that her mother’s failing health makes it impossible for her to continue taking boarders. Polly starts the book with a plan: she will become a kindergarten teacher. She then… makes no progress toward this plan whatsoever, ends up accidentally taking another boarder when her friend’s older brother falls in with a bad crowd at college and needs to be reformed, and then accidentally makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Bird, a character from Wiggin’s previous novel The Birds’ Christmas Carol (in which Mrs. Bird’s daughter Carol dies a tragic and angelic death), who takes Polly in after her mother dies and sets her up as a professional storyteller.

The book was enjoyable as I read (Wiggin also wrote Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; she knows how to entertain a reader), but looking at it as a whole - what odd plotting. The reformation of the college student in particular gets dropped like a hot potato; it looks like the book’s setting the chap up as Polly’s love interest, but then Polly's mother dies and he writes Polly a nice letter about how much the Olivers helped him and he’d like to help her in return… and that’s the end of it.

I also limped to the end of Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, a Newbery Honor book from 2009, which is about two kittens who are born underneath a battered house in the Louisiana bayou, where they must stay because otherwise the house’s owner Gar Face would use them as alligator bait… but of course one of them disobeys.

I found this hard to get through, not because of the story, but because of the style. “Soon this storm would blow through these piney woods,” it tells you. “And it would pack a punch. Batten your hatches. Close your doors. Do not go out into that stormy night.” And it does this sort of thing quite a lot, and it always jarred me out of the story.

On a brighter note, I read The Moffats and The Middle Moffat, the first two books in Eleanor Estes’ Moffat quartet, which I’ve meant to read for ages. These books were published in the 1940s and set around the time of World War I, which makes for a double dose of nostalgia. Despite being set during the war, these are emphatically not war books: it’s just a quiet affectionate picture of American small town life during the 1910s.

And last! But assuredly not least! I finished Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which surprised me by being quite a funny book, which is perhaps surprising when you consider that it’s telling Penelope’s side of the Odyssey, with particular attention to the twelve maids who are killed at the end of that epic. But much of this book is set in the underworld, after the characters are already dead, and Atwood draws a lot of dark humor for the Greek underworld and Greek mythology in general.

I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and a lot of time on their hands. ‘Which prayer shall we answer today?’ they ask one another. ‘Let’s cast dice! Hope for this one, despair for that one, and while we’re at it, let’s destroy the life of that woman over there by having sex with her in the form of a crayfish!’

What I’m Reading Now

holyschist clued me in that Gerald Durrell in fact wrote THREE memoirs about his family’s time on Corfu, so I have happily flung myself into the second one, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, which kicks off with Gerry’s family berating him for their portrayal in his first memoir, till his mother pipes up, “The only thing I thought [was wrong with the book] was that he hadn’t used all the best stories.”

His mother is absolutely right! It turns out that the TV show The Durrells in Corfu drew almost all its first season stories from this book. You wonder why Gerald Durrell saved them for the second book in his trilogy of family memoirs.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve got Emily Nagoski’s Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, which will be either the perfect book for 2020 or completely useless for 2020. I’m not sure how you get off the stress cycle when the stressor is “the president would sit cheerfully on top of a pile of our corpses.”

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

If

ladyherenya hadn’t posted about it, I probably never would have heard about Jill Paton Walsh’s Fireweed, and that would have been a great pity. The children’s book centers on two teenagers who end up living on the streets during the early days of the Blitz in London - or rather, living on the streets during the day and in the bomb shelters by night, because the Blitz somewhat ironically has made it much easier to be homeless.

This book is more serious than The Boxcar Children, but it’s got a similar kids-on-their-own feeling, with prose that is simultaneously lyrical and transparent. The narrator is telling the story years later, which gives the story an “Et in arcadia ego” feeling, the sense of the narrator looking back on a golden past that he realizes was not really golden (bombs dropping from the sky, and so forth) and yet remembers with great fondness.

We saw London getting knocked apart. We knew where there was ruin, and we knew that it wasn’t all in the papers. We saw a lot of terrible things. But the strangest thing, in a way, was the way things were the same. It sounds silly to say that the oddest thing was that the leaves turned gold and fell off while Hitler’s bombers filled the sky; of course they would, and they did. But in all that disruption, in the midst of so much destruction, when everyone’s life was changed and we were alone, standing on our own feet for the first time, looking after ourselves, familiar things seemed as exotic and unlikely as hothouse flowers.

I continued my James Baldwin journey with Go Tell It on the Mountain, a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on Baldwin’s time as a youth preacher. The story is set, steeped really, in the traditions of a Black church in Harlem, which is both the characters’ savior and their tormentor, which provides them with a strait and narrow path through the grim circumstances of their lives and yet tortures them with the torments of hell when they slip and stray..

I realize that this makes the book sound absolutely grim, and that’s not inaccurate, but it’s written with such clarity and truthfulness that it has a certain raw horrifying beauty. In this quality it reminded me of Shirley Jackson’s work, even though in many ways the two authors are quite different; but both of them look at the dark side of the human soul without flinching.

She found herself fascinated by the gun in his holster, the club at his side. She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains.

On a much lighter note, I read Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, the memoir which inspired the TV show The Durrells in Corfu, about an English family living on the Greek island of Corfu in the late 1930s. In terms of specific incidents, there’s actually not a lot of overlap between the book and the show, but they share very much the same feeling and atmosphere: the eccentric family having madcap adventures, featuring animals collected by young Gerry and exasperated epigrams by his older brother Larry, an aspiring writer.

And I read Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha, which is jolly good fun, as Mrs. Pollifax books generally are. This one features a cameo from a sidekick in a previous book, plus of course Mrs. Pollifax’s new husband (technically her name is now Mrs. Reed-Pollifax, although the narration still calls her Mrs. Pollifax, presumably so as not to confuse us), to whose existence I am becoming resigned.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, which tells Penelope’s story both before and after the Odyssey (it begins, in fact, when Penelope is already dead, a shade looking back at her life, and Atwood’s glimpses of life in the Greek underworld are darkly comic), interwoven with a Greek chorus of the twelve maids who Odysseus kills at the end of the Odyssey for dallying with the suitors. I’m not very far in, but so far I’m really enjoying it.

What I Plan to Read Next

My forward motion in the Mrs. Pollifax series has been tragically arrested by the fact that the library doesn’t have the next three titles (Mrs. Pollifax and the Golden Triangle, Mrs. Pollifax and the Whirling Dervish, and Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief). Alas! I intend to request that the library purchase them as soon as possible, but unfortunately the library’s purchase request form is down right now on account of the pandemic, so who knows when THAT will be?

In brighter news, I’ve discovered that the 1971 adaptation Mrs. Pollifax - Spy stars Rosalind Russell, so that may very well be worth watching.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As a birthday present to myself I read Elizabeth Wein’s White Eagles, a short novel about a young woman flying with the Polish army at the beginning of World War II. If you know anything about the invasion of Poland, you’ll be able to guess that this has some dark moments, but overall it’s about our heroine flying away from Poland (with a stowaway!) so the grimness-to-adventure ratio ultimately tilts toward adventure.

As a further birthday present to myself (White Eagles is QUITE short), I read Francesca Forrest’s new short story Duplication, which takes place in a world a little slantwise from ours: sometimes people, especially children, will duplicate for a few hours, a day or two at most, so that there are two of the same person running around for a while till they merge back into one.

The story is concerned with the everyday experience of a mother whose daughter suddenly becomes two daughters, and the philosophical question - although with a certain lived urgency that philosophical questions often lack - of what it means for one person to become two. To what extent are the duplicates two separate entities? What does it mean - what is lost - what the duplicates merge back into one?

I also finished Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, which I read because I enjoyed the miniseries adaptation so much. (Well, enjoyed seems like the wrong word for such a bleak story, but you know what I mean.) It turns out that the adaptation was extraordinarily faithful, to the point that Grace tells her story in the exact words she uses in the book (I often had the eerie sense of hearing the words in the actress’s voice as I read), which, well, if you’ve got Margaret Atwood’s words at your disposal, why wouldn’t you?

The main difference is that the book includes a subplot in which Dr. Jordan, the doctor interviewing Grace Marks to try to prove her innocence, becomes sexually entangled with his landlady. In general I found Dr. Jordan’s POV unpleasant to read: he has such an instrumental view of people, always with an eye for how they can be of service to him (sexually, for women, and in his career, for men), and few signs of actual affection for anyone. Thus, the book induces an even stronger feeling of “WHY ARE MEN” than the miniseries, which also didn’t skimp in this regard.

What I’m Reading Now

I finished part one of Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, and I’m taking a break before I read part two because it’s such a dense, intensely emotional book.

Thus, I’m treating myself to Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha. Following series order, I should have read Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, but the ebook was checked out and I figured, “There’s not super a lot of continuity in this series, it will be fine if I skip it for now!”

Reader, it turns out that Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha builds heavily on Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station. So I’m kicking myself, although honestly it doesn’t matter all that much: the books are clearly interrelated, but not so much that I’m finding anything in Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha hard to follow. Anyway one doesn’t read the Mrs. Pollifax books expecting surprises, but because it’s such a pleasure to spend time with Mrs. Pollifax and whoever she has befriended in the course of this book’s spying mission.

A quote I noted down, as exemplary of Mrs. Pollifax’s character: “Mrs. Pollifax measured intelligence by curiosity, rueing people who never asked questions, never asked why, or what happened next or how.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I intend to continue my Margaret Atwood journey with The Penelopiad, but before that, I really MUST attend to this stack of library books that has been moldering patiently on my bookshelf. (I’ve been clinging to them in the superstitious sense that we might go back on lockdown at any time, but I am coming to the conclusion that this would be MUCH too sensible for the government to ever actually do it.) First up: James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

William Dean Howells’ My Year in a Log Cabin, a very short book - really more of an extended essay - about the year in Howells’ boyhood when his family lived in a log cabin in southern Ohio in 1850. What really struck me is the sense that he and his brothers had that they were almost engaging in a living history reenactment: they had the delicious sense of having moved into one of their father’s stories about his own childhood, when log cabins were the common domicile, even though by 1850 log cabins were out-of-date and the Howells only stayed there till they got a more modern house built.

It’s easy to generalize airily about the 19th century - I know I myself am guilty of it on occasion - so this was a good reminder that daily life changed enormously over the course of the century, just as much as it did in the twentieth. Sometimes the exact decade really matters.

But also, conversely, newfangled devices don’t instantly sweep all old things out of their way. The log cabin era in Ohio ended long before 1850, but here’s the Howells family living in a log cabin, and poor Mrs Howells reduced to cooking on a crane over an open fire rather than using a stove.

I also finished Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, and I stand by my thoughts last week: it’s a good book, but not as good as The Handmaid’s Tale, although honestly making comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale would set most any book up to fail. I think it would have been better if Atwood hadn’t tried to build suspense by having the characters withhold information from the reader: I guessed all the major twists before they happened. And it really added nothing to the book: the best parts by far are the moments when Atwood fleshes out the world of Gilead, and these would have been entirely unchanged if, say, ( Spoilers )

I know I’ve complained about this before with other books. In general, I feel that if a character knows something, they ought to share it with the readers sooner rather than later - unless they have a very good reason to withhold it, like an in-universe audience from whom they must conceal the truth. And anyway, you can build just as much suspense by telling the reader the gist of what will happen, and leaving them hanging about exactly how or why that event will occur!

What I’m Reading Now

I began William Dean Howells’ Suburban Sketches, but the first essay is a comical piece about a black cook whom the Howells employed for a while, and it is pretty much what you would expect from that description, and I decided to give Suburban Sketches a break for a while.

This is particularly depressing because in Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (first published in 1918), Brawley (an African-American educator) singles out Howells as unusually thoughtful and sensitive on this subject for a white author: “Such an artist as Mr. Howells, for instance, has once or twice dealt with the problem in excellent spirit.” That only serves to drive home just how absolutely dire was the field as a whole.

I’ve been reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in a desultory manner, interested without being deeply invested, but this week I finally got to the part where Theo meets his best friend-who-he-occasionally-hooks-up-with Boris Pavlikovksy and my investment immediately quadrupled… and then Theo and Boris lost touch, and now I’ve slowed down again.

Oh! And I've begun Don Quixote!

evelyn_b, I'm thinking I might do a Thursday Don Quixote post, like I did about The Count of Monte Cristo back when we were reading The Count of Monte Cristo.

What I Plan to Read Next

All of a sudden I’ve got LOADS of holds coming in all at once. The one I’m most excited about is Bessel A. Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, but I’ve also got Eva Ibbotson’s The Reluctant Heiress if/when I need something less heavy to read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

“A priest once told me that grief is not a duty. You should let it come and go as it will and not bind it to you with iron hoops.”

This quote comes from Vivien Alcock’s Singer to the Sea God, which is only intermittently a book about grief, so the quote is not really representative, but it stuck with me nonetheless.

As to what it is about when it’s not about grief? I’m not quite sure about that: I felt it was more diffuse than the other Alcock books that I’ve read, and perhaps didn’t ultimately come together as a whole, although I did admire Alcock’s project to delve into the world of ancient Greek myths through the eyes of the little people often ignored: Phaidon and his friends begin the book as slaves in a king’s court, and escape only after the king and most of his nobles are turned to stone by Perseus with Medusa’s head.

Singer to the Sea God is the last of the Alcock books my local library has available (the other two were The Mysterious Mister Ross and The Monster Garden), but I’ve found another source for some of her other books. Any particular recommendations? I seem to recall hearing nice things about The Stonewalkers.

What I’m Reading Now

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments! I’m about halfway through and CALLING IT NOW, ( Spoilers )

Non-spoilery reaction: I’m not sure, upon reflection, that rereading The Handmaid’s Tale right before The Testaments was the best idea. The Handmaid’s Tale is a great book, which means that The Testaments, while good, can’t help but suffer by comparison. It’s also, as

troisoiseaux observed, a much more conventional modern dystopian tale: a story about resistance, whereas The Handmaid’s Tale is about resignation, about a woman living under a regime she despises but has no power to change.

The story closest to the original Handmaid’s Tale in atmosphere is Agnes’s story about her childhood in Gilead. This is also the story that offers the most on-the-ground worldbuilding detail about Gilead, and so far it is my favorite in the book.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2020 Newbery winners have been announced! The big winner this year is Jerry Craft’s New Kid, and there are also four (!) Honor books: Kwame Alexander’s The Undefeated (which also won the Caldecott Medal for the word of illustrator Kadir Nelson), Christine McKay Heidicker’s Scary Stories for Young Foxes (I’ve heard good things about this one: probably the one I’m most looking forward too), Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home, and Alicia D. Williams’ Genesis Begins Again.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in preparation for reading The Testaments. This is actually a reread: I read the book in high school as a possible book for my term paper, which I ended up writing about A Tale of Two Cities because I figured that would be easier.

I was almost certainly right about this, not least because I super loved The Handmaid’s Tale and it’s often harder to write about things that you love. It wasn’t quite the same bolt from the blue this time (but then, how could it be, being a reread?) but I still loved it. It’s a look at a character living in an oppressive society and trying to eke out a little happiness despite the odds stacked against her, and that’s something that I really love in books and in fact often miss in dystopian novels: so many of them involve people directly rebelling against oppression, not just trying to live their lives.

I also read Jen Wang’s Stargazing, in which Christine befriends Moon, who she thinks is way cooler than she is - so much cooler that she’s afraid Moon will inevitably abandon her for other friends. This is a dynamic that I had with a friend growing up and I thought Stargazing absolutely nailed it, to the point that it swept away my usual dislike for a certain plot twist: ( Spoilers for the plot twist )

And finally I finished Elizabeth Goudge’s The Dean’s Watch, which I really liked. I’ve heard that Goudge’s adult fiction is preachy, and certainly this book was written with a heavier hand than her books for children, but ultimately I felt that this book managed to deal with heavy themes without crossing over into preachiness.

I’ve often found it puzzling, given that I’m not religious myself, that I’m drawn to books by religious authors with religious themes - like Goudge, or C. S. Lewis, or Rumer Godden - but I think ultimately what draws me to them is this willingness to grapple with heavy themes, to look directly at the inevitability of death or the problem of evil and say “Well, wanna make something of it?”, which I rarely find in secular books. Which is not to say that secular authors don’t deal with weighty themes - see above The Handmaid’s Tale - but often it’s a different set of themes. The religious authors give the kaleidoscope another twist.

What I’m Reading Now

Things are heating up in William Dean Howells’ A Modern Instance: Bartley has just published a story that he stole from a friend, which may prove the tipping point for Marcia to realize that her husband is not a good man who makes mistakes, but an unprincipled man who mostly manages to convince people he’s good because he’s got a charming way with words. Will she divorce him and marry his old college friend Ben Halleck, who clearly has an enormous crush on her?

“What could be worse than marriage without love?” Ben Halleck demands of a friend, with whom he has been discussed the Bartley/Marcia problem without directly mentioning that he’s in love with Marcia.

“Love without marriage,” the friend replies.

This exchange may be the key to all nineteenth-century Anglo-American novels.

What I Plan to Read Next

Perhaps Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker?

Oh! Oh! And the 2020 Newbery winners should be announced shortly!!!

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: margaret atwood

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