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

Mary Renault’s The Lion in the Gateway: The Heroic Battles of the Greeks and Persians at Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae. (I’m not sure if that second part is actually the subtitle or if it’s just on the cover to clarify what the book’s about.) I got this because the library that is closing for renovation happened to have it in the children’s section that has been deliciously neglected for at least forty years, and I figured if I didn’t snap it up, then I might never get a chance at it, and actually it’s quite charming. It’s a children’s nonfiction book, so the style is simpler than in Mary Renault’s adult novels, but it shares their lucidity and admiration for the ancient Greeks. And of course she can’t resist name-checking Alexander the Greek a couple of times even though he’s a hundred years later.

Continuing my journey with the New York Review Children’s collection, I read Russell Hoban’s The Marzipan Pig and Palmer Brown’s Beyond the Pawpaw Tree, both of which are very odd in very different ways. The Marzipan Pig is about a marzipan pig which falls behind a couch, and muses on its fate, then three pages in gets eaten by a mouse. The mouse, having apparently ingested the marzipan pig’s deep thoughts as well as its delicious marzipan self, falls in love with a clock. Then the mouse gets eaten by an owl, and the owl falls in love with the light on a taxicab, and so forth and so on.

Beyond the Pawpaw Tree is odd in a much more classical children’s nonsense book sort of way. Anna Lavinia wakes up on a lavender blue day and sets off to visit her missing father’s sister, whom she finds at last living on a mirage in the desert, and who should she meet in the garden but her father! And he has found the gold he was seeking at the end of the rainbow, so he is ready to come back home.

I don’t actually much enjoy nonsense books of this sort, and yet in a weird way I’m always delighted by them, I think because they are so perfectly pointless except for their desire to delight. They are imparting not a single moral message of any kind and I love them for that.

What I’m Reading Now

Almost done with Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds and Other Stories. So far “The Birds” is the strongest story, but overall it’s quite a strong collection, except for “The Apple Tree” in which the conceit, I thought, is just a bit too obvious.

What I Plan to Read Next

At long last I have Anne Lindbergh’s Nobody’s Orphan!
osprey_archer: (cheers)
The Frances books! Bread and Jam for Frances, A Birthday for Frances, Best Friends for Frances...we had all of Russell and Lillian Hoban's Frances books. I LOVED the Frances books: their beautiful four-color illustrations, black, white, pale pink and pale green; and Frances herself, who was just like me, if I were an anthropomorphized badger. She's neither an angel - an uncommon character type in picture books, anyway - nor exaggeratedly naughty, which is very common: Eloise, Olivia, Max, Curious George…

Oh, I loathed Curious George. I wasn't a big fan of any of the picture books about naughty children, but Curious George was the worst. There's one book where he destroys a dinosaur skeleton. A fossil skeleton that paleontologists lovingly, carefully, painstakingly picked out of the rocks in which it had lain for at least 65 million years! And he doesn't get in any trouble at all! Those poor paleontologists. The poor museum. All the museum goers who will never get to see the T-rex skeleton because of Curious George! RAGE.

But Frances is not like that. She's an in-between girl: she usually wants to do right, but even when she tries to be good it's very hard. In one book she generously uses her own allowance to buy her little sister Gloria candy for her birthday, but then eats half of it before Gloria gets a bite. But sometimes she doesn't want to be good at all.

I loved all the Frances books (special mention goes to Best Friends for Frances), but Bread and Jam for Frances was my favorite. So many long, lovingly described scenes all about food - like Albert's description of the lunch he brought to school:

"I have a cream cheese-cucumber-and-tomato sandwich on rye bread," said Albert. "And a pickle to go with it. And a hard-boiled egg and a little cardboard shaker of salt to go with that. And a thermos bottle of milk. And a bunch of grapes and a tangerine. And a cup custard and a spoon to eat it with."

And then there's a whole page devoted to Albert's preparations for eating this enormous lunch, and only then does he actually eat it. I wouldn't have eaten almost anything in Albert's lunch at the time, but nonetheless I found the passage immensely satisfying.

There's often an assumption that descriptions are satisfying because they evoke reality well - that one can feel or see or taste the thing described. But descriptions like the one above are satisfying purely for their own sake. It has a rhythm - I have this...And this...And this - with long and short sentences intermixed; and it keeps going, and going, and going, creating in its length a sense of repleteness. An absolutely satisfying lunch, even if it is just words.

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