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Wednesday Reading Meme
May. 8th, 2024 12:19 pmWhat 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!
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!
