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Reading Wednesday
Dec. 4th, 2019 07:39 amRecently read
96. Read the memoir Know My Name by Chanel Miller, the young woman known as ‘Emily Doe’ in the infamous People v. Turner case a few years back. This was a super tough book to read, emotionally, but I couldn’t put it down.
97. (Re-)read Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, which I’d read in 4th or 5th grade. I had forgotten everything about it except for one scene in which the main character longs for bronze boots— after re-reading the whole book, I have no idea why that one detail stuck with me, but I’ve thought of it about once a year since, always idly wondering what the book was called and who it was by, with no success until last week, when I saw a gif of a scene from that new TV show Dickinson, featuring Louisa May Alcott as a character, and it suddenly popped into my head that she had been the author and I was able to track it down easily from there. Funny how memories work, isn’t it?
ANYWAY. It was a really charming book, following a pair of childhood friends – Polly Milton, the titular old-fashioned girl, and the wealthier, worldlier Fanny Shaw; it’s all very “country mouse, city mouse” – from the first time Polly visits the Shaws in Boston, unconsciously helping to soothe tempers and bring their family closer together through her sweet disposition and kindness, to their young adulthood, when Polly moves to Boston to work as a music teacher and Fanny begins to weary of life as a socialite.
It had a moral message about Simplicity and Caring About Others and Honest Hard Work that was about as subtle as a bonk to the head – occasionally taking on the tone of a Goofus & Gallant comic strip – but the characters got to be people rather than just symbols or stock characters, which kept it from getting too precious to be bearable. In the second half of the novel, Polly finds a social circle of other independent young women who support each other professionally and personally - including a pair of artists who live together in “true Damon and Pythias style,” one of whom is a sculptress making a statue of “the coming woman ... bigger, lovelier, and more imposing than any we see nowadays” - so obviously I was very delighted by all of that. I also genuinely loved the childhood friendship turned romance between Polly and Fanny’s brother Tom.
Currently reading
98. Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm, which - to quote the Tumblr post that inspired me to read it - “asks: what if the person who stumbles into Fantasyland isn’t some wide-eyed bookworm child, but one of the Koch brothers? Then it cheerfully places us 40 years past that inciting incident, and as a result, Fantasyland is now a colonized Disney property” on the brink of societal and environmental collapse. Just some light escapism from all the depressing stuff happening in the real world, you know?
96. Read the memoir Know My Name by Chanel Miller, the young woman known as ‘Emily Doe’ in the infamous People v. Turner case a few years back. This was a super tough book to read, emotionally, but I couldn’t put it down.
97. (Re-)read Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, which I’d read in 4th or 5th grade. I had forgotten everything about it except for one scene in which the main character longs for bronze boots— after re-reading the whole book, I have no idea why that one detail stuck with me, but I’ve thought of it about once a year since, always idly wondering what the book was called and who it was by, with no success until last week, when I saw a gif of a scene from that new TV show Dickinson, featuring Louisa May Alcott as a character, and it suddenly popped into my head that she had been the author and I was able to track it down easily from there. Funny how memories work, isn’t it?
ANYWAY. It was a really charming book, following a pair of childhood friends – Polly Milton, the titular old-fashioned girl, and the wealthier, worldlier Fanny Shaw; it’s all very “country mouse, city mouse” – from the first time Polly visits the Shaws in Boston, unconsciously helping to soothe tempers and bring their family closer together through her sweet disposition and kindness, to their young adulthood, when Polly moves to Boston to work as a music teacher and Fanny begins to weary of life as a socialite.
It had a moral message about Simplicity and Caring About Others and Honest Hard Work that was about as subtle as a bonk to the head – occasionally taking on the tone of a Goofus & Gallant comic strip – but the characters got to be people rather than just symbols or stock characters, which kept it from getting too precious to be bearable. In the second half of the novel, Polly finds a social circle of other independent young women who support each other professionally and personally - including a pair of artists who live together in “true Damon and Pythias style,” one of whom is a sculptress making a statue of “the coming woman ... bigger, lovelier, and more imposing than any we see nowadays” - so obviously I was very delighted by all of that. I also genuinely loved the childhood friendship turned romance between Polly and Fanny’s brother Tom.
Currently reading
98. Diana Wynne Jones’ Dark Lord of Derkholm, which - to quote the Tumblr post that inspired me to read it - “asks: what if the person who stumbles into Fantasyland isn’t some wide-eyed bookworm child, but one of the Koch brothers? Then it cheerfully places us 40 years past that inciting incident, and as a result, Fantasyland is now a colonized Disney property” on the brink of societal and environmental collapse. Just some light escapism from all the depressing stuff happening in the real world, you know?
