Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow. I loved The Witch of Blackbird Pond so much as a child, why did I fail to read all the rest of Speare’s work? But perhaps it’s as well that I didn’t. The Bronze Bow is about Judaea in the first century AD and therefore unavoidably about Jesus.
Our hero is a young fellow named Daniel, who hates Romans so much (for reasons that are slowly revealed and suitable devastating) that he spits whenever he sees a Roman soldier, and dreams of the day when he can take part in a rebellion to drive the Roman usurpers into the sea. Naturally he is pretty much horrified when he realizes that Jesus is not going to lead an armed rebellion of any kind.
Also naturally - and this is a spoiler, although if you’ve read anything ever I bet you can see it coming from a mile away - after some halfway successful but quite depressing attempts at military action against the Romans, Daniel accepts Jesus’s message: we have to love everyone, even our enemies, the kingdom will come on earth only when we do, and military action is besides the point.
I don’t know, maybe I would have actually liked that a lot. I was quite the pacifist in my youth; I adored Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Greensky books, although I think the trilogy went off so badly in the last book that I tend to pretend it’s a duology.
A fanciful corner of my mind is convinced that Elizabeth George Speare, Elizabeth Marie Pope, and Rosemary Sutcliff have a weekly tea party in the Great Reading Room in the sky, where all good authors go after death. They are all three children’s historical fiction writers with a slight mystical bent who wrote between 1950 and 1980, clearly that is enough to be getting on with! I bet they come up with five amazing book ideas per tea party.
What I’m Reading Now
Louisa May Alcott’s Under the Lilacs. I’ve always thought it was kind of embarrassing that I wrote my senior thesis about nineteenth century literature for American girls without having read Alcott’s entire oeuvre.
What I Plan to Read Next
My bookshelf tells me Eleaner Estes’s Ginger Pye and Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan. Yes! The author of the Animorphs and Everworld series (serieses? serii?) won a Newbery medal just this year! Maybe this means we’ll finally get an ending for Everworld...
I’ve always thought it was odd that Applegate, having set up a golden opportunity for the quartet to return permanently to Earth (and thus have a conclusion that actually concluded), proceeded to leave them in Everworld at the end of the last book. Maybe she wanted to leave it open to our imagination that our intrepid young explorers were traipsing around Everworld having adventures?
But frankly, staying in Everworld forever seemed totally unappealing - it was so bloody and dangerous and full of mean hyper-powered beings! So the ending seemed inconclusive and untidy to me.
Elizabeth George Speare’s The Bronze Bow. I loved The Witch of Blackbird Pond so much as a child, why did I fail to read all the rest of Speare’s work? But perhaps it’s as well that I didn’t. The Bronze Bow is about Judaea in the first century AD and therefore unavoidably about Jesus.
Our hero is a young fellow named Daniel, who hates Romans so much (for reasons that are slowly revealed and suitable devastating) that he spits whenever he sees a Roman soldier, and dreams of the day when he can take part in a rebellion to drive the Roman usurpers into the sea. Naturally he is pretty much horrified when he realizes that Jesus is not going to lead an armed rebellion of any kind.
Also naturally - and this is a spoiler, although if you’ve read anything ever I bet you can see it coming from a mile away - after some halfway successful but quite depressing attempts at military action against the Romans, Daniel accepts Jesus’s message: we have to love everyone, even our enemies, the kingdom will come on earth only when we do, and military action is besides the point.
I don’t know, maybe I would have actually liked that a lot. I was quite the pacifist in my youth; I adored Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Greensky books, although I think the trilogy went off so badly in the last book that I tend to pretend it’s a duology.
A fanciful corner of my mind is convinced that Elizabeth George Speare, Elizabeth Marie Pope, and Rosemary Sutcliff have a weekly tea party in the Great Reading Room in the sky, where all good authors go after death. They are all three children’s historical fiction writers with a slight mystical bent who wrote between 1950 and 1980, clearly that is enough to be getting on with! I bet they come up with five amazing book ideas per tea party.
What I’m Reading Now
Louisa May Alcott’s Under the Lilacs. I’ve always thought it was kind of embarrassing that I wrote my senior thesis about nineteenth century literature for American girls without having read Alcott’s entire oeuvre.
What I Plan to Read Next
My bookshelf tells me Eleaner Estes’s Ginger Pye and Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan. Yes! The author of the Animorphs and Everworld series (serieses? serii?) won a Newbery medal just this year! Maybe this means we’ll finally get an ending for Everworld...
I’ve always thought it was odd that Applegate, having set up a golden opportunity for the quartet to return permanently to Earth (and thus have a conclusion that actually concluded), proceeded to leave them in Everworld at the end of the last book. Maybe she wanted to leave it open to our imagination that our intrepid young explorers were traipsing around Everworld having adventures?
But frankly, staying in Everworld forever seemed totally unappealing - it was so bloody and dangerous and full of mean hyper-powered beings! So the ending seemed inconclusive and untidy to me.