Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
I finished Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost, which I actually quite enjoyed! Given that my last experience with Stratton-Porter was Her Father’s Daughter, this surprised me, but I think Stratton-Porter didn’t get on her racist eugenicist hobbyhorse until she moved to California.
A Girl of the Limberlost is quite a bit pre-California. Our heroine Elnora Comstock lives on the edge of the Limberlost Swamp with her mother, who is still wildly pining for her husband who drowned in the swamp soon after Elnora’s birth (sinking into the bottomless deeps of a pool while Mrs. Comstock stood on the edge, watching but unable to help - there is a certain melodramatic pulpy quality to all this, it’s great) and resents Elnora because she believes Elnora, I am not certain how, prevented her from saving her husband.
Mrs. Comstock is an arrestingly terrible mother. She is an unpredictably terrible mother, so sometimes she makes Elnora a delicious lunch with spice cake and cured ham and Elnora peeks at it repeatedly on the way to school because she believes that here at last is some concrete proof that her mother loves her at least a little (ELNORA I WANT TO HUG YOU), and sometimes she sends her daughter to her first day of high school in an outdated calico dress without warning her in advance that she’ll have to pay fees for her classes and school books, because she figures that humiliating herself in front of her classmates will teach Elnora a good life lesson about... I don’t know. Not trusting her mother?
Fortunately, Elnora is a budding young naturalist who has been collecting moths for years, which she sells to a local collector - the Bird Woman - and thereby funds herself through high school. The naturalist sections are really well done (Stratton-Porter herself wrote natural history articles for magazines); I kind of want to read a book about moths now.
What I’m Reading Now
Still working on Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, which looks even worse in light of A Girl of the Limberlost. Stratton-Porter is sufficiently confident in Elnora’s excellence that she can surround her with interesting female characters; she even has sympathy for Elnora’s eventual romantic rival. Woolson has so little faith in Anne (who, poor child, is not allowed to have opinions or faults or much emotion at all) that she seems to believe she can only sell her as a heroine if she constantly runs down every other woman in the story and also women in general.
Women, it seems, are essentially creatures of vanity and whim: “A man, however mild, demands in a home at least a pretense of fixed hours and regularity; only a household of women is capable of no regularity at all, of changing the serious dinner hour capriciously, and even giving up dinner altogether.”
I strongly suspect that the reason men invariably demanded a fixed dinner hour, at least in houses with women present, is that the dinner hour was not their responsibility. They just had to wave a hand and demand it, and huff and puff and blow the house down if it wasn’t done.
I’ve also continued Black Dove, White Raven; it turns out (of course) that I quit right before it got interesting the first time I tried it. War looms with the Italians! And I am really enjoying all the detail about Ethiopia - it’s sort of humbling to realize how absolutely nothing I know about it.
Plus, Elizabeth Wein always has gorgeous descriptions of flying.
What I Plan to Read Next
Oh my God, ALL MY HOLDS came in at the library all at the same time. Carney’s House Party (a Betsy-Tacy companion novel), A Tangle of Gold (Jaclyn Moriarty’s latest book), In the Labyrinth of Drakes (the latest Isabella Trent novel), AND it turns out the library has Glimpses of the Devil, which is the book where M. Scott Peck finally reveals all the details of the exorcisms that he alluded to with cruel vagueness in People of the Lie!
I WANT TO READ ALL THESE BOOKS SO MUCH THAT I CAN’T DECIDE WHERE TO START. Although probably it should be Carney’s House Party because that’s an interlibrary loan and therefore really needs to go back on time.
I finished Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost, which I actually quite enjoyed! Given that my last experience with Stratton-Porter was Her Father’s Daughter, this surprised me, but I think Stratton-Porter didn’t get on her racist eugenicist hobbyhorse until she moved to California.
A Girl of the Limberlost is quite a bit pre-California. Our heroine Elnora Comstock lives on the edge of the Limberlost Swamp with her mother, who is still wildly pining for her husband who drowned in the swamp soon after Elnora’s birth (sinking into the bottomless deeps of a pool while Mrs. Comstock stood on the edge, watching but unable to help - there is a certain melodramatic pulpy quality to all this, it’s great) and resents Elnora because she believes Elnora, I am not certain how, prevented her from saving her husband.
Mrs. Comstock is an arrestingly terrible mother. She is an unpredictably terrible mother, so sometimes she makes Elnora a delicious lunch with spice cake and cured ham and Elnora peeks at it repeatedly on the way to school because she believes that here at last is some concrete proof that her mother loves her at least a little (ELNORA I WANT TO HUG YOU), and sometimes she sends her daughter to her first day of high school in an outdated calico dress without warning her in advance that she’ll have to pay fees for her classes and school books, because she figures that humiliating herself in front of her classmates will teach Elnora a good life lesson about... I don’t know. Not trusting her mother?
Fortunately, Elnora is a budding young naturalist who has been collecting moths for years, which she sells to a local collector - the Bird Woman - and thereby funds herself through high school. The naturalist sections are really well done (Stratton-Porter herself wrote natural history articles for magazines); I kind of want to read a book about moths now.
What I’m Reading Now
Still working on Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, which looks even worse in light of A Girl of the Limberlost. Stratton-Porter is sufficiently confident in Elnora’s excellence that she can surround her with interesting female characters; she even has sympathy for Elnora’s eventual romantic rival. Woolson has so little faith in Anne (who, poor child, is not allowed to have opinions or faults or much emotion at all) that she seems to believe she can only sell her as a heroine if she constantly runs down every other woman in the story and also women in general.
Women, it seems, are essentially creatures of vanity and whim: “A man, however mild, demands in a home at least a pretense of fixed hours and regularity; only a household of women is capable of no regularity at all, of changing the serious dinner hour capriciously, and even giving up dinner altogether.”
I strongly suspect that the reason men invariably demanded a fixed dinner hour, at least in houses with women present, is that the dinner hour was not their responsibility. They just had to wave a hand and demand it, and huff and puff and blow the house down if it wasn’t done.
I’ve also continued Black Dove, White Raven; it turns out (of course) that I quit right before it got interesting the first time I tried it. War looms with the Italians! And I am really enjoying all the detail about Ethiopia - it’s sort of humbling to realize how absolutely nothing I know about it.
Plus, Elizabeth Wein always has gorgeous descriptions of flying.
What I Plan to Read Next
Oh my God, ALL MY HOLDS came in at the library all at the same time. Carney’s House Party (a Betsy-Tacy companion novel), A Tangle of Gold (Jaclyn Moriarty’s latest book), In the Labyrinth of Drakes (the latest Isabella Trent novel), AND it turns out the library has Glimpses of the Devil, which is the book where M. Scott Peck finally reveals all the details of the exorcisms that he alluded to with cruel vagueness in People of the Lie!
I WANT TO READ ALL THESE BOOKS SO MUCH THAT I CAN’T DECIDE WHERE TO START. Although probably it should be Carney’s House Party because that’s an interlibrary loan and therefore really needs to go back on time.