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What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Agnes Hewes’ The Codfish Musket, third and last in her trio of boring 1930s Newbery Honor winners. I can only imagine that the committee felt that the “Rah rah MANIFEST DESTINY” message was good for the Youth, because my God these books are dull. How can books be so dull when there are so many deadly conspiracies?

But maybe it’s because Hewes is actually not great at deadly conspiracies. The best part of this book by far is the non-deadly middle, when our hero Dan Boit goes to Washington and accidentally becomes Thomas Jefferson’s secretary after he finds Jefferson’s lost notebook full of observations about when the first peas come up and the frogs start peeping.

In modern-day Newbery Honor winners, I finished Chanel Miller’s Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All, a short and charming tale in which Magnolia and her new friend Iris try to return orphaned socks from Magnolia’s parents’ laundry to their owners. In the process, they explore New York City and learn more about the denizens of their neighborhood.

I also read Susan Fletcher’s Journey of the Pale Bear, about a Norwegian boy accompanying a captured polar bear to England as a present for the king. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Fletcher wrote a related picture book, but that focuses more on the bear’s experiences, while this is more about the boy and the boy-meets-bear of it all. Who among us has not wished for a bear friend!

What I’m Reading Now

In Our Mutual Friend, Lizzie Hexam’s father has DIED. This may be a lucky escape for him, as he was about to be arrested on suspicion of murder (at the word of his wicked lying former business partner), but I’m very concerned what will become of poor Lizzie.

My suspicion that Mr. Rokesmith is in fact the dead John Harmon has only grown stronger as he has insinuated himself in the Boffin household as an unpaid secretary. What is his ultimate goal here? A more suspicious soul than Mr. Boffin might wonder who on earth would offer himself up as a secretary without pay, and consider the possibility of embezzlement, but blessed Mr. Boffin is not concerned a bit.

What I Plan to Read Next

Onward in the Newbery books! I am ten books from the end of the historical Newberies, and I intend to finish the project while Interlibrary Loan is still alive.

glitteryv

Expectations had been HIGH ever since it was announced that Coldplay would perform in Seoul for 6 sold out shows. They had TWICE during the first show (and then dropped an annoucement of a collabo they're doing with them.)

PPL were like OJO to the max cuz it was a fact that Jin was gonna show up. After all, he'd released "The Astronaut", a pop rock "I'm going into the military, but I'll be back" song that featured Coldplay. AND, shortly before enlisting, he'd flown something like 40 hrs from SK to perform the song live at what ARMYs affectionately call ArJINtina back in 2022.

The reunion happened this past Saturday and everyone was floating on cloud nine...

NB: these two videos (though filmed in HD) are fancams. As such, there's a lot of v. happy screaming, plenty of flashing lights from the stage, etc. BigHit will most deffo release a couple of Bangtan Bombs abt these two performances at some point in the future. But this is what we've got right now, so that's what I'm sharing with y'all. :DDD

Watch on YouTube

osprey_archer

I am happy to report that Joan Aiken had mercy after all, and started Dido and Pa with the reunion between Dido and Simon which she denied us at the end of The Cuckoo Tree. At long last they see each other again! They are delighted to be reunited and have a lovely supper at an inn.

However, their reunion is short-lived, as Dido hears a song that reminds her of her father’s tunes. She goes out to investigate (musing all the time that her father never played for her, not once, in her entire childhood) and runs into her father, who informs her that her sister is extremely ill! and wants to see her! so just get into this carriage and stop asking questions!

You will be unsurprised to hear that Dido’s sister is not ill. Indeed, Dido’s father has no idea where Dido’s sister is. He is kidnapping Dido to make her take part in another wicked Hanoverian plot. This plot has been slightly complicated by the fact that the last Bonnie Prince Georgie just died, oops, so the Hanoverians no longer have a contender to the throne, but never fear! They will come up with a way to plot wickedly anyway.

(I was reading a history book the other day which mentioned Hanoverians and I needed to pause a moment to remember that Hanoverians are (a) real and (b) not constantly wickedly plotting in real life.)

Dido’s father starts this book as a terrible father and only goes downhill from there. He is also music master to the Hanoverian ambassador and actually a wonderful musician and composer, which causes Dido painful confusion. How can he be such an awful person and such a wonderful artist? I feel you, Dido. If only the two were incompatible, things would be much easier for us all.

But he continues to be the worst, up to and including walking whistling away from a burning building with over a hundred children in the basement, while also being such an amazing musician that his music actually has healing properties. (Pity Queen Ginevra in The Stolen Lake didn’t discover the life-extending properties of music rather than porridge made from the bones of children.) Beneath the barmy plots, Joan Aiken is a stone-cold realist about the contradictions of human nature.

glitteryv

So, since it's Friday, I thought "let me do a post of fun stuff ppl might want to check out over the weekend." all three videos feature Matteo Lane--a gay, Italian-American comedian. IHNI what his comedy is like, but I found him on YT when it suggested one video where he talked abt informacials. IDEK, hahah.

The shows discussed are things I either watched in real time OR am familiar enough to jabber abt for a bit.

MTV's True Life

Back in the day, one of the reasons young ppl were watching MTV was cuz of their unscripted series. This was a deocumentary-style show where each episode dealt with anything and everything you can think of. Substance abuse, homelessness, being queer, driving while Black, being a cheerleader, going to college, moving to another city, etc. The series started airing in 1998 so reality TV was a huge thing. In some ways (and despite the editing) this MTV version of reality TV felt, well, fairly real.

IIRC, I watched the first three or four seasons? It was cancelled in 2017, so there was that.

ANYWAY

One of the most INFAMOUS episodes was "I'm Getting Married". It centered around Charlie and Sabrina, an Italian-American couple from New York, and their nuptials.

Watching this was a trip cuz I remember my initial O___O when it first aired. Not only the wedding stuff, but also watching what Charlie and Sabrina's life was like, the fashion (!), the nostalgia was there in full force, LOL.

I gotta mention that Charlie had a temper and his relationship with Sabrina was...messed up in a lot of ways. Also, I have a throw in a mild content warning for discussions of what went on in Charlie's life after the show aired. Heartwrenching stuff.

Watch on YouTube

Undressed

This anthology series first aired in 1999 and got cancelled 3 yrs later. Every Monday, the show would follow a group of ppl (usually college-aged, sometimes slightly younger or older) and their romantic and/or sexual relationships (breaking up, getting together, etc). The plots had two, occasionally three, storylines focusing on a handful of the characters. By Thursday, the stories would end. And then a new set of ppl would come up in the following week and so on. The show had an v. adult vibe and would air at 11:30 p.m.

Due to the set-up, you HAD to tune in every night during a week you liked the stories or the characters. Because MTV would not only take their sweet time doing reruns of the anthology BUT ALSO, due to the premise, you wouldn't know IF they were gonna rerun the storylines you liked. It was fun most of the time, tho.

NOT THE BEST ACTING, BUT it was the show that introduced me to Katee Sackoff, so.. hey! Other notable folks who appeared include: Max Greenfield, Adam Brody, Jason Ritter, Brandon Routh, and PEDRO PASCAL.

As a matter of fact, Pedro is IN THE EPISODE Matteo is commenting abt.

One of the main reasons why I liked this show (at the time) and one of the v. few things that MTV did right was showing queer ppl alongside cishet folks without mocking the queers. Frex, the episode Matteo is revisiting is centered around an M/M couple. HOWEVER, culturally speaking, the way the show (and the rest of late 90s/earlyl 2000s media) were handled in a problematique way a lot of the time.

IT WAS ALL US QUEER FOLKS HAD TO WATCH AT THAT TIME THO! Like, on non-MTV networks, queer folks were either the joke OR presented under the "Very Special Episode" umbrella. So, in that sense, I could appreciate this show.

Anyhoodle, I deffo agree with Matteo's commentary here regarding the messiness of it all...

Watch on YouTube

NEXT

Speaking of MESSY...

This is a dating reality show that began airing a little bit after I stopped watching MTV? So 2005-ish and ran for 3 more years. I watched a few episodes while getting ready to go out, but it's not like any of them were super memorable.

This was RIDICULOUSNESS. The basic idea is that there are 5 or 6 daters who are trying to win over a single person. The longer any of the daters remains with the single, the more money they make. The last dater will get the option of keeping the money they've accumulated throughout the date OR go on a second date with the single person. That said, the single person will "NEXT" any dater they're not clicking with.

SHENANIGANS AND TOMFOOLERY EVERYWHERE! It's v., v. early 2000s. I deffo cackled a lot because I lived thru it.

Watch on YouTube

osprey_archer

Exciting news from the Hummingbird Cottage: a Canada goose is nesting by the lake, right across from my patio! There are two geese, actually, and sometimes one is on the nest and the other patrolling, but sometimes both on the lake, dipping their heads underwater so their white back ends stick up in the air.

So far no sign of goslings, but I’m keeping an eye out. The pond might be christened Gosling Pond.

However, I also believe that there’s a kingfisher (!!) in the area, and if I can get a positive ID on the bird, the pond will likely be Kingfisher Pond instead. I am not very confident in my bird identification skills and even less so than usual in this case because I would LOVE to have a kingfisher, and therefore fear deluding myself. But I’ve seen it more than once and feel cautiously hopeful that I have not after all led myself astray.

Other birds in the area: lots of robins. Cardinals. Blue jays. A lot of little brown birds that I vaguely classify as “sparrows,” although I’m sure some of them are chickadees. A lovely little red bird, smaller than a cardinal and without the distinctive crest, very red at the front and fading to brown at the back. I saw that one in the tree outside my office window, which is on the second story so I am of a height with the birds in the trees.

The office is a fancy name for a table pushed up under the window, where I do my Sunday Writing Mornings. Mostly I’m working on short stories, and I’m building up a little stash: seven so far! This is also the room where I practice my dulcimer (most recently working on “Scotland the Brave”), and think about practicing my tin whistle, but I haven’t managed to take the plunge on that one yet.

It’s getting warm enough to plant, so I need to get started in the garden. There’s a rosemary plant that appears to have overwintered, as there’s green coming into the tips of its gray leaves, and some very happy mint on the shady side of the house. Not sure what kind. I brought a little inside and Bramble was very interested, starting whizzing around the house, and then either jumped or fell off the upstairs balcony into the living room. (He was fine. He has been courting this experience for weeks, as he considers the balcony rail a fun enrichment opportunity for cats.)

My composting efforts were met with great enthusiasm by the wildlife community, by which I mean that something dug them up repeatedly until it ate every last bit that it found appetizing. Strongly suspect the agency of a possum that I saw waddling across the patio one morning. This is probably a heartening sign of biodiversity, but as I don’t wish to open a buffet for possums, the composting is on hold as I consider next steps.

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing, but that's because I had a bunch of migraines, had to prep ten issues for the YGMAH book club, and had to keep writing stuff for the fic exchange. Sometimes, in the five minutes before I fall asleep, I think about maybe reading a book.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

( Iron Man #7, Sam Wilson Captain America #4, Superior Avengers #1, Ultimate Wolverine #4 )

What I'm Reading Next

Not sure. I am typing The Art of War on Entertrained, solely because it's the shortest book. I can hit, like, 35 wpm with punctuation and everything currently, which is approaching my QWERTY speed, but I need more muscle memory.

Current Mood: creative

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ella Young’s The Tangle-Coated Horse and Other Tales, a 1930s Newbery Honor book that retells some stories from the sagas of Finn MacCool. Some lovely descriptive passages but not memorable overall.

I also finished Annie Fellows Johnston’s Cicely and Other Stories. Some of the stories I’ve forgotten already (what happened to the titular Cicely?), but others have stuck in my mind, like the story of three southern girls living in genteel poverty because Family Tradition says they mustn’t work… until they realize that their grandmothers worked very hard indeed when they first came to Kentucky, and conclude that surely this older Family Tradition trumps the newer one.

What I’m Reading Now

In Our Mutual Friend, the Boffins have just decided to adopt an orphan boy whom they will name John Harmon, to the astonishment of the Wilfers’ lodger Mr. Rokeworthy, whom I strongly suspect is the real John Harmon in disguise who is lodging with the Wilfers in secret to see if he wants to marry their daughter Bella, as their marriage is the condition under which he could inherit the fortune that, as everyone believes John Harmon to be dead, has currently gone to the Boffins.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have decided that once I finish Our Mutual Friend, I will at long last tackle Elizabeth Barrett Brownings’ Aurora Leigh!

osprey_archer

Years ago I read and really liked Edward L. Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, so I was pleased to have a chance to read his earlier book In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, not least because this solved the mystery of Ayers’ otherwise puzzling decision to start The Thin Light of Freedom smack dab in the middle of the war.

But either Ayers really grew as a historian between the two books, or I’ve gained a lot of Civil War knowledge since I read The Thin Light of Freedom, or possibly both. I found In the Presence of Mine Enemies much less interesting and insightful than The Thin Light of Freedom.

However, it did spark off a number of thoughts, none of which are things that the book exactly explores in itself, so this is not so much a review as a couple of things that it made me think about.

1. The beginning of a popular war apparently feels just terrific. I’ve read this sort of thing about the beginning of World War I, too (or America’s entry into World War I), where you’ve had months of lead-up, ages of aching tension, furious argument on all sides, and suddenly the war is declared and everything seems clean and clear and unanimous and everyone is running through the streets waving flags and singing patriotic songs and throwing tomatoes at the windows of the few old windbags who are muttering “This isn’t going to be as much fun as you think.”

This lasts until the first defeat (if that long), at which point everyone realizes that the war is indeed NOT going to be as fun as they think, and also all those political divisions that it seemed like the war had transcended are back! and more furious than ever! and somehow we have to deal with that while also fighting a war! Because of course you are still stuck with the war after the first euphoric glow wears off.

2. Every war is different, and presumably there have been wars where crusty old geezers send innocent young men to die for fun and profit, but in the Civil War at least the young men were wildly in favor of going to war while the old men were, overall, the ones going “But have we considered NOT going to war.”

I say this because there seems to be something of a canard that young men go to war because they have been duped by old ones, and in this case if they were duped by anyone it was by themselves and their own conviction that they could whip Those Dirty Whosits by Christmas.

osprey_archer

Not so long ago,

skygiants acquired Frances Mary Hendry’s Quest for a Kelpie, which is about a girl during the Jacobite uprising of 1745 who is fated by a seer to meet with someone four times.

“Hmmm,” we said. “This sounds similar to D. K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron!”

Conveniently, I just recently unpacked the paper copy of Flight of the Heron that I found at John K. King Books in fall of 2023, and felt like rereading it anyway because I’d never read it on paper before, so I gave it a spin before

skygiants sent me Quest for a Kelpie.

Although it is of course possible that Frances Mary Hendry read Flight of the Heron at some point, I wouldn’t bet on it based on Quest for a Kelpie. Although the two books have the same setting and almost the same premise (in Flight of the Heron it’s five meetings instead of four, of course), their thematic preoccupations are completely different.

Flight of the Heron is interested in honor, particularly the moments when honor and duty clash with desire and prudence - not just in the repeated meetings of Ewen and Keith, but in Lochiel’s decision to rise for the Prince because he promised his support, even though he knows that the Prince’s choices have made this particular rising unlikely to succeed. It’s interested in people on opposing sides of a war who would have been friends under different circumstances. And, of course, gorgeous men being wounded and tenderly nursed back to health by a friend in a desperate situation.

Quest for a Kelpie is interested in women’s work, work in general and the way that small subsistence-level communities survive, the effect of war on the poor who have little say in whether war comes or not, the devastation wrought by war (to be fair, Flight of the Heron is cognizant of this too; it’s not a main theme, but it comes up insistently nonetheless), the fact that we are all human despite divides of class or caste or race, and the way this is so easy to forget and the forgetting so easily leads to our devastation.

( Spoilers )

This was Hendry’s first book, and it’s not as polished and memorable as Quest for a Maid. (I can’t be the only one who thought of Quest for a Maid and the heroine’s streak of white hair where her witch sister struck her when I first saw Frozen.) But it’s thematically resonant with the later book, and shares many of the same overriding preoccupations.

Quest for a Maid was the only Hendry published in the US, so Quest for a Kelpie is hard to come by. Would anyone like my copy? I’d be happy to mail it within the US.

osprey_archer

Yesterday evening, I decided I might as well get started on my 2025 Newbery reading, and picked up Kate O’Shaughnessy’s The Wrong Way Home to read a couple of chapters before bed. Then I read the whole book in one sitting, and lay awake for the next three hours or so thinking about it.

This is particularly impressive because I felt lukewarm about the premise of the book. Our heroine Fern starts off in a back-to-nature cult in New York, only to be yoinked out by her mother who drives her across the country to California to start a new, mainstream life.

Now, I love cult stories, but to be honest I’m much more interested in the cult aspect than the “return to mainstream life” thing. I know what mainstream life is like. I want to read about a day in the life of the cult, I want cult rituals, I want a deep dive into cult beliefs. My favorite cult story is the movie Midsommar, which ends with Dani ecstatically joining the cult of flower-bedecked Swedish human sacrificers. I mean, yes, technically bad, but don’t we all practice a spot of human sacrifice from time to time – what is the death of the uninsured but a human sacrifice on the altar of Freedom and Capitalism! – and, more importantly, Dani feels held by them.

The Wrong Way Home grasps that in order for Fern (and the reader) to root for Fern to stay out here, she has to find a mainstream community that she also feels held by, without the cult drawbacks of “when you come of age you have to go on a coming of age ritual which might kill you.” Driftaway Beach is Fern’s mother’s tiny oceanfront California hometown, and although her mother’s parents died long ago, her godmother Babs is still there, running an extremely pink teashop called Birdie’s after her dead wife.

Then Fern starts school. She’s much more enthusiastic about this once she realizes the school has computers, which she can use to help her find the Ranch’s address so she can write to Dr. Ben to come save her. And her science teacher is pretty cool, and really concerned about the environment in a way that makes Fern realize that you can care about the environment and also NOT live in an isolated rural compound that you never ever leave, and she starts to make friends, and also Babs invites her to come to the teashop for treats anytime she wants, on the house, and she hasn’t had sugar in years and the petit fours completely blow her mind…

But she still really misses her friends back home at the Ranch, and the chickens and the forest and the feeling of building a community that will sustain life in a future wracked by climate change and societal collapse.

And she’s also having trouble finding the Ranch on the internet, not least because she hasn’t used the internet since she moved to the Ranch when she was six. So she hires a private investigator, using money that Babs is paying her to clear out a bunch of clutter left behind by her wife’s sudden death years ago.

But earning money takes time, and a private investigation also takes time, and time is what it takes to put down roots. And when you hire a private investigator, well, he might turn up more than you’ve bargained for…

Just an incredibly readable book. I really meant to put it down and go to sleep, but I kept having to read just another chapter or two, and then somehow the book was done.

osprey_archer

I have been ill, so this Wednesday Reading Meme is alas two days late!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I reread Francesca Forrest’s “The Bee Wife,” (Amazon link here, but available through other retailers as well), which I have been gently prodding her to publish ever since she first let me read it. A lovely sweet and sad story about a beekeeper who loses his wife Joy, and the bees try to comfort him by forming a replacement Joy…

Love the magic of the bees and the characterization of the children, five children over a wide span of ages trying to understand the appearance of this new mother, and the story’s grounding in Catholicism. Is this a miracle? Witchcraft? Can the magic of the bees be holy, since we thank them specially for their candles at Easter? Shout out to the overwhelmed priest who is not at all sure what to do about an apparently resurrected Joy showing up at the church door, and even less sure when she assures him, “I am a new creation.”

What I’m Reading Now

My mother kindly delivered my hold on Our Mutual Friend when it arrived at the library, so I have at long last started reading it! So far, it’s about making your living by pulling dead bodies from the river and emptying their pockets of all their moveables before handing them over to the police (the river always seems to turn pockets inside out, the boatman says ingenuously), and a guy who is reading The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to a pair of retired servants who have come into a fortune.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have been eyeing the latest Newbery winner, Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being, with misery and dread since I got it from the library, but I suppose I’d better get it over with.

sineala

What I Just Finished Reading

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: I actually read this over the past couple months because I typed it all on Entertrained, and God, it was boring.

( My (slightly expanded) Goodreads review )

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday! Everything is very Asgard this week on my pull list.

( Doctor Strange of Asgard #2, Ultimates #11 )

What I'm Reading Next

I don't know, because now I have a migraine again. I sure enjoyed the 24 hours where my head didn't hurt. That was great. I had so much energy. At least I managed to get this post written, right? I did not catch up on my DW reading list (hope everyone is okay) or my RSS news feeds although honestly I suspect I don't want to know what the news is anyway. Sorry I did not get around to my inbox of replies I owe people from the previous migraine. Also sorry that I did not wash the dishes. This paragraph took me five minutes to write. All my energy is gone.

I'm gonna go lie quietly in the dark some more.

Current Mood: annoyed

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Reading

Wednesday Reading Meme

Fannish 50 S3 Post 10: Jin and Coldplay REUNITED!!

Book Review: Dido and Pa

Fannish 50 S3 Post 9: MTV Nostalgia Done Right With Matteo Lane

Hummingbird Cottage News

Wednesday Reading Meme

Wednesday Reading Meme

In the Presence of Mine Enemies

Flight of the Heron and Quest for a Kelpie

Book Review: The Wrong Way Home

Wednesday Reading Meme on Friday

Wednesday Reading Meme

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December 2018

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