Entry tags:
Books I read in August
...I reread Madeleine L'Engle, and that was pretty much it :P (Well, also have been reading for German book club, but that discussion is in the Frederick the Great threads. After a month of Duolingo, I can read German on the level of a six-year-old! :D But not very well at all on the level of a twelve-year-old writing on the level of an eight-year-old, and definitely not on the level of a precocious ten-year-old :PP)
-Meet the Austins - actually this was in July, as I was rereading it as a potential birthday present for a kid who doesn't read fantasy (not the niece for whom I was asking for recs before). The Austins are just such a nice family! I used to read about them and think, "I wish my family was like that!" Now I read it and think, "I wish I could parent like that!" I mean, it's clearly aged, some parts better than others, but it's still charming.
-A Small Rain - Book 1 of Katherine Forrester (later Vigneras). L'Engle's first book. It's one of those books that sort of ambles along and shows Katherine growing up, but besides this doesn't have a huge amount of plot. I like it. There is some sexual harassment and a death I totally did not remember from when I read it as a kid. Justin Vigneras, her piano teacher whom she has a crush on (and who, in book 2, we find out she later married) does not come off super well in this book, and I think he was retconned a bit in Wasp.
-A Severed Wasp - Book 2 of Katherine Forrester Vigneras. You can tell this was written much later in L'Engle's career -- this is a much more focused book, with an actual plot, lots of interesting characters, some really interesting things to say about career and family relationships, etc. And it's very cool to see Suzy (previously Austin) and Dave Davidson again and see their kids, and now I'm wondering if I should ask for fic about the two of them for Yuletide; how did that happen, anyway? I also really admire how Katherine feels like a very different character from the Katherine of Rain, and yet from the flashbacks (where she is a much more similar character to that of Rain) we get an idea how she became the Katherine of the present day. I also really like the descriptions of Katherine and her music, and Katherine and her family, and how you build a life with these things. I really enjoyed so much of this book -- up until the ending. The last time I read this was many years ago, so while I remembered who the antagonist was (and had a good time picking up all the little hints I'd missed the first time through -- she really does do a good job of setting it up), I didn't remember very much at all about how it played out.
And then it turns out that Yolande, the bishop's wife, was demanding the girls Emily and Tory kiss her?? And not in a good way. And then tells them not to tell their parents OR ELSE. (And sends a guy to frighten Emily who ends up running over her leg, which has to be amputated *facepalm*) [ETA 9-3: All of this happens before the start of the book, and a major plotline is Katherine putting together the clues to figure out what happened.] Okay. But THEN Katherine is like, "you know, Yolande, you need to stay FAR away from Emily and Tory [okay, good], and now we should just keep all this a secret so it doesn't hurt your husband."
It's sort of a theme of the book that you don't have to tell everyone every single little thing, and it does come up with some decent arguments in that regard -- but this is not one of them, omg. Do you not think JUST MAYBE Suzy and Dave should know about this, Emily and Tory being their kids?? And maybe this has something to do with Tory acting out???? And maybe people WITH KIDS ought to know about this so Yolande doesn't end up teaching THEIR kids in a Sunday School class somewhere????? gaaaaar I am choosing to believe that right after this book ends, Emily and Katherine totally tell her parents everything, just for starters.
I still liked this book a lot, it does a number of really interesting things before the ending, and to be fair it came out before all the clergy scandals and coverups we've all lived through now, but wooooooow, if I were to recommend this to any other people I'd have to super warn them about that ending. (ETA: Also![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rymenhild reminded me I didn't mention the romantic!Nazi WTF at all! Yeah, there is also romantic!Nazi WTF that I did remember and mostly skimmed/skipped on this reading.)
-Meet the Austins - actually this was in July, as I was rereading it as a potential birthday present for a kid who doesn't read fantasy (not the niece for whom I was asking for recs before). The Austins are just such a nice family! I used to read about them and think, "I wish my family was like that!" Now I read it and think, "I wish I could parent like that!" I mean, it's clearly aged, some parts better than others, but it's still charming.
-A Small Rain - Book 1 of Katherine Forrester (later Vigneras). L'Engle's first book. It's one of those books that sort of ambles along and shows Katherine growing up, but besides this doesn't have a huge amount of plot. I like it. There is some sexual harassment and a death I totally did not remember from when I read it as a kid. Justin Vigneras, her piano teacher whom she has a crush on (and who, in book 2, we find out she later married) does not come off super well in this book, and I think he was retconned a bit in Wasp.
-A Severed Wasp - Book 2 of Katherine Forrester Vigneras. You can tell this was written much later in L'Engle's career -- this is a much more focused book, with an actual plot, lots of interesting characters, some really interesting things to say about career and family relationships, etc. And it's very cool to see Suzy (previously Austin) and Dave Davidson again and see their kids, and now I'm wondering if I should ask for fic about the two of them for Yuletide; how did that happen, anyway? I also really admire how Katherine feels like a very different character from the Katherine of Rain, and yet from the flashbacks (where she is a much more similar character to that of Rain) we get an idea how she became the Katherine of the present day. I also really like the descriptions of Katherine and her music, and Katherine and her family, and how you build a life with these things. I really enjoyed so much of this book -- up until the ending. The last time I read this was many years ago, so while I remembered who the antagonist was (and had a good time picking up all the little hints I'd missed the first time through -- she really does do a good job of setting it up), I didn't remember very much at all about how it played out.
And then it turns out that Yolande, the bishop's wife, was demanding the girls Emily and Tory kiss her?? And not in a good way. And then tells them not to tell their parents OR ELSE. (And sends a guy to frighten Emily who ends up running over her leg, which has to be amputated *facepalm*) [ETA 9-3: All of this happens before the start of the book, and a major plotline is Katherine putting together the clues to figure out what happened.] Okay. But THEN Katherine is like, "you know, Yolande, you need to stay FAR away from Emily and Tory [okay, good], and now we should just keep all this a secret so it doesn't hurt your husband."
It's sort of a theme of the book that you don't have to tell everyone every single little thing, and it does come up with some decent arguments in that regard -- but this is not one of them, omg. Do you not think JUST MAYBE Suzy and Dave should know about this, Emily and Tory being their kids?? And maybe this has something to do with Tory acting out???? And maybe people WITH KIDS ought to know about this so Yolande doesn't end up teaching THEIR kids in a Sunday School class somewhere????? gaaaaar I am choosing to believe that right after this book ends, Emily and Katherine totally tell her parents everything, just for starters.
I still liked this book a lot, it does a number of really interesting things before the ending, and to be fair it came out before all the clergy scandals and coverups we've all lived through now, but wooooooow, if I were to recommend this to any other people I'd have to super warn them about that ending. (ETA: Also
rymenhild reminded me I didn't mention the romantic!Nazi WTF at all! Yeah, there is also romantic!Nazi WTF that I did remember and mostly skimmed/skipped on this reading.)
Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf
But wooooow, even that relatively short article does illuminate some things for me.
Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf
And you're right about the parallel between Polly running for hetero sex immediately after the Max thing and Katherine running from the Cardinal to the Nazi. There is decidedly something going on there.
It's all so strange to me, because L'Engle's vision and her faith were touchstones to me growing up. I'm Jewish, but as a child I didn't read many authors who really worked with the numinous, and so I took L'Engle's conceptions of the Divine and the angelic worlds to heart. Now I look at her work and think that it's really hard to integrate being a visionary who idealizes humanity with living a life among humans as a good, loving person.
Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf
She wrote him as the precocious magical geniuses Charles Wallace Murry and Rob Austin, but neither one of those boys is ever seen anywhere in the mythos as an adult.
ohhhh nooooo I just realized that in Wasp Katherine's sweet gifted boy child dies. As a boy full of promise, not as an adult with problems. Like a lot of these things, it doesn't ping anything for me as a one-off, but coupled with Charles Wallace's and Rob Austin's disappearances it's Really Not Good.
Now I look at her work and think that it's really hard to integrate being a visionary who idealizes humanity with living a life among humans as a good, loving person.
Hmm. So one of the things that I am taking from Marcus' book is that she actually did live a life among most humans as a good, loving person -- if you weren't her family. She just apparently really sucked at doing family. In Marcus' book there are all these interviews where the person remembers L'Engle as just a lovely woman and awesome friend, and then the interviewee will mention offhand about L'Engle's own family that, yeah, she didn't do great with that. Though I think your point about idealizing humanity still applies -- I think there's a sense in which that kind of outlook can work really well for friends and acquaintances (where idealizing them can act as a kind of ennobling), and really not well for, say, raising one's own children (where it becomes essential to see them as they really are). (Also MAYBE NOT PUTTING YOUR KIDS IN YOUR BOOKS in weird ways would have helped, L'Engle! Just saying!)
Now, on one hand it's not like L'Engle had much in the way of good parental role models, but on the other hand this is still bizarre to me as I've thought the Austin books had such a lovely family/parenting where I wish I could do it like that -- but I suppose there's the ideal parent one imagines in one's head and the parent one actually is. (Perhaps L'Engle conflated the two?) And I know she did at least one or two young-kid books about the Austin family where everyone was much younger, but I haven't read those -- it occurs to me that in the ones I've read, there's also not really any mention of actual parenting of younger kids, and now that I think about it maybe not all that much actual parenting takes place at all?? IDK, I may not be remembering well (even Meet the Austins which I know I just read, but I read it pretty quickly); I may go reread those and look again. Though I'm going to have trouble reading the bits about Rob now :(