Books I read in August
Sep. 2nd, 2020 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn...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: Alsorymenhild 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
Date: 2020-09-27 10:05 pm (UTC)Yes, good filter!
Also, go you for this being a good thing at that age. I would have rejected this book out of hand for including the word "sex" up until high school, never mind lesbians (which I didn't even know what they were) and then...I certainly would have been deeply uncomfortable with it even in high school. Between being a super-prude on my own account (for a very long time, I didn't think people should kiss on television or the word "sex" should be used in books to refer to gender, never mind actual sex), and growing up in a very heteronormative and slightly homophobic environment, and just having *no idea* about homosexuality beyond "taboo subject," I did not really become comfortable with it until late in college.
When I started grad school, I'd met a grand total of three people, all male professors I'd had in college, who were out of the closet. Before that, I'd never even *heard* of anyone in real life, i.e. not someone on television, who was gay.
And f/f lagged years behind m/m in terms of what I was comfortable reading even in fanfic, even once I'd gotten over the prudery about reading about sex. (Yay misogyny to go with homophobia.)
To my parents' credit, like a lot of people, they got more tolerant in the 2000s, as the movement for tolerance gained visibility. But when I was in high school, and my mother was pregnant and everyone in the family was tossing around baby names, I proposed Ellen, and my mother vetoed it immediately with, "I know you don't watch television, but there's a celebrity named Ellen and she's homosexual, and so you can't name your kids that anymore."
And since that kind of attitude, plus kids at school using it as a taunt/dirty joke, constituted 100% of my exposure to same-sex relationships before I started reading fanfic in senior year of high school, growingup!me would not have been okay with Lotus. (Which is exactly why we need more openness about homosexuality: growingup!me was quite happy to disagree with my parents on any and every subject on which I had a data point to the contrary. ;) )
Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf
Date: 2020-10-02 04:53 am (UTC)Hm. So as regarding heterosexual sex (which was the only kind people really talked about), I was both a prude about reading about romance/sex (people kissing in books and talking about their (physical) feeeeeelings about it was all ewwwww) but also extremely curious about what this sex thing actually was, given that no one in real life was talking to me about it. So any book that was willing to go into it in a way that I could deal with (memorably, I learned the mechanics from Judith Krantz' multigenerational romance/glamour novels, but not actually from the romance parts, all of which I skipped; rather, from a bit where an adolescent is explaining the Facts of Life to her friends) was interesting to me, and Polly's having sex with her boyfriend was something that apparently fell in that category?
I didn't know anyone gay and out until... grad school? I remember a high school acquaintance coming out, which might have been when we were all in college, but I didn't know him all that well. So the whole concept of homosexuality I learned (middle-to-high-school-ish-age) from Orson Scott Card's books (Songmaster and the Memory of Earth series both have gay and/or bisexual men as characters) and House Like a Lotus. (There may have been more -- those are the ones I remember right now.) In both cases it was an author that (at the time) I would go anywhere for, and so when they portrayed homosexuality as part of the normal order of things (I mean, yeah, they didn't do it perfectly, but they did it), I was like, "Whoa, this is okay?? Well, OSC and L'Engle say it is, so it must be."
OSC (and to a lesser degree L'Engle) gets SO much flak, and some of it is deserved. (Though I will continue to assert that the majority of it is... OSC being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, and this coming with a Whole Host of Stuff and Baggage that it's much harder to understand if you're not a member. But that's another rant for another day.) But it's also true that they were authors with an enormous audience and kids like me who would eat up anything they wrote, and they did choose to show us these things when the vast majority of other authors I was excited about reading didn't, and in both cases they got backlash from their more conservative readers.
I suppose my parents are more tolerant than they were in the 80's, but they are still on the homophobic side. My niece (age 6) declared recently she wanted to get married to a girl, and my mom was like "no, you shouldn't do that," and told me she didn't think my sister should expose my niece to her husband's family as much -- in particular, husband's family includes one F/F marriage. GAH. Anyway, let's just say that tolerance, much less celebration, of same-sex relationships was not one I was getting outside of fiction, so I'll always be grateful that I got it from those authors.