wynnebat

Although I got Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia: A Memoir for the book talk, in fact it’s a mental illness memoir with some books in. Chihaya is pondering about the stories we tell ourselves - in her case, her certainty that her story would end in suicide, and the concurrent certainty that this could only be averted if she found the exact right book to save her.

Also about her relationship to her Japanese-American identity, her feeling that as a person with ancestors who were in Japan during World War II she doesn’t really belong in the Asian-American community (because of the whole bit where her ancestors were brutally invading other Asian countries), the effect of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on her own sense of racial identity, A. S. Byatt’s Possession as a book that shaped her understanding of what it means for “reader” to be a load-bearing identity, the fact that she doesn’t usually relate to characters in the way that many readers do as the point of a book, for her, is not to see yourself in it but to become an invisible eye experiencing things without having to be perceived…

Until she realizes upon rereading The Last Samurai that she actually does identify with one of the characters in the story, and maybe that was why she found herself able to read this particular book after her hospitalization, when for a time she found it impossible to read anything. Not just in a “I’m psychologically blocked on reading” kind of way, but in the sense that the text generally appeared to be swimming.

And it’s about the writing of books, the fact that what precipitated her long-awaited hospitalization (because she’d been waiting for this to happen for years) was, in part, her failure to write the book that she needed to write to get tenure. She didn’t write it and didn’t write it and then she lost the tenure-track position and therefore the need to write it and then wrote this book instead.

And she ponders: does that make this book the one that saved her? Or was it unrealistic all along to expect any one book to bear so much weight?

So, although it wasn’t quite what I was expecting, an interesting read for sure.

A few weeks ago, I was browsing the children’s section at the library, and I sent skygiants a photo of a book. “It’s about a Jewish boy who is evacuated during World War II and becomes a spy! Also he has a kobold and a dybbuk living on his shoulders!” I said. “You should read it!”

I was hoping hereby to offload the book onto someone else instead of adding it to my ever-growing to-read list, but of course this backfired and instead we both had to read Adam Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies.

Max, a child genius with a special gift for radios, escapes Germany on the Kindertransport in 1938. He ends up living with the Montagus, where he slowly realizes that Uncle Ewen Montagu is a spy, and sets his little heart on becoming a spy too so he can go back to Berlin and rescue his parents.

(“That Ewen Montagu?” some of you are saying. Yes, that Ewen Montagu, and this book also includes Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild who keeps blowing stuff up. I didn’t realize at first that these were real people, but skygiants and genarti clued me in, and now at last I’m going to read Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat, which Gidwitz mentions in the bibliography as the book that inspired this duology.)

(Also I didn’t realize going into it that this was a duology, but I just happened to see the second book on the processing cart when I was processing library books with my mother, which is fortunate because otherwise when I reached the cliffhanger ending my scream might have been heard round the world.)

Because Max is the plucky hero of a children’s adventure novel, he does in fact manage to finagle Ewen Montagu into recruiting him, and ends up going through a thrilling training regimen at Lord Rothschild’s manor, where he meets the aforementioned Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild. Fun training exercises ensue! (Fun for the reader, not for Max.)

Meanwhile, the kobold and the dybbuk are sitting on Max’s shoulders providing color commentary, which during the spy training mostly becomes focused on “I can’t believe they are sending an ACTUAL CHILD to spy in NAZI GERMANY.”

Now on the one hand, they certainly have a real-world point, but on the other hand, we’re not in the real world here. We’re in a children’s adventure novel, and it’s a convention of the genre that children can and should have deadly adventures, just like it’s a convention of cozy mysteries that one quirkily charming small town can have 50 murders in an indeterminate but relatively short time span without having any impact on that quirky charm.

No one reading this (well, no child reading this, adults can be spoilsports) is going, “Gosh, I hope they don’t send Max on a spy adventure.” We’re all rooting for him to go forth and spy! “Children shouldn’t be sent into deadly peril” is merely a killjoy obstacle to the adventure we all crave! The emotional dynamic here undercuts the moral point.

I also don’t think it quite worked to saddle Max with two mischief spirits who get up to no mischief beyond serving as a sort of mobile peanut gallery. I enjoyed Stein and Berg, but I also felt that the book would have been stronger without them, actually.

Criticisms aside! I really enjoyed this book, and I’m mad at myself that I didn’t get the sequel before I finished it, because it ends on a cliffhanger and now I will have to WAIT to find out what HAPPENS and the suspense is killing me.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally wrapped up Harold R. Peat’s Private Peat, a World War I memoir written in 1917 by a guy who looks, according to the frontispiece, like pre-serum Steve Rogers. Despite looking like a strong breeze would blow him over, he bluffed his way into the Canadian army soon after war was declared (he told the recruiting sergeant that he had family in Belgium, whom he needed to avenge) and fought for two years before being too injured to return to the front.

But even injured, Peat continues to serve the war effort by writing this memoir to whip up war support among Americans, who by this time have declared war but are still dragging their feet about the whole thing, in part because even at this late date many Americans doubted the atrocity stories about German troops. Peat always emphasizes that the only atrocities he is mentioning are ones where he saw the evidence with his own eyes, especially the Belgian girls raped and impregnated by German soldiers.

One begins to suspect that British war propaganda, usually lauded as so effectively, actually backfired, not only after the war but to a great extent during the war itself. The sensational accounts were so sensational that they made many people disbelieve real accounts of rapes and mass executions.

My latest Newbery is Padraic Colum’s The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside, which is about Colum’s own countryside not merely in the sense of Ireland but in the quite literal sense of stories that come from the specific area where he grew up, close to the Big Tree of Bunlahy. He relates the tale of the local manor, stories of local people, local variants of folktales, all in a lively and entertaining voice. An excellent read if you like folktales.

Finally, I finished William Dean Howells’ Literary Friends and Acquaintances, which really ought to be called Literary Friends and Acquaintances of the 1860s and 70s, because although he’s writing in 1900 he’s not writing about anyone more recent than that, possibly because they’re still alive to object if he says anything too nice about them. Howells is not sharing hot gossip on anyone; he’s reminiscing about people that he knew and liked and wants to present in a good light, Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier and Professor Child (of Child Ballad fame) and so forth and so on. A restful book.

What I’ve Reading Now

Nothing that requires a progress report right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

Howells wrote so charmingly about his friend the Norwegian-American author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen that I decided to read one of his books. Gutenberg doesn’t have Gunnar, the one Howells identifies as most famous, but they do have Boyhood in Norway: Stories of Boy-life in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and as you know I LOVE a good childhood memoir.

Joan Aiken’s pacing may have bobbled in some of her later books, but it’s full speed ahead in The Witch of Clatteringshaws, which she raced to get done with the literal deadline of her own encroaching demise.

She has a lot of loose ends to wrap up in this book, chief among them the question of who will be the next King of England. Simon is currently saddled with the job, but he doesn’t want it, because all he wants to do is live a quiet life communing with animals and painting, and also he would like to marry Dido who has very definitively stated that she is unwilling to be queen.

It’s not entirely clear to me if she’d like to marry Simon, but she’s a good bro who doesn’t want to see Simon stuck on the throne, so she heads off to the north to chase up the only lead they’ve got on a possible alternative king. Apparently there’s an Aelfric somewhere up in Caledonia with a claim to the throne?

Spoilers: we never find Aelfric. From beginning to end we have no idea who this man is. Like the thought speech, which was so important in the Is books and never appears again, this one of many loose ends Joan has decided she doesn’t have time to bother with. As she finished this book a scant four months before her death, that’s fair enough.

Instead, Dido finds a Dickensian old person’s home (and let’s pause to admire Aiken’s breadth of Dickensian vision: Dickensian orphanages, Dickensian schools, Dickensian mines, apparently Dickensian mills in Midnight Is a Place which we haven’t read yet, and now Dickensian retirement homes). And at this home there is a boy, an orphan foundling who has been raised as a drudge, even though he arrived at the door wrapped in a cloth emblazoned with a golden crown…

( Spoilers )