Currently Reading…

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Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It. Having greatly enjoyed the 1936 movie version, I took up the novel and was interested to discover that it is very different in many respects and covers a much longer time-span than even the two generations of the movie. A rich and wonderful reading experience, completely absorbing. One startling development that is not in the film knocked me right off my chair.

I especially relate to this novel because I have lived on its Northern Wisconsin turf. “Butte des Morts” is Neenah in the northeast, close to where I resided in Little Chute. “Iron Ridge” is Hurley in the northwest, the great northwoods area that I often visited. The timber and paper industries are at the core of the narrative.

Ferber is adept at what critics call “solidity of specification”, description of exterior elements as in Balzac. You always know how the rooms are furnished, how the characters are dressed. (I was surprised to have it pointed out that Trollope, even writing at the length he does, doesn’t much bother with this, and it is true.)

All 11 volumes of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series are doorstops individually, and the complete sequence, well! This is an entertaining way to take in the history of the first half of the 20th Century, because our Lanny is like the young Indiana Jones, he shows up everywhere that’s important. I’m currently 2/3 of the way through the first volume, World's End.

I recall that The Jungle was one of the few required high school freshman lit assignments that captured my interest, but never tackled any of Sinclair's other works.

Edna Ferber's short stories are absolutely delicious, if you've never sampled them.

Come and Get It was my first Ferber, but I’m looking forward to more.

Sinclair was pretty prolific. I need to read The Jungle, certainly his most famous work.

Joseph C. Lincoln (1870-1944) was part of the explosion of “local color” writing at the tail end of the 19th Century, his turf being the otherwise unclaimed Cape Cod. I started in on his Cape Cod Stories (1907) this morning and was immediately struck by the affinity with Neil Munro’s contemporary Scottish stories about Para Handy, which started appearing in 1905. I doubt there was any direct influence, since I’m not sure if Munro’s very Scottish stories appeared in US editions then or ever. But the salty use of dialect, the nautical context, and the conception of the characters are quite similar. “Rollicking” is an appropriate adjective in both cases.

One retro-ish project I have going is Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series in story-chron (not publication) order. I just started the third, Mary Wakefield.

Although the Jalnas are light romantic novels, a number of features of the stories ring realistically true. One, rich kids tend to be over-indulged brats, and that travels down the generations. Two, good-looking people who pair up get off on being good-looking together; Adeline and Philip both think about this all the time in The Building of Jalna.

The Whiteoaks through three volumes are an entertaining but rampantly egotistical family, who are apt to blow up their minor issues into major crises; I doubt this changes in the later books. 😏

What Sarah Orne Jewett did for Maine in The Country of the Pointed Firs, Alice Brown (1857-1948) does for New Hampshire in her stories of “Tiverton” (Hampton Falls). Local color writers like this should appeal greatly to cottagecore enthusiasts of today! I am reading Brown’s Meadow-Grass: Tales of New England Life, and a noteworthy characteristic of the writing is her great precision regarding plant life, every species specified, which should make her work a delight for botanists and gardeners.

I love Country of the pointed firs so I should check out Alice Brown! Thanks for mentioning her!

>1 PatrickMurtha: went through an Edna Ferber stage when I was young but there are a few that I missed! Come and Get It sounds good. I am reading The Girls and loving it! The heroines are ‘old maids’ but they leap from the page. The younger ones are incredibly modern, considering that it is set in 1916.

I also like reading about the decor of the rooms, and the way in which the characters are dressed.

I read the Jalna series when I was young, and want to get around to doing it again. You describe them as ‘rampantly egotistical’, but I don’t remember thinking that!

>8 Sakerfalcon: I have that on my shelves, patiently waiting for a read.

Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series, 11 doorstop novels published between 1940 and 1953, are like The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles at a political affairs rather than an adventure level, and are comparable good fun. Lanny, born with the century into a situation of privilege, finds himself part of everything (and I do mean everything) that goes on in the first half of the 20th Century. Although I’ll never forget the young John Gunther Jr. rejecting the series (in Death Be Not Proud) - “I prefer my Superman straight” - still, Lanny is a cool fellow to know, and after being neglected for several decades, the novels seem to be finding new fans through ebook publication.

I'm reading The Psmith Series by P. G. Wodehouse. Delightful. So far I've read the first, "Mike." About 75% about cricket and boy's public schools in England and I didn't understand most of that, but the narrative was such that I am enchanted. So much Piffle when Psmith comes on the scene.

Yesterday, we watched a really nicely done documentary about Shad Heller, a Silver Dollar City amusement park original and occasional supporting character on The Beverly Hillbillies. (My husband worked on park and knew Shad.)

Shad was the also the original Shepherd in the Shepherd of the Hills outdoor theater, which made me wonder why I haven't reread my paperback copy in years. I've set out to remedy that. Makes me homesick for the Ozarks as I remember them, not Branson (MO) as it is now.

>14 gmathis: I live in Arkansas and was at the "old" Silver Dollar City several times a year back when. I too miss the place it was. I haven't been in at least 15 years. I can't say I knew Shad personally but certainly knew who he was. Is the documentary somewhere I can access?

>15 clue: Yes, it's streaming on the Ozarks Public TV website:
https://video.optv.org/video/shad-heller-master-of-his-craft-ib4y0x/

You may also recognize Terry Sanders, who was a friend and fellow Junior Dugan back in the diving bell days.

I am a few chapters into Swallows and Amazons, which I have been meaning to read for years. This series never attained popularity in the United States, in part because it seems very British indeed, and in part because vanishingly few American young people ever learn to sail or have much to do with boats at all, even in areas like Minnesota where there are lots of lakes.

The first thing that hits me smack between the eyes is that these are free-range children with a vengeance. I was a free-range kid in the Sixties and Seventies, and feel that I benefited from it greatly, but even so, my parents would never have allowed anything even close to the sorts of adventures Ransome describes. Yes, American kids camp - but in Boy Scout or Girl Scout activities supervised by adults, even in my time.

So a question I have is, were parents in Ransome’s era really this cavalier, sending a seven-year-old out on a boat to an island with his siblings, or is this a complete fantasy on the author’s part?

I have a lurking suspicion that I am not going to like the Walker children very much, but we shall see. They seem pretty full of themselves.

What are your experiences with these books?

>17 PatrickMurtha: I loved it. I think the British class system plays into it. The Walker children are being raised to be in leadership positions. They will be expected to give orders not follow them. Like the children in E.Nesbit’s books I think there was more supervision that the children were aware of. The locals depended on the rich people who spent their summers there every year. They wanted to curry favor and avoid their wrath. They would’ve spread the word and kept an eye out. No idea if it was realistic. The parents were comfortable around boats and camping. Happy reading.

>18 BonnieJune54: That is helpful, thank you!

>17 PatrickMurtha: I started it last year and was enchanted for a while. I love the mother and how she understood the boy was tacking across the field, and patient with that and then correcting him on his reverse trip.
But I put it down half way through and it got lost. I know generally where it is…

>20 2wonderY: The books in the series are long and not brisk in pace; I have seen comments about that. One Goodreads Group tackled Swallowdale, the second in the series, listed at 448 pages, and didn’t finish the read, partly because of longueurs, partly because they found it highly repetitive of the first book (which they had liked).

Another frequent complaint is the preponderance of technical nautical vocabulary, which is part of why the series never went over in the US. Of course that cuts both ways, because those who ARE versed in that vocabulary will find its use charming.

I didn’t like the conflicts, the rude girls, the cranky old guy who wouldn’t listen. I avoid all that sort of thing in life and I’m impatient with it when it goes on too long in fiction.

The Lark by E. Nesbit. Charming so far. 79% done. I expect a predictable ending.

Y'all are making me think I would be better off with the newish movie of Swallows and Amazons, rather than trying to read it directly. The poster on Kanopy makes it look like a delightful child's adventure, at any rate.

Though tbh I'm putting off all the English children's books until I get much further along with the American ones, so I would probably have chosen the movie first anyway, ha.

>22 2wonderY: I like the children in E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle much better.

The Biblio website has an interesting article up about the Mitford sisters:

https://www.biblio.com/reading-nook/the-best-books-about-the-mitford-sisters

I just finished Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939; UK and movie title, The Mask of Dimitrios). Ambler is one of those authors I have been meaning to read forever. He was a specialist in what – spy fiction? But there are not always spies per se. Suspense? Thrillers? Those are pretty broad designations. I think the best descriptor is “novels of international intrigue”.

Anyway, this is perhaps Ambler’s most famous novel, partly because of the top-notch 1944 movie adaptation, directed by the underrated Jean Negulesco and featuring the legendary Peter Lorre / Sydney Greenstreet pairing. I think it is best if I say nothing about the characters or plot. But it is terrifically entertaining. There is good reason why this is a celebrated book.

Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy (published between 1939 and 1943) and John Moore’s The Brensham Trilogy (published between 1945 and 1948) bear definite similarities to each other, including a basic difficulty of categorization: Are these novels? They both have an autobiographical, lightly semi-fictional element, but each is more of a picture of a place, time, and lifestyle, and large sections read like non-fiction, not story-based at all. They are set in adjoining central English counties which share a long border: Thompson’s trilogy in Oxfordshire, Moore’s in Gloucestershire.

My friend Scott Thompson has done salutary work on behalf of female middlebrow writers at his website Furrowed Middlebrow. Yet there are male novelists who wrote this sort of book too. The Case Is Altered (1932) by William Plomer (1903-1979), a London boarding house novel, is an excellent example.

Plomer was born in South Africa to English parents, and was active in the South African literary scene in his early twenties; his first and most celebrated novel, Turbott Wolfe (1925), scandalized that country with its positive account of inter-racial romance.

After a few years in Japan, Plomer spent all the rest of his life in England, where he was friendly with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and many other prominent figures in British cultural life. He was an editor for Ian Fleming and a librettist for Benjamin Britten. His literary criticism is excellent (Electric delights).

For a man with impeccable “highbrow” connections, The Case Is Altered reads perfectly as a middlebrow novel, with an emphasis on character and social class, and a shifting Altman-esque focus among the residents of the boarding house. It has some real bite, and felt rather timely to me, with domestic terror and homosexuality among its themes (Plomer was gay himself). A good read altogether.

I have been reading Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series in narrative chron order, but I was disappointed in Mary Wakefield, a weak entry with an extremely watered-down Jane Eyre scenario. Mary is a lousy governess and her employer is a putz.

In the 16-novel series, this is the third in the narrative chronology (the first two are much better), but the eleventh published.

One thing I did notice and approve as realistic is that the children who were so engaging in the first two volumes grew up to be stiff and dull adults. Ain’t it always the way? 😏

My mother bought me a number of Horatio Alger paperback reprints when I was a kid. I adored them, and read them to death. They really did inspire me, and they are NOT sappy. Alger’s boy heroes have to learn to navigate a fundamentally dishonest world; they encounter roguery constantly, and they get wise to it.

My favorite was Making His Way. The story is absorbing and well-managed, and Frank Courtney makes a good but still believable role-model. Episodes such as his stint as a tea salesman are sociologically fascinating. The homoerotic friendship angle common in Alger’s work is not downplayed at all.

I recently picked up and am almost finished reading a hardcover reprint of The Erie Train Boy. Great fun. Working on a train brings you into contact with many sorts of people and really does offer opportunities to the alert, as the young Thomas Edison could tell you.

I read a couple of Horatio Alger’s books. I liked them too. Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy.
I’m being held prisoner in a convent in The Italian by Ann Radcliffe. It’s chunky so I may be here awhile unless I get out to have adventures instead of just waiting while my lover has adventures trying to rescue me.

>32 BonnieJune54: The Italian is. hm. It's interesting in context?? i thought other Radcliffe novels were more accessible. I'm still put out that we read that one instead of Udolpho in my Gothic Lit course, 20 years ago. 😆

I've got Ragged Dick in my kindle to read, I think? or something of Alger's, anyway. Standard eBooks has some nice public domain versions. but The Erie Train Boy seems like it's exactly my jam - I love books about train travel! (and I bookmarked so many in Ruth's train topic years and years ago that I swear I'll get to some day....)

Alger is very dependable - one can scarcely go wrong. Of course the books have similarities, but there is variation too. Most of his young heroes start out poor or poor-ish and work their way up, but Frank Courtney in Making His Way begins rich and then falls on hardship.

T.S. Stribling’s The Forge (1931), the first in his Vaiden Trilogy, deserves far more of a reputation as one of the best Civil War novels. It centers on the Vaidens, slave-owning but far from rich, and other families in northern Alabama as they are involved in and react to the war and its aftermath. The slave and Union points of view are not neglected either. The Forge is frequently VERY funny, a quite unexpected and welcome characteristic in a Civil War novel.

The second Vaiden novel, The Store, which takes place in the 1880s, won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The third, Unfinished Cathedral, skips ahead to the 1920s. Faulkner bought and read these as they appeared, and there is an obvious affinity with / influence on his own Snopes Trilogy.