Catching Up on Reading

I really am into my booktube channel now.  So I guess I can only do some much social media at once.  This blog is dying a slow death.  But to prolong the agony, I will post what I've read since my last post way back in April.

The Marriage of Katherine by D. E. Stevenson.  A gentle novel in a trilogy perhaps? (I think this one is the second book, but it works as a stand alone as well).  Very pleasant escape.  Made me want to go to Scotland!

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey.  A disappointment for me.  I have been wanting to read it for ages but found a lot of it annoying.  I did a video on it here.

Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan.  This is a classic I've heard about all my life.  My interest in it renewed when I reread Little Women recently which references it a bit.  I did a buddy read for this one which really increased both my discipline in sticking to it and my enjoyment of it.  I actually found it an interesting read.  I am glad I read it.  The language is antiquated but the story line is simple and fairy tale like.  The underlying theology though gets a bit arcane at times.

Rose In Bloom by Louisa May Alcott.  This was April's read for the A Year With Louisa May 2020 challenge.  I enjoyed it but reading too much Louisa May Alcott is getting a tiny bit old for me, unfortunately.

Eagle Against the Sun by Ronald Spector.  This was a big survey of the Pacific Theater in World War II.  Very well written but chock full of facts and numbers and military stuff.  I don't know how much I retained, but I was rather ignorant of a lot of what went on in the Pacific at this time.  I read this because I wanted to know more about my father's experience as a fighter pilot in the Navy during WWII.  He fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.  It took me 2.5 months to work through this book, but I am really glad I did!  Worthwhile.

Radical Prunings by Bonnie Thomas Abbott  This is an odd but very funny novel in the guise of a collection of a gardening columns.  Sometimes scathingly funny, sometimes sweet, sometimes absurd, sometimes actually giving good gardening advice, it was a fun, light romp.  I enjoyed it.

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott.  Alcott poses as Nurse Periwinkle here but it really is a memoir of her time working as a nurse in a Civil War hospital in Washington DC.  She tells her story with a lot of humor, wisdom and pathos.  It's as if Jo March were talking.  She doesn't dwell on the fact that she got really ill while working at the hospital and that the doctors treated her with mercury which caused lifelong health issues that eventually led to her premature death.  I guess when she wrote this she wasn't aware of the damage done though she did experience insanity for a bit after getting home, probably the mercury poisoning.  Anyway, none of that is in this book, but it does give a good sense of how they did things during the war.  It was a break from the type of novels I've been reading by her this year (Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom) and I appreciated the different flavor!

Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson.  This is a classic of nature writing.  Williamson, a veteran from WWI, wrote it between the wars.  He moved to Devon which he loved.  He studied the natural world there.  Tarka isn't a children's book at all.   It is not sentimental but a dark and beautifully written book about the sheer joy of existence and the brutality of survival and death as told through the eyes of an otter.

Classics Spin #23 - my list

This is an adjusted list of the classics that I want to read.  This year I am doing the #Yearofreadingonesown challenge, which is a challenge to not buy any books this year but to spend it reading all the unread books on my various shelves at home.    The exceptions to this were the Louisa May Alcott books I didn't own already because I also am doing the #LouisaMay2020 challenge which is to read one book by her a month. (April is Rose in Bloom and May is Hospital Sketches)  Those I am trying to find for free on my Kindle. Or I may be able to get them out of the library via ebooks.  I haven't quite figured out how to do ebooks with the library, so that may or may not happen.  Anyway, I did a search through the house and here are the 20 books I came up with.  A few of them are rereads and a couple are books I had planned to read anyway (or in truth, have started reading already).

Classics Spin #23

1) Odes - Horace
2)  Democracy in America by Tocqueville (this one is long so I might just read excerpts)
3)  The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (Already started reading)
4)  Utopia by Thomas More (I know I own this but couldn't find my copy)
5)  Out of Africa by Isaak Dinesen (reread)
6)  Purgatorio by Dante
7)  Mythology by Edith Hamilton
8)  Short Stories of Flannery O'Conner
9)  Short Stories of Pushkin
10)  Favorite Tales of Sholom Eleichem (started reading)
11)  Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
12)  The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne
13)  Bleak House by Dickens
14)  The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas (pretty sure I read this already but maybe not!)
15)  Civilization by Kenneth Clark
16) Till We have Faces by C. S. Lewis (reread)
17)  Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (already started reading)
18)  The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov (reread)
19)  The Leopard by Lampedusa
20)  King Solomon's Ring by Konrad Lorenz

Reading Catch Up!

I don't know why I suddenly stopped blogging.  You would think with this quarantine thing, I'd have the time, but I tend to take what free time I do have (keep in mind I am quarantining with 6 other people!) to do my booktube channel or I take the time to . . . . READ!

My reading in March was influenced by several things.  First, I am doing a 2020 challenge called Year of Reading One's Own which is a challenge to not buy books but to read those unread books gathering dust on your shelves!  March was also the Middle Grade March book challenge, so all these books are Middle Grade level.  Also Lent and St. Patrick's Day played a part in inspiring reading choices in March.  Here's what I have been reading:

The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare - a reread, still excellent!  About a young man chaffing under the Roman occupation who encounters Jesus.  Good Lenten read!

Black Potatoes; The Story of the Great Irish Famine 1845-850 by Susan Campbell Bartoletti.  This book has been sitting on my shelf for years.  I did read parts of it when I first bought it, but not cover to cover.  Excellent addressing of the topic; just the right tone and level of detail for middle grade students.  I found the illustrations (from actual newspaper articles at the time) really interesting and compelling.

So Far From the Bamboo Grove by Yoko Kawashima Watkins.  This is an unusual story in that it is a  childhood memoir of the daughter of the occupying Japanese in Korea during World War II.  When the Japanese control collapses in 1945, her family must flee for their lives.  Harrowing and I think a bit adult for middle grade, but absolutely riveting!  I bought this book years ago at a library sale and I don't think anyone had read it until now!

Homesick; My Own Story by Jean Fritz - This is another book that sat on our shelves and I don't think anyone read it, even though we loved Jean Fritz's history books.  Well, it was excellent!  Highly recommend!  It tells the story of her childhood living in China during the year 1927 when they had to flee the Communists.  Her father ran the YMCA in a city in China.

Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott.  The story of a girl named Rose who has been recently orphaned and goes to live with and get to know her extended family.  Her new guardian is Uncle Alec, a ship's doctor, and she also gets to know her aunts and her seven lively boy cousins.  Lovely, cozy read.  Quintessential Alcott!  This was both Middle Grade and part of my #LouisaMay2020 challenge.

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Things to do today - Feast of St. Joseph the Worker - 3/19/20

Just thought I'd post my loose plans for today.  Life is crazy during this plague time.  I think I'll try to update at end of day.

Read - when I can

Watch Word on Fire mass after lunch

Clean kitchen

Cook Breakfast and dinner but we are hopefully doing pizza take out for lunch - if that still exists in the outside world!

Spend a few minutes working on the horror that is our mud room

Plant potatoes, broccoli, spinach. lettuce and onions (might be doing this over the next few days)

Take a nice walk somewhere

All day - take care of D hopefully with some pinch hitting from S and B.

4 p.m. rosary with the Pope!

Record video this evening.

The Secret Garden - Book 7

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was a reread for me, but I hadn't read it in many years.  It's a perfect book for spring! It's utterly charming and a nice relief from our current anxieties (though it starts off with a deadly cholera epidemic!).  Because of the time in which the book was written there does seem to be a bit of racism going on, though I do think it is mixed in with the classicism of the age as well.   Other than that, the story is really charming and almost ecstatic when it comes to the wonders of spring, when all the plants, trees and flowers begin to bloom.  The healing of the two children, Mary Lennox and Colin Craven, comes from their connection with nature and from the almost magical qualities of the Yorkshire peasant lad, Dickon and his wise and loving mother.  The book begins with Mary Lennox and slowly shifts in perspective to Colin.  It's got a most satisfying ending.  Enchanting!

Two thumbs up!  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - Book 6

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a mammoth book, 1,280 pages long.  It was published in 1960.  The author was a reporter in Berlin in the late 1930s and very early 40s so he was an eyewitness to the rise of Nazism and saw and heard many of Hitler's speeches.  He witnessed the changes in Germany society as Hitler and his henchmen rose to power.  This book is a detailed and well-written account of the whole horrible tragedy. 

The author starts out trying to explain why Hitler turned out the way he did by tracing his childhood in Linz, Austria.  I think though we don't have quite enough information to solve the mystery of why Hitler became as evil as he did.  One thing that influenced him for sure was the rampant and open antisemitism that made the Jews the scapegoat for all the evils that befell Germany after World War I.  Hitler wasn't the only one who espoused these views, he just was the one capable of taking them to the horrendous logical extreme of such views. 

There was a real milieu of antisemitism, bad science based on social Darwinism, the glorification of nationalism to a fever pitch, largely influenced by the resentment of the overly harsh, vengeful terms of the Treaty of Versailles.  The Allies from that first world war scapegoated the Germans and so the Germans turned around and scapegoated the Jews and Slavs among others.  Extreme economic problems because of inflation and then the Great Depression did not help matters.  Hitler with his weird megalomania, his belief that HE alone was the one to bring Germany to its fullest glory.  Caught up in the nationalistic romance of Wagner and embracing the 'Will to Power' of Nietzsche, Hitler manipulated everything into his own cult, where his charismatic leadership and his obsessive manipulating for power got him first the chancellorship, then dictator and finally the supreme and total leader of the German nation. 

The European response, especially as manifested in Chamberlain's appeasement policy, was also partly responsible for allowing Hitler's power to grow.  Chamberlain might not have had much problem with the antisemitism aspect.  There were prominent Brits who weren't unsympathetic to Hitler.  And by responding so wimpily to Hitler's aggression, his military build up and then his land grabs, actually added fuel to the fire.  And in fact, set things on their course, especially with the appalling betrayal of Czechoslovakia which really capitulated into the invasion of Poland.  Again and again, the victors of World War I, absolutely terrified of another war, meekly let Hitler bully his way into a better and better position of power. 

Hitler was the most selfish being ever.  He cloaked himself in love for Germany and yet he did so much harm to that nation.  His treatment of the Jews, his blood thirst, his demonic hatred, brought about one of the most evil events in all history.  But it couldn't have happened without the German people, seduced by his vision of glory, cooperating. 

This book was a long, hard read, but I am very glad I read it.   It took me more than 2 months to finish it.  Starting from Hitler's childhood, through his adoption of the Nazi party and then subsequent take over of it, his failed Beer Hall Putsch, his writing of Mein Kampf in jail, his rise to power through the hot mess of the Wiemar government, his becoming chancellor and then consolidating his power through brutal means, his build up of the military, and then the chain of takeovers, starting with the Rhineland through Poland, which triggered the Allies into war and then the catastrophe of the complex two front war, the diabolical 'final solution' and finally the slow collapse of Germany.  We get it all in this book, in clear detail.  This books is considered a classic of its kind and I can see why.

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Jo's Boys - Book 5

Jo's Boys is the final of three books by Louisa May Alcott chronicling the story of Jo March and her family.  This was a reread for me.  I read it out loud to my youngest about 6 or 7 years ago.  It's a very enjoyable continuation of all the characters we met in Little Women and Little Men.  We find the students now college age, and we see how they turned out: their romances, their careers, their moral struggles. 

I enjoyed the book very much.  Some of the moralizing lecturing was a bit much and I cared about some of the students more than others.  It was really interesting though to pull out references to early feminism and the right to vote for women.  The college that Laurie founds is co-ed and we meet women encouraged to get a college education and go into careers.  It seemed to me that this book was more overtly religious than Little Men. 

Two unfortunate associations though dimmed my enjoyment of this book a bit. One was the frequent reference to how wonderful Germans and German culture was.  Alcott seemed to be quite star struck by it.  Professor Bhaer is a wise and lovable man and that seemed to be extrapolated to all of Germany.  But while reading this novel I was also reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  And so Alcott's rosy portrayal of all things German really jarred.  I kept saying to myself, Poor Louisa May, just wait 50 years.  I even looked up the timing and Jo's Boys was published in 1886 and yes this was a time of rising German nationalism, along with antisemitism.   Perhaps Alcott was ignorant of this aspect of the culture, she never mentions Jews at all in the three books.  The other thing that bothered me was knowing that Alcott wrote an article in a paper supporting the No Irish Need Apply laws.  She didn't like Catholics, I don't think.  She thought the 'Irish race' inferior. 

So those two things sort of diminished my enjoyment.  I liked Little Men better because I could focus on the educational theories displayed there.

However, overall the book is a sweet conclusion to the Little Women series. 

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.