What Are You Reading (Actually On A) Wednesday

[highlyeccentric]

What Are You Reading Wednesday:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

What Are You Currently Reading?

Oooh, hmm. According too goodreads, for fun I am reading:
- Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess. I'm actually listening to it as a free french language audiobook via litteratureaudio.com, who are my new best buddies.
- Perrault's Contes, also french audiobook.
- Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue. Neither French nor audiobook. It is *very* interesting, although not what I expected. I had seen it cited as a foundation text for 'health at every size/ fat positivity'. Imagine my surprise to find it's a self-help manual for compulsive eaters, which would likley get anyone laughed out of the fatosphere now.

For work:
- Lisa Gee, Friends: Why Men and Women are from the Same Planet. This is pop sociology: well informed but not excellently analysed. Not well historicised and occasionally prone to evo-psych. BUT. It's nevertheless fascinating at pointing up intersections between approaches to friendship and to family. I suspect liv might find it interesting - or find the distinction made between 'instrumental' and 'affective' familial cultures useful, if only Gee had cited where she'd *got* that from.
- Yasmina Foehr-Janssens, La jeune fille et l'amour. Peer review took me to task for lack of francophone scholarship, and this is one of the few pieces that have come out since I did the basic research that might remedy that. Also Yasmina is likely to be on my final diss. panel, so it MIGHT help to read her stuff. Delighted to report that her prose is clear & lucid and not like wading through French scholarship often is.

What did you recently finish reading?

A lot of things, apparently.

Anne of Windy Poplars by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Summary: "Anne befriends abusive elders, and various minor plots reinforce that women suffer if not married".

And yet. And yet. I really *liked* this book on re-read. I think because it's nice to see Anne as an adult, away from the romantic sub-plots of Anne of the Island. Anne's House of Dreams, where she's safely married, also has that upside. I find it odd how her professional life is treated - no apparent regret about giving up work? And for that matter her engagement - she doesn't even seem to THINK about saving up money for her house, trousseau, etc. Isn't even sewing for her trousseau? That's odd, especially given that money, savings, and household econcomics feature clearly in all the preceding books.



Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was good fun, as always. I enjoy seeing Anne as a professional/working adult, even though the book treats her as a girl still in most ways. I had somehow forgotten, or not linked up in my mind, how much this book influences my ideas about teaching.



Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As a teen I used to skip re-reading this book, because there was too much childish playing in it. On re-read, that only takes up half the book! It is weird how twelve-year-olds are 'little girls', and then very rapidly fifteen-year-old Anne is off to train as a teacher. I did a lot of checking and wiki-searching bits and pieces of the PEI education system and references that have always gone over my head, this time. The references to Home Children, for instance, I had never connected up with the matching Australian child migrant scheme.

Also, woah, casual racism. Home children might turn out to be 'london-bred Arabs', apparently. And the way these books treat French canadians! There are at least three 'Mary Joe' characters in the series as a whole, and only about five rotating names for French characters at all. Where do all the French people live? Where is 'the creek' from whence they come? Why do none of them attend school? If they have their own school, who teaches at it - none of Anne's Queens classmates, apparently. Why is Anne writing out French verbs at the kitchen table and never considering actually conversing in French with the hired boy as a method of getting ahead of Gilbert in class?

I had noticed and made my peace with the entrenched classism (distinct from money-having, in these books, it seems), but this time the racism caught me by surprise.


Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Each individual chapter in this was fairly interesting - I particularly enjoyed the ones on Canadian & US oil towns. However, all together, one after the other: it gets boring. The latter half is also pulled down by the author's attempt to integrate his personal romantic woes into the narrative of his travels - it would be better if he had not bothered, as they don't constitute a narrative so much as a repeated whine.


I also finished 'Best Australian Poems 2013', 'Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminisms', Susan Cooper's 'The Grey King' and Tracey Warr's 'Almodis the Peaceweaver'. Running out of time this week - I'll review them properly in a later post.

What Will You Read Next?

I have a book of queer girl writings ('Baby Remember My Name'), and a Keiran Desai novel, and a rapid reading list for article revising purposes. Remains to be seen what takes precedence...

Comments

[realpestilence]

I like to re-read A Little Princess and The Secret Garden every few years. Still get that warm, nostalgic glow. I like the Anne books well enough, but once or twice and I was done-I don't know why they don't wear as well for me.

Have you ever read Daddy Long Legs, by Jean Webster? One of the same ilk, rather funny, with cute illustrations for the character's letters.

[highlyeccentric]

I read Daddy Long Legs & sequel as a kid, and Daddy Long Legs again shortly after I got my Kobo. It's in... hmm, this post here.

[cursor_mundi]

I've never really been able to get into the Anne stories - early exposure the "Little House" series by Wilder filled that particular niche - so I was intrigued by the question of why Anne would not consider speaking with a native speaker to develop her French! With that caveat... The only suggestion I can offer is that perhaps Canadian French is not considered true French by the text and time? Example: when I was contemplating language choices, I thought about French (because, hey, Montreal, hello northern neighbor! and it would be cost effective) but was strongly advised by all (and I do me ALL) that the language differences were so significant that I'd be better off learning another language rather than Canadian French. See Chaucer's Prioress and her pretensions to a Parisian accent, and all that: like world Englishes, the accent and dialect you learn and perform significantly impacts reception, I am told. If Anne is laboring and not taking advantage of a native speaker, there are without doubt issues of class and race, but there might be linguistic considerations as well. (Caveat part two: I do not know when Canadian French and European French split, nor the causes, etc. That's likely also a consideration, as well as trans Atlantic matters.)

[highlyeccentric]

Hmm, well, French was compulsory on the PEI curriculum in Montgomery/Anne's day, and was presumably used by those who visited Montreal - there's coming-and-going mentioned throughout the series. One of Anne's students in Windy Poplars goes to study at McGill (Anglophone, but has been allowing some graduate theses to be written in French since 1835).

I don't know if the French taught in PEI schools would be Quebecois (closer to 16th c French than modern in some ways so presumably distinct by 1880) or Parisian, but it would evidently have had a *practical* use for the mobile middle classes - Montreal and Quebec city are closer to PEI than any other major Canadian cities save for St John and Halifax.

I'm inclined to conclude that the text's dismissal of 'the french' minor characters is a product of class/religion, over and against practical purposes! Interestingly, these novels never do the exotifying/idolising of continental French culture that English and American girls' novels of the period do (see: What Katy Did in Europe).

[cursor_mundi]

Ooo, much to think on - thanks for the context!

Surely some scholar has written on this topic...I've got a colleague here who specializes in children's lit, time period unknown, so I'll poke her during a break this semester and ask.

[highlyeccentric]

There's a huge swathe of Montgomery scholarship coming out of... hmm. Guelph. Observe: http://www.lmmrc.ca/

There's been a series of critical editions released, it's quite possible if I got hold of a critical ed of the first book there would be commentary on the role of French canadians - but I'm reading off open access e-books. I have a critical ed. of The Blythes are Quoted, but it's with my childhood collection at my parents' house, waiting to be given to little sister in due course.

[lefaym]

Oh, Anne!

Some of the weird things you mention in Anne of Windy Poplars Willows probably arise because it was the last Anne book that Montgomery wrote -- at that point, her publisher was pressuring her for more Anne, and she was just filling in whatever gaps were left in Anne's life. At that point, Montgomery had written multiple books about Anne's happily married life, and readers had read them, so I suppose there wasn't much narrative tension to be had in Anne wondering about her savings or whether or not she would regret giving up her career. (And also, of course, Montgomery was under a huge amount of social pressure to present marriage as good and wonderful, in spite of her own less-than-happy matrimonial state.)

I do find it really interesting though, given its later publication date, that Montgomery is able to talk about things like Anne getting all hot and flustered by Gilbert kissing her neck -- well, okay, it doesn't phrase it like that, but the implication of sexual desire is there (in contrast to the romantic desire that we usually see from Anne).

(ETA: I was wrong about the publication order: Willows/Poplars was second-last in 1936, and the last one was Ingleside in 1939, but I don't think that changes things too much in terms of what I say above.)

Regarding the racism in Green Gables, there's also the Jewish peddler who sells Anne her hair dye -- I felt like that was very much playing into the whole "Dishonest Jewish merchant who exploits innocent young Christian girls to make money" thing.

[highlyeccentric]

Oh, I know about the publication order - and there's so little narrative tension in Willows/Poplars anyway that I don't think that figures. I think LM was avoiding any suggestion that Anne's teaching was *useful* or important in any way except nurturing young people.

Oh, yeah, the peddler! He susprises me less, because it's exactly the same sort of racism you'd get in an Australian book of the same period. I noted that it's a double-whammy, too: Marilla has issues with *italians*, Anne concludes a german jew is OK (northern europeans are AOK! But not jews, as it turns out).