A Wednesday Catching-Up
Feb. 5th, 2020 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bSome of the books I finished in the past few weeks, but haven't said anything about yet:
The Ripening Seed by Colette, my first book by Colette! Childhood best friends Philippe and Vinca are stressed out about being sixteen and fifteen, respectively. Philippe gets seduced by an upsettingly insistent woman in her thirties; Vinca finds out and is angry and confused; they have sex in the barn and it's THE END OF INNOCENCE, sort of? In any case it doesn't help them feel any less stressed out about being sixteen and fifteen respectively.
I'm not sure what to do with Dictionary of Occupational Titles Part IV: Entry Occupational Classification, prepared by the War Manpower Commission, October 1944. It's literally just lists of the jobs a person might have, sorted into categories, and some "leisure time activites" that have skills relevant to wartime employment - I don't have any immediate use for it, and any use I could have for it would be temporary, but I kind of like having it around. Same deal with Reference Materials, a brief guide to bibliographies and so on from 1970.
Main-Travelled Roads, like so many other books from the pre-Jazz Age phase of American literature, comes bearing the William Dean Howells Stamp of Approval. Hamlin Garland explains that he returned to his family home in the Midwest from a sojourn in the East, only to be shocked out of his mind that his family and all their neighbors were not just poor, but bored and despairing, sometimes inextricably. The resulting stories are not ground-breaking as literature, but good-hearted and sturdy examples of an old-fashioned form. I was 1000% a sucker for the one where a guy starts a bank in a small town, speculates and loses everyone's money, and tries to sneak out of town before the news hits. His wife insists that he stick around and work to pay everyone back, and that if he doesn't, she will. In the end, he gets a lucky windfall, she decides she's happier when she has a job, and they settle down together to honest work.
This book also has a classic rural example of a multi-level marketing scam: a farmer is induced to paint a patent-medicine advertisement on the side of his barn, but instead of cash, the medicine-seller gives him twenty bottles of patent medicine to sell to his neighbors at a tidy profit! Of course his neighbors aren't interested, and the only person he can get to agree with him that the medicine is worth a try has also fallen for the scam and has bottles of his own to unload.
Creative School Music is a gem of a book from pedagogical giants Silver Burdett & Ginn, published in 1936 and offering a new program for learning music in elementary school. It's full of heartwarming anecdotes guaranteed to make the teacher reading it wonder what they're doing wrong, and wraps up with a full catalog of adorable student-created songs and their illustrations, by grade. Lots of instructive glimpses into the curriculum of "progressive" California elementary schools in the 1930s.
Everywhere You Don't Belong is a brand-new book by Gabriel Bump, about a regular guy growing up in a messed-up world. The characters are sharp and bright and a little opaque. It's funny, fast-paced and significantly stranger than the jacket cover description gives it credit for, though I eventually got tired of the miles and miles of clipped Carveresque dialogue used as duct tape between scenes.
To be honest, I picked up Phyllis Loves Kelly from the free book shelf because I thought it was about vintage lesbians. I thought this partly because in the cover photo, Calvin "Kelly" Gotlieb's computer-scientist babyface was obscured by a post-it from the library saying "do not add" (presumably a donation attempt). What it is: a collection of valentines and birthday poems from poet Phyllis Gotlieb to her husband Kelly, some involving rebuses, an art form I have never appreciated and probably never will. They are cute but mostly forgettable. My favorite was the simplest:
The cover image, once I peeled the post-it off, is charming in its own right, as it depicts 1949's biggest nerds. Look at them! They could have been married yesterday, for all time has touched their essential dorkitude.
I've ordered Don Quixote, but it hasn't come in yet - I'll let the library help me out if the delay continues. I continue to fail to understand what the deal is about Wallace Stevens
The Ripening Seed by Colette, my first book by Colette! Childhood best friends Philippe and Vinca are stressed out about being sixteen and fifteen, respectively. Philippe gets seduced by an upsettingly insistent woman in her thirties; Vinca finds out and is angry and confused; they have sex in the barn and it's THE END OF INNOCENCE, sort of? In any case it doesn't help them feel any less stressed out about being sixteen and fifteen respectively.
I'm not sure what to do with Dictionary of Occupational Titles Part IV: Entry Occupational Classification, prepared by the War Manpower Commission, October 1944. It's literally just lists of the jobs a person might have, sorted into categories, and some "leisure time activites" that have skills relevant to wartime employment - I don't have any immediate use for it, and any use I could have for it would be temporary, but I kind of like having it around. Same deal with Reference Materials, a brief guide to bibliographies and so on from 1970.
Main-Travelled Roads, like so many other books from the pre-Jazz Age phase of American literature, comes bearing the William Dean Howells Stamp of Approval. Hamlin Garland explains that he returned to his family home in the Midwest from a sojourn in the East, only to be shocked out of his mind that his family and all their neighbors were not just poor, but bored and despairing, sometimes inextricably. The resulting stories are not ground-breaking as literature, but good-hearted and sturdy examples of an old-fashioned form. I was 1000% a sucker for the one where a guy starts a bank in a small town, speculates and loses everyone's money, and tries to sneak out of town before the news hits. His wife insists that he stick around and work to pay everyone back, and that if he doesn't, she will. In the end, he gets a lucky windfall, she decides she's happier when she has a job, and they settle down together to honest work.
This book also has a classic rural example of a multi-level marketing scam: a farmer is induced to paint a patent-medicine advertisement on the side of his barn, but instead of cash, the medicine-seller gives him twenty bottles of patent medicine to sell to his neighbors at a tidy profit! Of course his neighbors aren't interested, and the only person he can get to agree with him that the medicine is worth a try has also fallen for the scam and has bottles of his own to unload.
Creative School Music is a gem of a book from pedagogical giants Silver Burdett & Ginn, published in 1936 and offering a new program for learning music in elementary school. It's full of heartwarming anecdotes guaranteed to make the teacher reading it wonder what they're doing wrong, and wraps up with a full catalog of adorable student-created songs and their illustrations, by grade. Lots of instructive glimpses into the curriculum of "progressive" California elementary schools in the 1930s.
Everywhere You Don't Belong is a brand-new book by Gabriel Bump, about a regular guy growing up in a messed-up world. The characters are sharp and bright and a little opaque. It's funny, fast-paced and significantly stranger than the jacket cover description gives it credit for, though I eventually got tired of the miles and miles of clipped Carveresque dialogue used as duct tape between scenes.
To be honest, I picked up Phyllis Loves Kelly from the free book shelf because I thought it was about vintage lesbians. I thought this partly because in the cover photo, Calvin "Kelly" Gotlieb's computer-scientist babyface was obscured by a post-it from the library saying "do not add" (presumably a donation attempt). What it is: a collection of valentines and birthday poems from poet Phyllis Gotlieb to her husband Kelly, some involving rebuses, an art form I have never appreciated and probably never will. They are cute but mostly forgettable. My favorite was the simplest:
Seventy-two
Looks sexy on you.
The cover image, once I peeled the post-it off, is charming in its own right, as it depicts 1949's biggest nerds. Look at them! They could have been married yesterday, for all time has touched their essential dorkitude.
I've ordered Don Quixote, but it hasn't come in yet - I'll let the library help me out if the delay continues. I continue to fail to understand what the deal is about Wallace Stevens
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Date: 2020-02-05 06:11 pm (UTC)Don Quixote has not won me quite as thoroughly as The Count of Monte Cristo yet, but I think that in time, it might.
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Date: 2020-02-05 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-05 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-06 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 03:55 pm (UTC)