The Long Road of Wednesday's Memory
Jan. 6th, 2021 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bWhat I’ve Finished Reading
I didn’t have enormously high hopes when I bought Bobs: A Girl Detective at a used bookstore back in the day, but it still managed to disappoint them a little, as Bobs does hardly any detecting. It also exceeded them – this was a silly story, but it’s also lively and earnest and moves reasonably well under its own power, which you can't always say for the non-classic girls' books of yore. I enjoyed it much better than Nancy Drew, for example, in spite of Nancy's more focused and rigorous detective content. Bobs, aka Roberta Vandergrift, is one of four formerly rich Long Island orphans who have just learned that they don’t have any money after all and legal ownership of their house is being contested in court by the egregiously-named Grabberstein family. Three of the girls, Bobs included, are determined to make their own way in present-day (1928) Manhattan, but Gwen can’t stand the idea of being poor and goes to stay with friends. The others are game for adventure, but the nice kind, and the plot obliges: Gloria (called Glow) has a friend who works in a settlement house, and of course there’s a job there for her and her sweet youngest sister Lena May. They also find a haunted mansion close by that no one else wants to rent because it’s haunted. Bobs turns up at a detective’s office, where she overhears that their one female detective is out and where are they going to get another one at this hour? She offers her services spying on the staff in an antiques store, but ends up befriending them instead, and when she comes back from lunch, the rare book she was supposed to be protecting is gone.
Oh no! Luckily, an elegant Rube Goldberg machine of coincidences assembles itself around her and puts things right on her behalf. Meanwhile, the girls learn about poverty and Model Tenements and become favorites at the settlement house, and more coincidences allow them to arrange happy outcomes for the minor characters who cross their paths. They worry about Gwen and eventually find her – completely by accident – just in time to nurse her back to health from an attempted suicide in a rented room. We never really find out what happened; presumably she ran out of rich friends. Bobs acquires two suitors, but successfully pawns one off on Gwen, they find out the true owner of the haunted mansion (it’s Gwen’s guy), and they all live happily ever after except for the miscellaneous tenement dwellers whose building gets burned down so that a disabled poet-farmer can be miraculously cured by his own heroism.
I enjoyed Transcendent Kingdom a lot. The story is sad – Gifty, the young neuroscientist narrator, is so busy taking care of her mentally ill mother and trying to make sense of her older brother’s death by opioid overdose that she hardly has time to be mad at her dad for walking out on them – but the writing is light-footed rather than heavy. The observations, from a narrator who isn’t sure what she believes anymore, of churchy Alabama pettiness are especially good. I wished some of the characters had a little more heft to them, especially Gifty’s academic friends and partners who mostly seem to exist as foils to and pinball-flippers for her inner struggles. To be fair, this is a first-person book and Gifty has a lot on her mind, and sometimes other people just bounce off the invisible cyclone through no fault of their own.
The real problem with (my copy of) this book is not Yaa Gyasi’s fault at all: whoever made it, in addition to the slightly-too-thick pages and their ostentatiously purposeful raggedyness (some pages were almost half an inch narrower than the page next to them), sewed it up way too tight, so that it was impossible to open all the way. Was this also on purpose, or was it a bad batch at the factory? I’d have to go into a bookstore to check. Whatever the reason, it was distracting to read a book that was constantly daring me to crack the spine.
World's Least Mechanically Gifted People Attach One Thing to Another
As noted last week, I bought the least DIY version of the Little Free Library kit available: a whole pre-assembled cupboard with working door, a post to affix it to, and a ground screw to jam the post securely into the ground. It was still a little too much spatial reasoning for the likes of me. We spent the better part of the afternoon trying and failing to get the screw to set level to the ground before we got rained out and had to give up for the day because we couldn't see what we were doing. The screw has a metal base that is supposed to rest on the ground (we ran out of pliable earth so it doesn't quite) and a little metal cradle for the 4x4 post. It came with five long bolts that we were supposed to use to screw into the post with a drill, but whatever metal the bolts were made of was so baby-soft that the drill stripped them instantly and completely, and even an ordinary screwdriver mashed them open like wet clay.
If I'd been working alone, I'd probably have given up early on the bolts, hammered a bunch of nails in instead, wound a mile of duct tape around everything, and called it a day. I'd also have completely forgotten about the level and just shored up the post with bricks or a Christmas tree stand if it ended up being too tippy. Maybe it's for the best I wasn't working alone? What we actually ended up doing was twisting the bolts in with a pair of needlenose pliers. This took a long time and also deformed the metal, but pliers are adaptable to a wide variety of shapes, so we were able to keep them moving almost all of the way in. Then we went to the hardware store and bought a set of nut drivers to clamp onto the bolts and drill them the rest of the way in. This worked exactly once, on one bolt, and proceeded to spin merrily and uselessly around on the four others, producing a lot of tiny chips of metal but no progress. So we just brute-forced them the rest of the way with the pliers and it was good enough.
Anyway, it all came out all right in the end. The library is up and running, and one of the books has already been taken! There was going to be a picture here, but my work laptop collapsed on Friday and this backup machine has many flaws, so pictures will have to wait.
What I’m Reading Now
A ton of magazines and whatnot that got piled up and now I’m trying to put down. Some boring, some good, some a mix. At some point last year I caved to the pressure of low prices and bought a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine, and when it finally arrived they send me three issues at once. Smithsonian has some extremely specific ad targeting (flip phones that double as emergency alert systems and also have Facebook prominently pre-installed, BUY GOLD, commemorative model kits) and is a pretty good, very fast, very easy read: lots of brief stories on Things You Might Not Know About History, lots of attractive pictures of objects held by the Smithsonian. I'm not quite well-versed enough in Tumblr to know if it would be accurate to call it Granddad Tumblr.
The most recent issue of The Southern Review has a short story about Laika, one of the dogs shot into space by the Soviet space program (“You Would Set Your Jaws Upon My Throat” by Steve Trumpeter) and I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was good or not; it was about a good dog in a world that can't be trusted so I just cried the whole time.
What I Plan to Read Next
The question now is: is Wolf Hall going to jump the queue by virtue of being a Christmas gift, or is it going to wait its turn like everyone else? If it does wait its turn, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte are next up. If it doesn’t, then I guess it’s Cromwell Time.
I forgot to vote for the next book in my sci-fi book club, then woke up a week later to find we'll be reading the sequel to The Three-Body Problem, a sequel I have no interest in whatsoever. A valuable lesson in book club civic duty.
I didn’t have enormously high hopes when I bought Bobs: A Girl Detective at a used bookstore back in the day, but it still managed to disappoint them a little, as Bobs does hardly any detecting. It also exceeded them – this was a silly story, but it’s also lively and earnest and moves reasonably well under its own power, which you can't always say for the non-classic girls' books of yore. I enjoyed it much better than Nancy Drew, for example, in spite of Nancy's more focused and rigorous detective content. Bobs, aka Roberta Vandergrift, is one of four formerly rich Long Island orphans who have just learned that they don’t have any money after all and legal ownership of their house is being contested in court by the egregiously-named Grabberstein family. Three of the girls, Bobs included, are determined to make their own way in present-day (1928) Manhattan, but Gwen can’t stand the idea of being poor and goes to stay with friends. The others are game for adventure, but the nice kind, and the plot obliges: Gloria (called Glow) has a friend who works in a settlement house, and of course there’s a job there for her and her sweet youngest sister Lena May. They also find a haunted mansion close by that no one else wants to rent because it’s haunted. Bobs turns up at a detective’s office, where she overhears that their one female detective is out and where are they going to get another one at this hour? She offers her services spying on the staff in an antiques store, but ends up befriending them instead, and when she comes back from lunch, the rare book she was supposed to be protecting is gone.
Oh no! Luckily, an elegant Rube Goldberg machine of coincidences assembles itself around her and puts things right on her behalf. Meanwhile, the girls learn about poverty and Model Tenements and become favorites at the settlement house, and more coincidences allow them to arrange happy outcomes for the minor characters who cross their paths. They worry about Gwen and eventually find her – completely by accident – just in time to nurse her back to health from an attempted suicide in a rented room. We never really find out what happened; presumably she ran out of rich friends. Bobs acquires two suitors, but successfully pawns one off on Gwen, they find out the true owner of the haunted mansion (it’s Gwen’s guy), and they all live happily ever after except for the miscellaneous tenement dwellers whose building gets burned down so that a disabled poet-farmer can be miraculously cured by his own heroism.
I enjoyed Transcendent Kingdom a lot. The story is sad – Gifty, the young neuroscientist narrator, is so busy taking care of her mentally ill mother and trying to make sense of her older brother’s death by opioid overdose that she hardly has time to be mad at her dad for walking out on them – but the writing is light-footed rather than heavy. The observations, from a narrator who isn’t sure what she believes anymore, of churchy Alabama pettiness are especially good. I wished some of the characters had a little more heft to them, especially Gifty’s academic friends and partners who mostly seem to exist as foils to and pinball-flippers for her inner struggles. To be fair, this is a first-person book and Gifty has a lot on her mind, and sometimes other people just bounce off the invisible cyclone through no fault of their own.
The real problem with (my copy of) this book is not Yaa Gyasi’s fault at all: whoever made it, in addition to the slightly-too-thick pages and their ostentatiously purposeful raggedyness (some pages were almost half an inch narrower than the page next to them), sewed it up way too tight, so that it was impossible to open all the way. Was this also on purpose, or was it a bad batch at the factory? I’d have to go into a bookstore to check. Whatever the reason, it was distracting to read a book that was constantly daring me to crack the spine.
World's Least Mechanically Gifted People Attach One Thing to Another
As noted last week, I bought the least DIY version of the Little Free Library kit available: a whole pre-assembled cupboard with working door, a post to affix it to, and a ground screw to jam the post securely into the ground. It was still a little too much spatial reasoning for the likes of me. We spent the better part of the afternoon trying and failing to get the screw to set level to the ground before we got rained out and had to give up for the day because we couldn't see what we were doing. The screw has a metal base that is supposed to rest on the ground (we ran out of pliable earth so it doesn't quite) and a little metal cradle for the 4x4 post. It came with five long bolts that we were supposed to use to screw into the post with a drill, but whatever metal the bolts were made of was so baby-soft that the drill stripped them instantly and completely, and even an ordinary screwdriver mashed them open like wet clay.
If I'd been working alone, I'd probably have given up early on the bolts, hammered a bunch of nails in instead, wound a mile of duct tape around everything, and called it a day. I'd also have completely forgotten about the level and just shored up the post with bricks or a Christmas tree stand if it ended up being too tippy. Maybe it's for the best I wasn't working alone? What we actually ended up doing was twisting the bolts in with a pair of needlenose pliers. This took a long time and also deformed the metal, but pliers are adaptable to a wide variety of shapes, so we were able to keep them moving almost all of the way in. Then we went to the hardware store and bought a set of nut drivers to clamp onto the bolts and drill them the rest of the way in. This worked exactly once, on one bolt, and proceeded to spin merrily and uselessly around on the four others, producing a lot of tiny chips of metal but no progress. So we just brute-forced them the rest of the way with the pliers and it was good enough.
Anyway, it all came out all right in the end. The library is up and running, and one of the books has already been taken! There was going to be a picture here, but my work laptop collapsed on Friday and this backup machine has many flaws, so pictures will have to wait.
What I’m Reading Now
A ton of magazines and whatnot that got piled up and now I’m trying to put down. Some boring, some good, some a mix. At some point last year I caved to the pressure of low prices and bought a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine, and when it finally arrived they send me three issues at once. Smithsonian has some extremely specific ad targeting (flip phones that double as emergency alert systems and also have Facebook prominently pre-installed, BUY GOLD, commemorative model kits) and is a pretty good, very fast, very easy read: lots of brief stories on Things You Might Not Know About History, lots of attractive pictures of objects held by the Smithsonian. I'm not quite well-versed enough in Tumblr to know if it would be accurate to call it Granddad Tumblr.
The most recent issue of The Southern Review has a short story about Laika, one of the dogs shot into space by the Soviet space program (“You Would Set Your Jaws Upon My Throat” by Steve Trumpeter) and I honestly couldn’t tell you if it was good or not; it was about a good dog in a world that can't be trusted so I just cried the whole time.
What I Plan to Read Next
The question now is: is Wolf Hall going to jump the queue by virtue of being a Christmas gift, or is it going to wait its turn like everyone else? If it does wait its turn, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte are next up. If it doesn’t, then I guess it’s Cromwell Time.
I forgot to vote for the next book in my sci-fi book club, then woke up a week later to find we'll be reading the sequel to The Three-Body Problem, a sequel I have no interest in whatsoever. A valuable lesson in book club civic duty.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-06 06:42 pm (UTC)LOL.
Congrats on beating the Free Library kit into submission!
no subject
Date: 2021-01-06 10:18 pm (UTC)I for one want to hear all about Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, so I vote for that, but I understand if you feel that Wolf Hall as a present needs to come first.
no subject
Date: 2021-01-07 12:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-08 03:17 pm (UTC)Gift books are queue jumpers!