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Increasingly misnamed 50-book challenge.
New books in September:
Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse; Cherry Ames, Army Nurse; Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, by Helen Wells.
Working my way through the set of Cherry Ames books I bought on eBay. These books (with Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, which doesn't appear on this list because it was a re-read) tell the story of Cherry's nursing school education, her decision to enlist in the Army, her basic training, and her service at a station hospital in Panama and then a jungle tent hospital on an unnamed Pacific island. They're pretty stirring; Chief Nurse especially is full of harrowing scenes of privation, suffering, and the determination to provide good medical care against overwhelming odds. I was at first annoyed by what seemed like over-the-top war propaganda: for example, the hospital is bombed by the Japanese despite clear Red Cross markings. Then I started reading historical materials and learned that, uh, actually it seems to have been fairly common for hospitals to be bombed or fired upon. At any rate, these were exciting and enjoyable. I particularly like the glimpses of utterly wrongheaded outmoded medicine, especially when the characters editorialize about how fortunate they are to have the benefit of such modern scientific ideas.
Ilsa, by Madeleine L'Engle.
When I was a L'Engle-obsessed child, I studied and studied the list of titles that appeared in the front of her books, so frustrated that I couldn't find them all. I'm so grateful now that I didn't try to read Ilsa when I was eleven. What a weird, weird book. Imagine Madeleine L'Engle trying to write a sultry, seething, torridly psychosexual Southern novel. No, really: the opening image is a young boy crouched barefoot behind some palmettos, watching a young girl who is on the brink of puberty (and wearing a dress that is too small because her family hasn't noticed her burgeoning &etc.) innocently asking big sweaty Negro chain gang prisoners voyeuristic questions about their crimes, and he's thinking about how he's probably going to get a beating when he gets home and he's struggling with his barely-realized internal stirrings and his uncomprehending unease about the way the chain gang is looking at her...
Really. In a Madeleine L'Engle novel.
Three-quarters of the way through she kind of forgets that she's trying to be sultry and psychosexual and starts writing a book about people talking and relating to each other, but it's way too late. Has anyone else out there read this thing?
Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufman.
If your objection to your mother's slow cooker cookbook is that the recipes are too spicy and strongly flavored, then this is the cookbook for you. That wasn't actually my primary concern, so I found it unsatisfying. We've tried three recipes from the book: a Moroccan chicken-and-chick-pea tagine, pork with Thai peanut sauce, and a beef ragout. The tagine was tasty but much too mild. The pork didn't taste like much of anything. The ragout, however, was amazing. Best stew I've ever made. So maybe the secret is to stick to things that aren't supposed to be spicy.
G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II, by Barbara Brooks Tomblin.
Reading about Cherry Ames' heavily propagandized wartime adventures made me want to find out what it was really like. There's some fascinating, moving, scary material here: Army nurses put on the beach in North Africa alongside invasion troops, huddling unprotected behind a sand dune as the battle raged; nurses with malaria and 103-degree fevers staying on duty and working 12-hour shifts while watching patients with the same illness be evacuated to the rear; nurses in the supposed safety of a hospital ship outside of Anzio taking a direct hit from a bomb and having to abandon ship.
But ultimately, this book was limited and frustrating. The writing is amateurish. The book is organized by theater, not chronologically or thematically, so readers are taken from the beginning of the war to the end multiple times. Information about how nurses' training was changed to fit military needs isn't given until the final chapter - because that's the chapter about nursing that happened outside war zones, and nurses were trained in the United States. Within each section, a factual narrative apparently based on official records - this unit went from here to there, and treated X number of patients - is filled out somewhat by quotes and stories from interviews with nurses. Information goes wherever she happened to have a quote talking about it, rather than in logical order. For example, an early chapter includes a nurse mentioning that "trench foot" was a problem where she served. Several chapters later, the symptoms and treatment for trench foot are explained. Why? Presumably because the nurse who gave the fuller explanation served in the theater which was discussed later.
It didn't seem as though Brooks Tomblin did much of the kind of secondary research which could have made the book more vivid and informative. I would have liked to know more about actual nursing practices and medical procedures, and how they were adapted for war zones. I would have liked more information about the illnesses and injuries that nurses encountered. (Trench foot was one of only about three illnesses whose symptoms and treatment were discussed in any detail.) Or, for example, she quotes a nurse who was present at the liberation of a German POW camp saying something along the lines of "I was so shocked by the men's condition, and the terrible conditions they were kept in." That would have been a great place for Brooks Tomblin to provide more details about the conditions in POW camps and the medical status of rescued prisoners - but she doesn't. Just the bare statement that the nurses were shocked.
And I was seriously irritated by two things:
(1) Brooks Tomblin's explanation in the introduction that she didn't ask questions about sexual harrassment or gender relations because her first interviewees were friends of her mother's, and women of their generation didn't talk about such things.
(2) Her account of nurses serving in Burma who went on regular expeditions to a Chinese military encampment to get donor blood. "The importance of having whole blood and blood plasma available for Chinese patients cannot be overemphasized," Brooks Tomblin writes: "A doctor [...] reported that many of his more seriously wounded cases died, not from poor surgical care, but the lack of Chinese plasma or whole blood for transfusions." Ahem. Yes. And that "lack" was a problem because of the Red Cross policy of a segregated blood supply, which required that Chinese patients be left to die rather than given blood that came from a white or African-American donor. I'm sorry, but anyone who presumes to write a book on a medical topic should know enough about medicine to ask herself "WTF is 'Chinese blood'?"
Cherry Ames, Night Supervisor, by Julie Tatham.
The first of the Cherry Ames batch I bought which I actively didn't enjoy. This is the point at which the series shifted to a new author, and it also seems to have made a shift here from a nurse series with mysteries in it to a mystery series with the odd bit of nurse window-dressing thrown in.
The Complete Home Learning Source Book, by Rebecca Rupp.
Okay, so I skimmed this one rather than reading every word. In my defense, when Rebecca Rupp says "complete" she MEANS "complete" - this one is over 850 pages long. It's a compendium of resources for learning pretty much every topic known to humankind. If you want to learn optics by making lenses out of Jell-O, or to make an accurate replica of the Globe Theater out of cardboard, or to buy owl pellets through the mail, or to learn American History using only historical fiction, this book tells you how. Also includes extensive excerpts from her homeschooling journal.
Total for September: 8
Total for the year: 64
Madeleine L'Engle reading project:
I decided that I would mark L'Engle's death by reading all of her prose works in order. She meant so much to me, as a geeky, out-of-place child and teenager. I'm going to make notes about the books here - I'll just put re-reads in a separate section.
The Small Rain.
Very much a first novel, and seemingly in large part autobiographical. It follows a young woman, Katherine Forrester, in the process of maturing and developing as a musician. Her troubled family; her early tragedies; her hellish confinement in a Swiss boarding school where no one understands her or her Art; her crush on her piano teacher; her sojourn among the Artsy in Greenwich Village; her relationships which are doomed by her seriousness about music. It's not great prose, but Katherine is a compelling character.
The Small Rain has creepy queer issues, which I think I sort of skimmed over as a teenager. Homosexuality comes up twice. Katherine's emotionally intense friendship with another girl at boarding school is abruptly broken off when the panicked administration confronts them and urges them to stay apart "for your own good" because they are "too intense." The other girl gets told something, in private, which causes her to avoid Katherine thereafter. No one ever uses the L word, and innocent Katherine is mystified about - and betrayed by - the whole thing. That part, I think is well done and believable. But then later in the book Katherine's Arty friends take her to a gay bar in Greenwich Village, and... ugh. The bar's patrons are portrayed as sad, sickening freaks. Katherine runs out in horror and says she needs a bath. Creepy and grim. Given that L'Engle worked in the New York theater, it seems hard to believe that she found gay people as shocking and horrifying as all that - and what is that scene in the novel for, anyway?
And Both Were Young.
The third novel, after Ilsa, and the first one aimed at a Young Adult audience. After Ilsa's weirdness, here L'Engle is back on the firm ground of "boarding school sure sucks when you are a sensitive young artist" - although this time there's a strong component of "...but sheesh, get over yourself," which is interesting. There's a mystery/suspense subplot about a young concentration camp survivor who has lost his memory and family, which doesn't work as well as the main plot about coping with an awkward adolescence.
Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse; Cherry Ames, Army Nurse; Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, by Helen Wells.
Working my way through the set of Cherry Ames books I bought on eBay. These books (with Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, which doesn't appear on this list because it was a re-read) tell the story of Cherry's nursing school education, her decision to enlist in the Army, her basic training, and her service at a station hospital in Panama and then a jungle tent hospital on an unnamed Pacific island. They're pretty stirring; Chief Nurse especially is full of harrowing scenes of privation, suffering, and the determination to provide good medical care against overwhelming odds. I was at first annoyed by what seemed like over-the-top war propaganda: for example, the hospital is bombed by the Japanese despite clear Red Cross markings. Then I started reading historical materials and learned that, uh, actually it seems to have been fairly common for hospitals to be bombed or fired upon. At any rate, these were exciting and enjoyable. I particularly like the glimpses of utterly wrongheaded outmoded medicine, especially when the characters editorialize about how fortunate they are to have the benefit of such modern scientific ideas.
Ilsa, by Madeleine L'Engle.
When I was a L'Engle-obsessed child, I studied and studied the list of titles that appeared in the front of her books, so frustrated that I couldn't find them all. I'm so grateful now that I didn't try to read Ilsa when I was eleven. What a weird, weird book. Imagine Madeleine L'Engle trying to write a sultry, seething, torridly psychosexual Southern novel. No, really: the opening image is a young boy crouched barefoot behind some palmettos, watching a young girl who is on the brink of puberty (and wearing a dress that is too small because her family hasn't noticed her burgeoning &etc.) innocently asking big sweaty Negro chain gang prisoners voyeuristic questions about their crimes, and he's thinking about how he's probably going to get a beating when he gets home and he's struggling with his barely-realized internal stirrings and his uncomprehending unease about the way the chain gang is looking at her...
Really. In a Madeleine L'Engle novel.
Three-quarters of the way through she kind of forgets that she's trying to be sultry and psychosexual and starts writing a book about people talking and relating to each other, but it's way too late. Has anyone else out there read this thing?
Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook by Beth Hensperger and Julie Kaufman.
If your objection to your mother's slow cooker cookbook is that the recipes are too spicy and strongly flavored, then this is the cookbook for you. That wasn't actually my primary concern, so I found it unsatisfying. We've tried three recipes from the book: a Moroccan chicken-and-chick-pea tagine, pork with Thai peanut sauce, and a beef ragout. The tagine was tasty but much too mild. The pork didn't taste like much of anything. The ragout, however, was amazing. Best stew I've ever made. So maybe the secret is to stick to things that aren't supposed to be spicy.
G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II, by Barbara Brooks Tomblin.
Reading about Cherry Ames' heavily propagandized wartime adventures made me want to find out what it was really like. There's some fascinating, moving, scary material here: Army nurses put on the beach in North Africa alongside invasion troops, huddling unprotected behind a sand dune as the battle raged; nurses with malaria and 103-degree fevers staying on duty and working 12-hour shifts while watching patients with the same illness be evacuated to the rear; nurses in the supposed safety of a hospital ship outside of Anzio taking a direct hit from a bomb and having to abandon ship.
But ultimately, this book was limited and frustrating. The writing is amateurish. The book is organized by theater, not chronologically or thematically, so readers are taken from the beginning of the war to the end multiple times. Information about how nurses' training was changed to fit military needs isn't given until the final chapter - because that's the chapter about nursing that happened outside war zones, and nurses were trained in the United States. Within each section, a factual narrative apparently based on official records - this unit went from here to there, and treated X number of patients - is filled out somewhat by quotes and stories from interviews with nurses. Information goes wherever she happened to have a quote talking about it, rather than in logical order. For example, an early chapter includes a nurse mentioning that "trench foot" was a problem where she served. Several chapters later, the symptoms and treatment for trench foot are explained. Why? Presumably because the nurse who gave the fuller explanation served in the theater which was discussed later.
It didn't seem as though Brooks Tomblin did much of the kind of secondary research which could have made the book more vivid and informative. I would have liked to know more about actual nursing practices and medical procedures, and how they were adapted for war zones. I would have liked more information about the illnesses and injuries that nurses encountered. (Trench foot was one of only about three illnesses whose symptoms and treatment were discussed in any detail.) Or, for example, she quotes a nurse who was present at the liberation of a German POW camp saying something along the lines of "I was so shocked by the men's condition, and the terrible conditions they were kept in." That would have been a great place for Brooks Tomblin to provide more details about the conditions in POW camps and the medical status of rescued prisoners - but she doesn't. Just the bare statement that the nurses were shocked.
And I was seriously irritated by two things:
(1) Brooks Tomblin's explanation in the introduction that she didn't ask questions about sexual harrassment or gender relations because her first interviewees were friends of her mother's, and women of their generation didn't talk about such things.
(2) Her account of nurses serving in Burma who went on regular expeditions to a Chinese military encampment to get donor blood. "The importance of having whole blood and blood plasma available for Chinese patients cannot be overemphasized," Brooks Tomblin writes: "A doctor [...] reported that many of his more seriously wounded cases died, not from poor surgical care, but the lack of Chinese plasma or whole blood for transfusions." Ahem. Yes. And that "lack" was a problem because of the Red Cross policy of a segregated blood supply, which required that Chinese patients be left to die rather than given blood that came from a white or African-American donor. I'm sorry, but anyone who presumes to write a book on a medical topic should know enough about medicine to ask herself "WTF is 'Chinese blood'?"
Cherry Ames, Night Supervisor, by Julie Tatham.
The first of the Cherry Ames batch I bought which I actively didn't enjoy. This is the point at which the series shifted to a new author, and it also seems to have made a shift here from a nurse series with mysteries in it to a mystery series with the odd bit of nurse window-dressing thrown in.
The Complete Home Learning Source Book, by Rebecca Rupp.
Okay, so I skimmed this one rather than reading every word. In my defense, when Rebecca Rupp says "complete" she MEANS "complete" - this one is over 850 pages long. It's a compendium of resources for learning pretty much every topic known to humankind. If you want to learn optics by making lenses out of Jell-O, or to make an accurate replica of the Globe Theater out of cardboard, or to buy owl pellets through the mail, or to learn American History using only historical fiction, this book tells you how. Also includes extensive excerpts from her homeschooling journal.
Total for September: 8
Total for the year: 64
Madeleine L'Engle reading project:
I decided that I would mark L'Engle's death by reading all of her prose works in order. She meant so much to me, as a geeky, out-of-place child and teenager. I'm going to make notes about the books here - I'll just put re-reads in a separate section.
The Small Rain.
Very much a first novel, and seemingly in large part autobiographical. It follows a young woman, Katherine Forrester, in the process of maturing and developing as a musician. Her troubled family; her early tragedies; her hellish confinement in a Swiss boarding school where no one understands her or her Art; her crush on her piano teacher; her sojourn among the Artsy in Greenwich Village; her relationships which are doomed by her seriousness about music. It's not great prose, but Katherine is a compelling character.
The Small Rain has creepy queer issues, which I think I sort of skimmed over as a teenager. Homosexuality comes up twice. Katherine's emotionally intense friendship with another girl at boarding school is abruptly broken off when the panicked administration confronts them and urges them to stay apart "for your own good" because they are "too intense." The other girl gets told something, in private, which causes her to avoid Katherine thereafter. No one ever uses the L word, and innocent Katherine is mystified about - and betrayed by - the whole thing. That part, I think is well done and believable. But then later in the book Katherine's Arty friends take her to a gay bar in Greenwich Village, and... ugh. The bar's patrons are portrayed as sad, sickening freaks. Katherine runs out in horror and says she needs a bath. Creepy and grim. Given that L'Engle worked in the New York theater, it seems hard to believe that she found gay people as shocking and horrifying as all that - and what is that scene in the novel for, anyway?
And Both Were Young.
The third novel, after Ilsa, and the first one aimed at a Young Adult audience. After Ilsa's weirdness, here L'Engle is back on the firm ground of "boarding school sure sucks when you are a sensitive young artist" - although this time there's a strong component of "...but sheesh, get over yourself," which is interesting. There's a mystery/suspense subplot about a young concentration camp survivor who has lost his memory and family, which doesn't work as well as the main plot about coping with an awkward adolescence.
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