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rivkaNovember
A Winter's Love, by Madeleine L'Engle.
From Diapers to Dating, by Debra Haffner.
His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War, by Naomi Novik.
Ha'Penny, by Jo Walton.
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell.
A Midnight Clear, by Katherine Paterson.
Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy, by Louise Bates Ames and Frances Ilg.
Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
Meet the Austins.
A Wrinkle in Time.
October
We Band of Angels, by Elizabeth Norman.
What an amazing, stunning, compelling book. More than everything I wanted, and didn't get, from GI Nightingales. We Band of Angels tells the story of the 99 U.S. Army and Navy nurses who were serving in the Phillipines when the Japanese invaded in 1941. American and Phillipine forces were quickly overpowered, and withdrew further and further into the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor. The nurses - all of whom had signed up in peacetime, and had never received real military training - wound up running a "hospital" which was really just rows of cots and pallets in the open jungle, completely exposed to the elements. Desperately wounded soldiers didn't even have roofs over their beds. There was so little food that they were admitting hundreds of cases of malnutrition per day. Hours before the surrender of Bataan, the nurses were ordered to withdraw to another island and leave their patients helpless and alone. (Norman reports that 40 years later, every nurse interviewed wept when they talked about receiving the order to abandon their patients.)
Soon Corregidor fell too, and the nurses spent the next three years in an internment camp. At first it was tolerable, while it was run by Japanese civilian authorities; when the military authorities eventually took it over, conditions deteriorated to concentration-camp levels. In the last months, rations were down to 600 calories per day with virtually no protein, and the nurses were still voluntarily working at hard hospital duty even as they suffered from beriberi and other symptoms of starvation. When they were liberated and returned to the U.S., they were expected to serve a propaganda role as glamorous heroes... and then quickly forgotten. A military psychiatrist announced that their professional training would shield them from the psychological damage suffered by male veterans and POWs. And after running hospitals under intolerable conditions, plus keeping the nurses together under military discipline in the internment camp, their leader was denied the medal MacArthur recommended her for: "The position of Chief Nurse of a field command is not considered a position of great responsibility. The position is normally lacking in duty requiring the exercise of independent initiative and responsibility... it is apparent that a large share [of the responsibility] must have been carried by doctors and commanders."
Norman is a consummate interviewer. Over repeated interviews, she elicited enough detailed memories from the surviving nurses to provide an almost novelistic account of their ordeal. This book provides an extremely vivid picture of what they experienced, what they felt, what they did. Highly recommended, even if you're not a war-stories type.
How Children Fail, by John Holt.
Holt is weird. I'll be reading along, nodding, and suddenly I'll slam into something completely horrifying and unacceptable. In this book it was a passage about his utter revulsion when he encountered a mentally retarded child. Also, he categorically states that learning disabilities don't exist, and mocks people who believe in them.
And yet, I think many of his observations about education are accurate. (I use the term "observations" advisedly; most of his books are about his close observation of children in different learning environments, and his conclusions about what he saw.) His principal explanation for why children fail is that they are much more closely focused on how to give teachers/parents/testmakers the right answers than they are in learning the material. My favorite example: he tried to introduce a collaborative small-group exercise in which one child was supposed to adjust a balance-scale in a way that represented a mathematical equation, and then the other children in the group had to vote on whether they thought the scale would balance. All right answers (adjustment + votes) earned a point for the whole group. One group of kids quickly figured out that they could maximize their group score by having the balance adjuster set up an obviously wrong answer and then everyone else vote that the scale wouldn't balance. He gives multiple examples of how kids learn to laboriously apply various mathematical algorithms but haven't learned anything about how numbers actually work - for example, the children who were given 475 + 317 and 475 + 318 as successive math problems, and worked through each one in the exact same add-columns-and-carry way.
The one quote that sums up pretty much everything Holt has to say about the schools: "Most of what is taught in schools is never learned, most of what is learned in schools is never retained, and most of what is retained is never used." The best Holt-related argument for homeschooling: his Amazon reviews written by education majors. (They're the ones with "MCC" after the name.)
Born Again, by Kelly Kerney.
Interesting YA novel about a teenage girl from a radically fundamentalist Christian family, as she moves from zealous faith to doubt. At first, as more and more was revealed about the protagonist's messed-up family, I thought that Kerney was unfairly stacking the deck against fundamentalists. But eventually I decided that she wasn't saying "all fundamentalists are deeply dysfunctional" - she was showing how one family had made a desperate flight into rigidly controlling religion as a way of saving themselves from their own inner demons, and how it worked only about as well as you'd expect.
The Sons of Heaven, by Kage Baker.
So that's over, after years and years. Before I draw any ultimate conclusions, I kind of want to read through the entire series from the beginning, at a steady pace. There is just so much going on - so many disparate threads Baker is trying to weave into a universe-sized tapestry - that it was hard to keep up, reading one or two books a year. I thought Sons of Heaven was good, and a satisfying conclusion, but not the overwhelmingly compelling and absorbing experience that some of the early books were. And I was disappointed by how much Mendoza seemed to be eclipsed by the men (and the male AI) in her life.
The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.
Enjoyable, but kind of slight. Sorcery and Cecilia is still by far the best in the series.
The Mirador, by Sarah Monette.
I always get sucked right in to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
truepenny's books, and The Mirador was no exception. I was a bit lost to begin with, because it's been a long time since I read The Virtu and I think I only read it once. So it took me a while to mentally reconstruct the plot that had gone before. But the story and especially the voices (especially especially Mildmay's) were so compelling that I gulped this one down. I love the setting of the Mirador, and I enjoyed seeing more of it. One quibble: I felt, at times, as if I were hearing chess pieces click into place for the endgame. Several new characters were introduced (like Mehitabel's mad servant from St. Crellifer's) in a way that seemed to shout "these people will be important later!", but the payoff wasn't in this book. I normally find Monette's books to be an incredibly immersive experience, so this was distracting. Also, I noticed that Felix seemed to slide into the background in this book. We continued to get segments from his POV, but I felt more distanced from him, as if I was seeing his scenes from outside rather than from inside his head. I wonder if that's a deliberate reflection of his arc getting darker, and the parallels with Malkar/Stritch getting stronger. The contrast with Mildmay's and Mehitabel's POV scenes was pretty strong. I'm loving Mildmay's character arc - it's so interesting to watch him struggling out of his hole.
Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
Camilla.
This wasn't one of the ones I read and re-read as a child. It's a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who is watching her parents' marriage fall apart and falling in love for the first time. Like all L'Engle teenagers, she and her boyfriend discuss theology passionately and at length. The book is well-written with some extremely creepy and psychologically realistic scenes, such as when her parents have her get all dressed up for a "grown-up" dinner in a restaurant alone with her father, who plies her with alcohol and then grills her about her mother's fidelity.
I'm beginning to wonder whether all L'Engle heroines are in fact the same person - there's not much to distinguish Camilla from Katherine Forrester or Phillipa Hunter, for example. I'll have to watch more closely when we get to Vicky Austin and Meg Murray. This isn't the sort of thing I would've noticed as a child or adolescent reader.
New books I failed to read in October:
The Last Days, by Scott Westerfeld.
I don't usually note the books I don't finish in my 50-book log. But given that I loved Peeps, and have wolfed down every other Scott Westerfeld book I've come across, I am puzzled by my inability to read The Last Days. This is the second time I've tried. I get about 40 pages in and lose all desire to continue. What's wrong with me and/or him?
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 (although her people haven't yet noticed that she's starting to bust out of her dress) 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
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 changed to fit military needs is in the final chapter, because that's the chapter about nursing that happened outside war zones. 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 much 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.) 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 it. 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.
Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
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.
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. Her emotionally intense friendship with another girl at boarding school is abruptly broken off when the 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. 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.
August
Faro's Daughter, by Georgette Heyer.
I feel as though every time one of these appears on my books-read list my reputation loses an IQ point - but I can't very well falsify my data, can I? At any rate: this one was just absurd. and completely unbelievable. Not recommended.
The Documents in the Case, by Dorothy Sayers "with Robert Eustace."
The back cover copy misled me into thinking that Lord Peter Wimsey was going to appear at some point. He doesn't. Instead, it's a mostly-epistolary mystery (the gaps are bridged by several long "statements") larded with philosophical ramblings on Art, Science, Culture, and Life.
All Together Dead, by Charlaine Harris.
Another of the Southern Vampire series. These books are pretty mediocre, and yet something keeps me reading them. They're like potato chips. She's made an interesting choice to work the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina into the series (the books take place in rural northern Louisiana); this book has a lot of details about how Katrina has affected the balance of power among vampires.
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesver, by Arthur Allen.
This was a fascinating book, and anyone who saw me in person while I was reading it was burdened down with my enthusiastic anecdotes. It begins in colonial America with variolation - the practice of introducing material from an active smallpox lesion into scratches on the arm of someone who has not yet had smallpox, in order to produce a (hopefully) milder and less lethal form of the disease. (Interestingly enough, some of the people who introduced the practice in the colonies learned about it from their slaves - it was a known and accepted practice in Africa and the Middle East before it spread to the West.) I had no idea that vaccination preceded germ theory (not to mention immunology) by so long, or that so much of the early development of vaccines was purely empirical - people tried stuff to see what might work, almost at random, without much in the way of guiding science.
Allen follows both the science and the politics of vaccination from the colonial period to the modern (and completely unfounded) claims that vaccines cause autism. He gives a great sense of perspective about the impact of infectious diseases - especially for readers, like me, who grew up after those diseases were largely conquered. He clearly believes that vaccines have great value, but he doesn't shrink away from the often-slipshod history of vaccine testing and manufacture (largely unregulated until much later in history than you'd think) and some of the appalling examples of vaccine-related injury and death.
I am resisting the urge to tell about ten pages' worth of fascinating stories and facts I picked up along the way. Really I am. This is me, resisting.
Allen does provide a primarily American story and perspective, with brief excursions to other countries largely by way of contrast. I would have loved to see more detail about vaccination campaigns in developing countries, for example. But overall, this is a fantastic book - great information, and written in an engaging style. I recommend it.
Envious Casca, by Georgette Heyer.
Not a Regency, but a classic English country house murder mystery with all the standards of the genre (unlikeable victim, puzzle crime, oddly assorted suspects, each with a motive, etc.). Mildly interesting.
Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated, by Judith Martin.
"Freshly updated," in this case, seems to mean that about half the 1979 original has been completely rewritten. I love Miss Manners (the books more so than the newspaper column), so this was a fun, entertaining, and undemanding read. Looking at the Amazon reviews, I do wonder about people who see the words "excruciatingly correct" in the title and aren't guided by that to take her tone with a grain of salt.
July
Watch Your Back, by Donald Westlake.
Meh. Another lackluster modern Dortmunder book, this one painfully trying to cash in on The Sopranos. But now I have done my duty and caught up.
Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Grades 7-9, by Pamela Wilson, and Sexuality and Our Faith: A Companion to Our Whole Lives Grades 7-9, by Rev. Jory Agate and Rev. Makanah Elizabeth Morriss.
OMG what an unbelievably great curriculum. I love everything about it. It's got a great structure: you start out with more intellectual issues (values, gender roles, societal messages about sex, physiology) and then move towards greater emotional content once the class has built up some intimacy and trust. The content is loving and sex-positive. It presents sexuality as a positive and natural element of the entire lifespan, and sexual intercourse as a narrow subset of sexuality, one which young teenagers are probably not developmentally ready to experience. There's explicit discussion of concepts like "touch hunger," and the difference between a desire for close physical contact (which is treated with full respect) and sexual desire (also treated with full respect, but it's important to differentiate the two!).
It's fully inclusive of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trangendered people - not just in the sessions which are specifically about sexual orientation and gender identity, but in the entire curriculum. In an exercise in which kids practice asking each other out and accepting or turning down a date, for example, the pairs are chosen at random, without regard to participant gender. A set of stories about sexual decision-making includes both same-sex and opposite-sex couples trying to decide how far they should go.
The details are all really well thought-out. For example, a regular feature is giving the kids an opportunity to write questions on slips of paper, which are then put into a "question box" and answered by the teachers. That's a pretty standard technique. But the OWL curriculum directs us to require every kid to write something, even if it's "I don't have a question." That way, the kids who do have questions don't stand out because they're the only ones writing. A tiny detail, but an important one.
I'm so looking forward to teaching OWL. Sadly, we weren't able to get our collective acts together soon enough to get everyone trained before October, so we probably won't be starting OWL until late in the fall. We go for training the weekend of October 19-21.
April Lady, by Georgette Heyer.
An enjoyable trifle, with secondary characters who are more interesting than the hero and heroine. The more Heyer I read, the more I realize that the principal theme is not love so much as it is money.
The Reluctant Widow, by Georgette Heyer.
papersky gets it exactly right when she says, "while Heyer writes wonderful repartee, I think she is at her best with a plot in which nothing much happens, she wasn't good with drama. A dog loose in a park, yes, but not a battle or exciting adventures." The Reluctant Widow has a midnight marriage to a dying total stranger, a secret passage, French spies, murder, and hidden papers vital to the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars, so as a Heyer novel it is at a serious disadvantage. What saves the book for me is the characterization. Unlike in The Black Moth (implausible characters reacting implausibly to implausible situations), the characters in this one are entirely plausible, well-drawn Heyer types who react just as you would expect them to react when thrown into implausible situations. I liked it.
Siblings Without Rivalry, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
No, we don't have any special news we're hiding. I saw this on the parenting books shelf in the children's library and had to check it out because I'm such a Faber & Mazlish fan. Unsurprisingly, it's really good. The sections on the dangers of assigning roles to children (the smart one, the dependable one, the rebel, the bully, the victim) and the harm done by comparisons, even ostensibly "favorable" ones, provoked a lot of thought about my own family - which was rife with both of those things.
Most useful new idea: that always trying to make things "equal" among your kids doesn't work and isn't necessary, and that children don't find "I love you both exactly the same" satisfying or reassuring at all.
Half a Crown, by Jo Walton.
I was beta-reading this one, so it wouldn't be proper for me to say anything about it. Instead, I'll just grin smugly.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.
I'm not sure what I have to say about this one that hasn't already been said repeatedly. I liked it. I'm not unaware of its literary flaws - if ever a book suffered from plot coupon troubles, Deathly Hallows did - but there's something about Harry Potter that makes for compelling reading despite the flaws. I liked that Snape was only partially redeemed, and that Dumbledore was revealed to be significantly more complicated and ambiguous than we believed him to be - especially because his death in Book 6 could've easily justified setting him safely on the shelf as the epitome of Good. One of the things Rowling did really well in this series was to gradually introduce more and more complexity to what begins as a black-and-white moral universe, in a way that beautifully encapsulates the way that moral judgment matures as we grow up.
Oh: and I loved Neville Longbottom. I love the character arc she gave him, across the full series. I would love to read a novel about Neville leading the Hogwarts Resistance - the brief glimpse we got of him was so compelling.
Did I Say That Out Loud?, by Meg Barnhouse.
A slim and wonderful book of essays/meditations by a musician, therapist, and UU minister I met at SUUSI. She comes across as very down-to-earth and real, with great depths of compassion and charity of spirit.
Regency Buck, by Georgette Heyer.
It's kind of hard to hold on to your dignity when you're reading a book called "Regency Buck." But it was pretty good, even if I completely failed to be even the tiniest surprised, even for an instant, by the shocking twist. Notable among Heyers for an uncommon level of descriptive detail of things like the Royal Pavillion in Brighton, and a cockfight, and preparations for a duel. Interesting to get outside of Almacks for once.
A Winter's Love, by Madeleine L'Engle.
From Diapers to Dating, by Debra Haffner.
His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War, by Naomi Novik.
Ha'Penny, by Jo Walton.
Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell.
A Midnight Clear, by Katherine Paterson.
Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy, by Louise Bates Ames and Frances Ilg.
Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
Meet the Austins.
A Wrinkle in Time.
October
We Band of Angels, by Elizabeth Norman.
What an amazing, stunning, compelling book. More than everything I wanted, and didn't get, from GI Nightingales. We Band of Angels tells the story of the 99 U.S. Army and Navy nurses who were serving in the Phillipines when the Japanese invaded in 1941. American and Phillipine forces were quickly overpowered, and withdrew further and further into the jungles of Bataan and Corregidor. The nurses - all of whom had signed up in peacetime, and had never received real military training - wound up running a "hospital" which was really just rows of cots and pallets in the open jungle, completely exposed to the elements. Desperately wounded soldiers didn't even have roofs over their beds. There was so little food that they were admitting hundreds of cases of malnutrition per day. Hours before the surrender of Bataan, the nurses were ordered to withdraw to another island and leave their patients helpless and alone. (Norman reports that 40 years later, every nurse interviewed wept when they talked about receiving the order to abandon their patients.)
Soon Corregidor fell too, and the nurses spent the next three years in an internment camp. At first it was tolerable, while it was run by Japanese civilian authorities; when the military authorities eventually took it over, conditions deteriorated to concentration-camp levels. In the last months, rations were down to 600 calories per day with virtually no protein, and the nurses were still voluntarily working at hard hospital duty even as they suffered from beriberi and other symptoms of starvation. When they were liberated and returned to the U.S., they were expected to serve a propaganda role as glamorous heroes... and then quickly forgotten. A military psychiatrist announced that their professional training would shield them from the psychological damage suffered by male veterans and POWs. And after running hospitals under intolerable conditions, plus keeping the nurses together under military discipline in the internment camp, their leader was denied the medal MacArthur recommended her for: "The position of Chief Nurse of a field command is not considered a position of great responsibility. The position is normally lacking in duty requiring the exercise of independent initiative and responsibility... it is apparent that a large share [of the responsibility] must have been carried by doctors and commanders."
Norman is a consummate interviewer. Over repeated interviews, she elicited enough detailed memories from the surviving nurses to provide an almost novelistic account of their ordeal. This book provides an extremely vivid picture of what they experienced, what they felt, what they did. Highly recommended, even if you're not a war-stories type.
How Children Fail, by John Holt.
Holt is weird. I'll be reading along, nodding, and suddenly I'll slam into something completely horrifying and unacceptable. In this book it was a passage about his utter revulsion when he encountered a mentally retarded child. Also, he categorically states that learning disabilities don't exist, and mocks people who believe in them.
And yet, I think many of his observations about education are accurate. (I use the term "observations" advisedly; most of his books are about his close observation of children in different learning environments, and his conclusions about what he saw.) His principal explanation for why children fail is that they are much more closely focused on how to give teachers/parents/testmakers the right answers than they are in learning the material. My favorite example: he tried to introduce a collaborative small-group exercise in which one child was supposed to adjust a balance-scale in a way that represented a mathematical equation, and then the other children in the group had to vote on whether they thought the scale would balance. All right answers (adjustment + votes) earned a point for the whole group. One group of kids quickly figured out that they could maximize their group score by having the balance adjuster set up an obviously wrong answer and then everyone else vote that the scale wouldn't balance. He gives multiple examples of how kids learn to laboriously apply various mathematical algorithms but haven't learned anything about how numbers actually work - for example, the children who were given 475 + 317 and 475 + 318 as successive math problems, and worked through each one in the exact same add-columns-and-carry way.
The one quote that sums up pretty much everything Holt has to say about the schools: "Most of what is taught in schools is never learned, most of what is learned in schools is never retained, and most of what is retained is never used." The best Holt-related argument for homeschooling: his Amazon reviews written by education majors. (They're the ones with "MCC" after the name.)
Born Again, by Kelly Kerney.
Interesting YA novel about a teenage girl from a radically fundamentalist Christian family, as she moves from zealous faith to doubt. At first, as more and more was revealed about the protagonist's messed-up family, I thought that Kerney was unfairly stacking the deck against fundamentalists. But eventually I decided that she wasn't saying "all fundamentalists are deeply dysfunctional" - she was showing how one family had made a desperate flight into rigidly controlling religion as a way of saving themselves from their own inner demons, and how it worked only about as well as you'd expect.
The Sons of Heaven, by Kage Baker.
So that's over, after years and years. Before I draw any ultimate conclusions, I kind of want to read through the entire series from the beginning, at a steady pace. There is just so much going on - so many disparate threads Baker is trying to weave into a universe-sized tapestry - that it was hard to keep up, reading one or two books a year. I thought Sons of Heaven was good, and a satisfying conclusion, but not the overwhelmingly compelling and absorbing experience that some of the early books were. And I was disappointed by how much Mendoza seemed to be eclipsed by the men (and the male AI) in her life.
The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.
Enjoyable, but kind of slight. Sorcery and Cecilia is still by far the best in the series.
The Mirador, by Sarah Monette.
I always get sucked right in to
truepenny's books, and The Mirador was no exception. I was a bit lost to begin with, because it's been a long time since I read The Virtu and I think I only read it once. So it took me a while to mentally reconstruct the plot that had gone before. But the story and especially the voices (especially especially Mildmay's) were so compelling that I gulped this one down. I love the setting of the Mirador, and I enjoyed seeing more of it. One quibble: I felt, at times, as if I were hearing chess pieces click into place for the endgame. Several new characters were introduced (like Mehitabel's mad servant from St. Crellifer's) in a way that seemed to shout "these people will be important later!", but the payoff wasn't in this book. I normally find Monette's books to be an incredibly immersive experience, so this was distracting. Also, I noticed that Felix seemed to slide into the background in this book. We continued to get segments from his POV, but I felt more distanced from him, as if I was seeing his scenes from outside rather than from inside his head. I wonder if that's a deliberate reflection of his arc getting darker, and the parallels with Malkar/Stritch getting stronger. The contrast with Mildmay's and Mehitabel's POV scenes was pretty strong. I'm loving Mildmay's character arc - it's so interesting to watch him struggling out of his hole.Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
Camilla.
This wasn't one of the ones I read and re-read as a child. It's a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who is watching her parents' marriage fall apart and falling in love for the first time. Like all L'Engle teenagers, she and her boyfriend discuss theology passionately and at length. The book is well-written with some extremely creepy and psychologically realistic scenes, such as when her parents have her get all dressed up for a "grown-up" dinner in a restaurant alone with her father, who plies her with alcohol and then grills her about her mother's fidelity.
I'm beginning to wonder whether all L'Engle heroines are in fact the same person - there's not much to distinguish Camilla from Katherine Forrester or Phillipa Hunter, for example. I'll have to watch more closely when we get to Vicky Austin and Meg Murray. This isn't the sort of thing I would've noticed as a child or adolescent reader.
New books I failed to read in October:
The Last Days, by Scott Westerfeld.
I don't usually note the books I don't finish in my 50-book log. But given that I loved Peeps, and have wolfed down every other Scott Westerfeld book I've come across, I am puzzled by my inability to read The Last Days. This is the second time I've tried. I get about 40 pages in and lose all desire to continue. What's wrong with me and/or him?
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 (although her people haven't yet noticed that she's starting to bust out of her dress) 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
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 changed to fit military needs is in the final chapter, because that's the chapter about nursing that happened outside war zones. 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 much 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.) 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 it. 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.
Madeleine L'Engle reading project: Re-reads.
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.
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. Her emotionally intense friendship with another girl at boarding school is abruptly broken off when the 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. 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.
August
Faro's Daughter, by Georgette Heyer.
I feel as though every time one of these appears on my books-read list my reputation loses an IQ point - but I can't very well falsify my data, can I? At any rate: this one was just absurd. and completely unbelievable. Not recommended.
The Documents in the Case, by Dorothy Sayers "with Robert Eustace."
The back cover copy misled me into thinking that Lord Peter Wimsey was going to appear at some point. He doesn't. Instead, it's a mostly-epistolary mystery (the gaps are bridged by several long "statements") larded with philosophical ramblings on Art, Science, Culture, and Life.
All Together Dead, by Charlaine Harris.
Another of the Southern Vampire series. These books are pretty mediocre, and yet something keeps me reading them. They're like potato chips. She's made an interesting choice to work the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina into the series (the books take place in rural northern Louisiana); this book has a lot of details about how Katrina has affected the balance of power among vampires.
Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesver, by Arthur Allen.
This was a fascinating book, and anyone who saw me in person while I was reading it was burdened down with my enthusiastic anecdotes. It begins in colonial America with variolation - the practice of introducing material from an active smallpox lesion into scratches on the arm of someone who has not yet had smallpox, in order to produce a (hopefully) milder and less lethal form of the disease. (Interestingly enough, some of the people who introduced the practice in the colonies learned about it from their slaves - it was a known and accepted practice in Africa and the Middle East before it spread to the West.) I had no idea that vaccination preceded germ theory (not to mention immunology) by so long, or that so much of the early development of vaccines was purely empirical - people tried stuff to see what might work, almost at random, without much in the way of guiding science.
Allen follows both the science and the politics of vaccination from the colonial period to the modern (and completely unfounded) claims that vaccines cause autism. He gives a great sense of perspective about the impact of infectious diseases - especially for readers, like me, who grew up after those diseases were largely conquered. He clearly believes that vaccines have great value, but he doesn't shrink away from the often-slipshod history of vaccine testing and manufacture (largely unregulated until much later in history than you'd think) and some of the appalling examples of vaccine-related injury and death.
I am resisting the urge to tell about ten pages' worth of fascinating stories and facts I picked up along the way. Really I am. This is me, resisting.
Allen does provide a primarily American story and perspective, with brief excursions to other countries largely by way of contrast. I would have loved to see more detail about vaccination campaigns in developing countries, for example. But overall, this is a fantastic book - great information, and written in an engaging style. I recommend it.
Envious Casca, by Georgette Heyer.
Not a Regency, but a classic English country house murder mystery with all the standards of the genre (unlikeable victim, puzzle crime, oddly assorted suspects, each with a motive, etc.). Mildly interesting.
Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Freshly Updated, by Judith Martin.
"Freshly updated," in this case, seems to mean that about half the 1979 original has been completely rewritten. I love Miss Manners (the books more so than the newspaper column), so this was a fun, entertaining, and undemanding read. Looking at the Amazon reviews, I do wonder about people who see the words "excruciatingly correct" in the title and aren't guided by that to take her tone with a grain of salt.
July
Watch Your Back, by Donald Westlake.
Meh. Another lackluster modern Dortmunder book, this one painfully trying to cash in on The Sopranos. But now I have done my duty and caught up.
Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Grades 7-9, by Pamela Wilson, and Sexuality and Our Faith: A Companion to Our Whole Lives Grades 7-9, by Rev. Jory Agate and Rev. Makanah Elizabeth Morriss.
OMG what an unbelievably great curriculum. I love everything about it. It's got a great structure: you start out with more intellectual issues (values, gender roles, societal messages about sex, physiology) and then move towards greater emotional content once the class has built up some intimacy and trust. The content is loving and sex-positive. It presents sexuality as a positive and natural element of the entire lifespan, and sexual intercourse as a narrow subset of sexuality, one which young teenagers are probably not developmentally ready to experience. There's explicit discussion of concepts like "touch hunger," and the difference between a desire for close physical contact (which is treated with full respect) and sexual desire (also treated with full respect, but it's important to differentiate the two!).
It's fully inclusive of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trangendered people - not just in the sessions which are specifically about sexual orientation and gender identity, but in the entire curriculum. In an exercise in which kids practice asking each other out and accepting or turning down a date, for example, the pairs are chosen at random, without regard to participant gender. A set of stories about sexual decision-making includes both same-sex and opposite-sex couples trying to decide how far they should go.
The details are all really well thought-out. For example, a regular feature is giving the kids an opportunity to write questions on slips of paper, which are then put into a "question box" and answered by the teachers. That's a pretty standard technique. But the OWL curriculum directs us to require every kid to write something, even if it's "I don't have a question." That way, the kids who do have questions don't stand out because they're the only ones writing. A tiny detail, but an important one.
I'm so looking forward to teaching OWL. Sadly, we weren't able to get our collective acts together soon enough to get everyone trained before October, so we probably won't be starting OWL until late in the fall. We go for training the weekend of October 19-21.
April Lady, by Georgette Heyer.
An enjoyable trifle, with secondary characters who are more interesting than the hero and heroine. The more Heyer I read, the more I realize that the principal theme is not love so much as it is money.
The Reluctant Widow, by Georgette Heyer.
papersky gets it exactly right when she says, "while Heyer writes wonderful repartee, I think she is at her best with a plot in which nothing much happens, she wasn't good with drama. A dog loose in a park, yes, but not a battle or exciting adventures." The Reluctant Widow has a midnight marriage to a dying total stranger, a secret passage, French spies, murder, and hidden papers vital to the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars, so as a Heyer novel it is at a serious disadvantage. What saves the book for me is the characterization. Unlike in The Black Moth (implausible characters reacting implausibly to implausible situations), the characters in this one are entirely plausible, well-drawn Heyer types who react just as you would expect them to react when thrown into implausible situations. I liked it.Siblings Without Rivalry, by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.
No, we don't have any special news we're hiding. I saw this on the parenting books shelf in the children's library and had to check it out because I'm such a Faber & Mazlish fan. Unsurprisingly, it's really good. The sections on the dangers of assigning roles to children (the smart one, the dependable one, the rebel, the bully, the victim) and the harm done by comparisons, even ostensibly "favorable" ones, provoked a lot of thought about my own family - which was rife with both of those things.
Most useful new idea: that always trying to make things "equal" among your kids doesn't work and isn't necessary, and that children don't find "I love you both exactly the same" satisfying or reassuring at all.
Half a Crown, by Jo Walton.
I was beta-reading this one, so it wouldn't be proper for me to say anything about it. Instead, I'll just grin smugly.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.
I'm not sure what I have to say about this one that hasn't already been said repeatedly. I liked it. I'm not unaware of its literary flaws - if ever a book suffered from plot coupon troubles, Deathly Hallows did - but there's something about Harry Potter that makes for compelling reading despite the flaws. I liked that Snape was only partially redeemed, and that Dumbledore was revealed to be significantly more complicated and ambiguous than we believed him to be - especially because his death in Book 6 could've easily justified setting him safely on the shelf as the epitome of Good. One of the things Rowling did really well in this series was to gradually introduce more and more complexity to what begins as a black-and-white moral universe, in a way that beautifully encapsulates the way that moral judgment matures as we grow up.
Oh: and I loved Neville Longbottom. I love the character arc she gave him, across the full series. I would love to read a novel about Neville leading the Hogwarts Resistance - the brief glimpse we got of him was so compelling.
Did I Say That Out Loud?, by Meg Barnhouse.
A slim and wonderful book of essays/meditations by a musician, therapist, and UU minister I met at SUUSI. She comes across as very down-to-earth and real, with great depths of compassion and charity of spirit.
Regency Buck, by Georgette Heyer.
It's kind of hard to hold on to your dignity when you're reading a book called "Regency Buck." But it was pretty good, even if I completely failed to be even the tiniest surprised, even for an instant, by the shocking twist. Notable among Heyers for an uncommon level of descriptive detail of things like the Royal Pavillion in Brighton, and a cockfight, and preparations for a duel. Interesting to get outside of Almacks for once.
