Read ALL the Newberys!

Okay, let us continue through this unholy mess of a book. Perhaps I will get really overwhelmed and stop; perhaps I won't.

When last we left our heroine, she had married the middle-aged and sickly Monsieur Roland and they had a daughter, Eudora. Their circle of friends was ramping up to become, presumably, the Girondin faction of the French Revolution -- not that I know any of the names that are being introduced. It is 1784.

( two-thirds of the book to go )

*flops* I didn't think maligning goddamn Robespierre was gonna be what did me in, but holy Hannah, people. The constant twisting of history to support her own sympathies was just so blatant. You can't tell me fucking Robespierre was a bad speaker and anti-republican, not without some damn solid evidence, and keep me reading. WHAT THE SHIT JUST HAPPENED.

When last we left our hero on page 27, he had met a cute boy he isn't going to hook up with, had quarreled with his constructedly mean uncle, and had revealed that he wants more education than he's had from the local one-room schoolhouse. Then I went on a tear about the apotheosis of book-larnin' and gave up for the night.

( now i have dust in my sinuses )

And then I finished the book in the scraps of time while waiting for my interwebs to load, so the rest of this liveblog is technically more of a re-read. *shrugs*

( Read more... )

It is Monday! I have... a partial liveblog of Little House in the Big Woods, written before Vaino arrived on interlibrary loan.

I'm posting this now because the deeply informal poll came out unanimously in favor of upping my language rating here. So I thought I'd post all the deliberately-G-rated writing I had and start fresh. ^_^

*********************

[Written earlier:]

For clarity, throughout this series, I'm going to use "Laura" to mean the fictionalized character and "Mrs Wilder" or "Laura Ingalls Wilder" to mean the real-life author / historical character.

( and dive in O_O )

And that's where I got distracted by the most biased retelling of the Finnish Civil War ever, so we'll pick up on Thursday with... more Little House, or a biography of Madame Roland on interlibrary loan, or both! ^_^

I'd like to polish off what I can of the 1920s here (there are about half a dozen books left I'll have to interlibrary-loan), so the next book I'll tackle is Trumpeter of Krakow. ...at least we're starting to hit things that are Children's Classics rather than Did You Ever Hear Of That Me Neither. Whether the "classic" status is deserved, we'll find out.

(I've read this book before, but it's been many years, and Shen of the Sea shook me badly. ;P)

( Come away with me then, to... oh never mind. XD )

And I'm only up to page 48, but it's Monday, so here we are: posting time. :-)

I may not get back to this book by next Monday, as I've got an interlibrary loan in - The Dream Coach by Anne Parrish, a 1925 Honor Book - and it's extremely rare and fragile and I have to return it in two weeks. So that's priority.

After that's done, though, it's Trumpeter of Krakow and then (except for the seven interlibrary loans not yet gotten) we'll wind up the Roaring Twenties in grand style with Millions of Cats. XD

The last post brought us up to page 207, anyway. I did some math: I'm 43% of the way done!

This book has taken me over a month to review. Admittedly, part of that was being on official hiatus, but part of it was just... this is a very dense book. It's got a lot of references I don't know anything about; my search history has probably hit the point where anyone who subpoenaed it would just be utterly perplexed. (Not that it was ever very incriminating. The basic stew of "[contact info/hours/address for X]", "what time should i go to bed calculator", and "muffaletta" has just been spiced up a bit by the addition of "venice council of ten", "milled coins history", "otto emperor" etc.)

Anyway. ENTER THE RENAISSANCE!

( this way to the egress, I mean Renaissance )

Halfway point! The next chapter looks to be taking us Eastward to talk about Buddha and Confucius for a bit, so I'll cut this off here... good grief. I talked that long about only thirty-odd pages? I'm going to be here FOREVER. AND A DAY. O_O

ETA: No I'm not. I flipped forward to look at the chapters about WWI, because their titles are uncommunicative, and ran across this paragraph near the end of the book:

( cut for racism )

He's trying to explain World War I happening, which is an admirable if futile enterprise... but I gave you three chances not to be casually racist above and beyond the demands of whatever your publisher wanted, Hendrik Willem van Loon. You just blew the last one. I'm out of here (except for the review).

I don't say The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle is going to be any BETTER, but at least I won't have to fact-check it! O_O

Apparently it's National or International Read A Book Day - I didn't quite catch the modifier - so I decided I'd post this tonight, though I meant to get to the Crusades in this section.

(On the other hand, maybe it's as well; I seem to be picking up some of Mr van Loon's speech patterns. *g*)

******

Enter the Middle Ages! For the record, everything up through the Fall of Rome has taken the first quarter of the book by number of pages (I'm on page 130 out of 482).

( here we goooooo!!! :D )

And now we reach the first-ever Newbery Medal winner: The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik Willem Van Loon! *round of applause* ;-)

( And liveblog! :D )

I'm just going to stop Section 1 of the liveblog there, because... well, because next we're getting into the Peloponnesian War and the Punic Wars, and they're long. But also because I'm kind of busy flailing a lot about Thermopylae. :D

*has neither the time nor the training to write a better history book* *keeps thinking about it anyway*