Wednesday reading — shy girls
Jun. 24th, 2015 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayhapWhat I've been reading
I (finally!) read Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. It's an interdisciplinary book, approaching the Pioneer Girl manuscript both as a nonfiction memoir and a precursor to the fictionalized Little House books, but I feel like it's on stronger ground on the historical side. It is published by the South Dakota Historical Society and not the South Dakota Literary Society, after all. I suppose the upside to the obsessive tracing of the best possible information about absolutely everyone mentioned in the manuscript which frequently swamps the space allotted to annotations is that if you know your genealogy and you had ancestors in any of the correct places at the correct times you can easily find out if they had any kind of memorable encounter with the Ingalls family. (Mine were in vaguely the right part of the country, but never close enough.)
Of all the differences between the remembered and the literary account, the one that actually bothered me was Jack, the brindle bulldog. It turns out that "because Jack wanted to stay with Pet and Patty as he always did Pa gave him to the man who had them." I'm disappointed in Jack. A dog is supposed to be man's best friend, not a team of horses' best friend.
I read Finding Audrey, Sophie Kinsella's first attempt at writing YA. The bullying/depression/anxiety storyline is different from anything she's written under that name (I haven't read any of her Madeleine Wickham) books and I'm not sure how well it meshes with the fluffier romance, but I suppose I can see it as more of a wish fulfillment thing.
I (finally!) read Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography. It's an interdisciplinary book, approaching the Pioneer Girl manuscript both as a nonfiction memoir and a precursor to the fictionalized Little House books, but I feel like it's on stronger ground on the historical side. It is published by the South Dakota Historical Society and not the South Dakota Literary Society, after all. I suppose the upside to the obsessive tracing of the best possible information about absolutely everyone mentioned in the manuscript which frequently swamps the space allotted to annotations is that if you know your genealogy and you had ancestors in any of the correct places at the correct times you can easily find out if they had any kind of memorable encounter with the Ingalls family. (Mine were in vaguely the right part of the country, but never close enough.)
Of all the differences between the remembered and the literary account, the one that actually bothered me was Jack, the brindle bulldog. It turns out that "because Jack wanted to stay with Pet and Patty as he always did Pa gave him to the man who had them." I'm disappointed in Jack. A dog is supposed to be man's best friend, not a team of horses' best friend.
I read Finding Audrey, Sophie Kinsella's first attempt at writing YA. The bullying/depression/anxiety storyline is different from anything she's written under that name (I haven't read any of her Madeleine Wickham) books and I'm not sure how well it meshes with the fluffier romance, but I suppose I can see it as more of a wish fulfillment thing.
