What I'm Reading Now

Nancy McCabe, From Little House to Little Women

McCabe writes about her childhood and young adult reading, as well as a trips she and her daughter take to visit literary sites across the US and Canada, including the Little House museums.  I've never been to any of these museums except the one outside of Independence, with the reconstructed Little House on the Prairie; but I was reading most of the same books McCabe read in the same years she was reading them, so I enjoyed this memoir a great deal.

McCabe, her daughter, and various friends visit not only the Little House museums, but other museums, such as the Betsy-Tacy houses; the Anne of Green Gables museums on Prince Edwards Island; and the Alcott museum in Concord. Interspersed with the travel memoirs are reflections on McCabe's own life growing up in a religious conservative family in Kansas, focusing on her relationship with her mother, aunts, and female cousins; and how she evolves, both as a reader and person, as she comes of age and adopts her own daughter. Her memories of her family intertwine interestingly with her memories of the books she reads.

There's also some political musing about the various books -- feminism in Anne of Green Gables, as well as the conservative strictures that helped to create the Little House books (and even more so in the horrible television show). Both Wilder and her daughter were opposed to the New Deal created by FDR's administration, and these books (among other things) worked to create a narrative that explained why the New Deal, or any government aid, was a bad thing. (Never mind all the government aid Pa got, which among other things gave them their land in the Dakotas and sent Mary to college.) 

McCabe is the author of Vaulting Through Time, which I reviewed for Asimov's. It's also about mothers and daughters, aunts and cousins. Plus time travel! Both that novel and this memoir are wonderful reads.

Ron Charnow, Mark Twain

This is a biography of Mark Twain, and about a zillion pages long. Twain has never been one of my favorite writers, being very uneven, though of course I read Tom Sawyer about a million times as a kid. I've read Huck Finn a couple of times, and enjoyed the first half every time. I don't think I have ever made it through any of his other books, though bits of his diaries of Adam and Eve are funny. Anyway, I picked this one up off the new books shelf at the library and mostly enjoyed it. 

The second half of the book, when Twain's life is falling apart and his kids and wife are dying, is a bit depressing. Also he (and they) were constantly ill with things that antibiotics would cure, or which could have been prevented with vaccines. The baby son died from diphtheria, for instance. And they were always getting boils or dysentery; the youngest daughter had her life ruined by epilepsy. Life before modern medicine was awful. (On that topic!)

If you want to know what it was like to be a writer born before the Civil War who lived through a number of historical events and social changes, this book will tell it to you. Warning: Charnow doesn't try to gloss over the racism and misogyny of Twain's younger days. To his credit, Twain learned better and did better in his adulthood. 

Reading the biography made me want to give Twain's works another chance, and I might even do that.

Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

This one was recommended to me by my kid, who likes horror novels. I do not like horror novels, but he said I would like this one. I did! 

It's about a Pikuni -- a Blackfoot -- Indian, Good Stabs, who becomes a vampire after attempting to kill a 500 year old vampire who immigrated to the US from Europe in the early 19th century. Good Stabs lives, as a vampire, through the destruction of his people and his culture by Europeans, attempting to fight back by killing Europeans, especially the Buffalo hunters who are wiping out the great herds that his people lived on.

Jones does interesting things with vampire lore, and he's a good writer. Trigger warning: lots of genocidal murder in the backstory. If you can handle that (I skimmed some parts), this is an engaging read. The ending left me a little underwhelmed, I'll admit.