Merry Wanderer of the Night:
shelf discovery

I never read any Beverly Cleary books so I decided to give her a try as part of the Shelf Discovery Challenge. After reading Fifteen I think it's probably best I didn't read any Beverly Cleary books because cynicism caught me pretty early in life and I think a lot of eye rolling would have happened. That's not to say that a lot of eye rolling didn't happen this time around, because it most certainly did. Jane is fifteen and she has decided that she is going to fall in love, although this doesn't seem like a possibility while she is on her way to babysit a tyrant child. Still, a girl can dream right?

Surprisingly, though, a dog food delivery boy comes to the house she is babysitting at and he is positively dreamy and wonderful and everything that a first boyfriend should be. Jane wonders when she gets home if it would be too forward of her to ask the woman she babysat for who the delivery boy was. No, that won't work, she'll just have to continue babysitting at the house and hope she runs into him again (sounds like something I would have come up with when I was fifteen). Luckily she doesn't have to worry about it because the boy calls her (this would never happen in real life). His name is Stanley Crandall and he would like to take her out. A few dates go by and Jane is Stan's girl, or at least she thinks he is until he takes another girl to the school dance!

So, the story has some misgivings, but it was also written in 1956, a year before my mom was even born. I tried to remind myself as I was reading the book. I never really felt like I knew who Jane was, but she did say some funny things every once in awhile. "Nobody wanted to be sweet and sensible, at least not a girl in high school. Jane hoped her mother would not spread it around Woodmont that she thought her daughter was sweet and sensible" (28). That was funny, and I think I could relate to that when I was about thirteen, not fifteen, but as I said 1956 so we'll move on. What really peeved me about this book though was that Stan was quite literally the only thing Jane cared about; "She did not want to be a brilliant student. She did not want to be intellectually curious. She wanted to be Stan's girl, dancing with him in the gymnasium of Woodmont High" (116). I mean, couldn't she have grown even just a little bit? I know I was kind of boy crazy when I was fifteen but I still had some other interests. Like reading and music and getting a car. I mean, it's 1956 not the beginning of the world.

So this novel earned a C.

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I remember loving the movie Harriet the Spy when I was a kid, but slightly remembering the movie didn't really prepare me for actually reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzburgh. For some reason the Harriet I had in my mind was an angsty 14-year-old girl. In reality, the Harriet of the novel is an 11-year-old genius. Or at least I thought she was a genius. She is encouraged to write everything she sees by her nanny Ole Golly. Harriet thinks about everything in terms of how it will help her career as a writer and detective. She has routes that she goes through every day.

The people she observes on her routes are cat-loving Harrison Withers, a snooty old couple, a woman who (for a period) refuses to get out of bed, and an Italian immigrant family who owns the local grocery store. Harriet's observations of these people are surprisingly astute for a young girl, and they kept someone twice her age (me) in fits of giggles. I had a journal like Harriet when I was a kid and I wrote down my thoughts on everyone in my class too. I always remember my mom telling me not to write anything down I didn't want anyone else to see, and this is something Harriet has to consider in this book.

One thing that annoyed me about this book was how the "romance" between Harriet and her friend Sport was portrayed as this fact that everyone should know. This fit with Harriet's voice in the novel, but I still thought it was kind of weird. Their love relationship was mentioned about twice during the whole book and I wondered why it needed to be there at all.

This novel earned a B.

I read this book as part of the Shelf Discovery Challenge.
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Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

is about, as you might have guessed, a young girl named Margaret. She has recently moved from her home in New York to a suburb in New Jersey because her parents want to be around nature. They want to mow! But her parents find out they cannot mow, amongst other things.

Upon her arrival in New Jersey Margaret makes friends with Nancy who suggests that Margaret not wear socks on the first day of school. Margaret desperately wants to be cool, so she does not wear socks against her mothers wishes. This results in several blisters and the realization that all the other girls are wearing socks anyway. Through Nancy Margaret meets Gretchen and Janie. The four girls form a club and discuss which boys (or boy, really) are the cutest, getting their periods, and their families. Nancy is kind of terrifying because she comes up with all the rules so everything that is said in the club is not exactly true, like who the cutest boy is for example. Everything must be Nancy approved.

In the midst of all the boys, periods, and busts, Margaret is also dealing with questions of religion. Her mother is Christian and her father is Jewish, so they do not practice any religion in their household. Margaret prays secretly but when she attends temple with her grandmother and church with her friends she realizes that she doesn't really know anything about religion. And that it might be kind of boring and silly.

I really enjoyed this book. I thought I hadn't read it before, but once I started I recognized the story, so I must have read it. As I mentioned on here during the readathon, I actually related to Margaret's teach, Mr. Benedict, more than anyone else in the novel. He is only 24-years-old and just graduated from college. He is completely nervous on his first day as a teacher and the kids in the class all want to play tricks on him. Blume is a genius because his character is actually fairly well developed and made the book enjoyable for me, not that Margaret isn't enough.

I read this for Booking Mama's Shelf Discovery Challenge.

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A Little Princess

by Frances Hodgson Burnett is my first book for Booking Mama's Shelf Discovery Challenge. The novel takes place in 19th Century London. Sarah Crewe is taken from her home in India to attend Miss Minchin's boarding school for girls. She is rich and her father showers her with every extravagance, until he dies and she is tossed into the attic to live with the scullery maid. Sarah never loses heart though, and still thinks of herself as a princess when she is wearing rags. She has a wild imagination which is tested by continuous hunger. When new neighbors move in she is fascinated by their Indian furniture and grows fond of watching them. Sarah adopts them as her friends even though she never speaks to them, but she finds out they are closer to her than she realized.

I had never read A Little Princess before, but I watched the 1995 version of the movie several times as a child. The movie changes a lot of things that I was a little surprised by, it really changed the meaning of the novel. I loved how in depth the book goes into what Sarah is thinking when Miss Minchin yells at her, even as an adult I wish that I could think the way she does.

When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wish they hadn't said afterward.

I was interested to read that the book was possibly inspired by Charlotte Bronte's unfinished novel Emma. Charlotte Bronte is my favorite author now so it was interesting to see yet again how my taste in childrens books are so similar to my taste in books now. My favorite part of the book was definitely the relationship between Sarah and the Indian lascar. It really captures the obsession with the Eastern mystique; everything he does is seen as magic. At the end you find out, of course, that it was not magic at all but that he was just sneaky. I felt like this really questioned the perception of India, almost in the vein of Virginia Woolf.

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Since I forgot about doing a What I'm Reading Monday post yesterday I figured I'd make up for it today.

Finished
Lady Audley's Secret

is a Victorian sensation novel. I posted a review yesterday which you can read here.

Still Reading
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

is a Quirk Classic edition of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. I should finish it in the next couple days.

Started
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

by Jan Morris is a travel novel about the city of Trieste. Trieste is in Italy, but it has the cultures of many countries in it because it has kind of been passed between surrounding countries. Morris mostly discusses the "nowhereness" of the place.

A Little Princess (Unabridged Classics)

by Frances Hodgson Burnett is my first read for Shelf Discovery.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie is a mystery I'm reading for Barnes and Noble's Literature By Women Book Club.

Today I found out about yet another great book challenge going around. It is crazy that I found out about Shelf Discovery today because I posted my favorite books from childhood. Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stop Reading is a book by Lizzie Skurnick. The challenge is to read this book as well as six classics from the list in the book. What a great challenge! It is also running for six months, so that only comes out to one book a month which makes it easy to include in all the other challenges. To find out more check out Booking Mama's blog here.

I have not read the book yet but based on the table of contents I will be reading the following six books:

My Sweet Audrina by V.C. Andrews
A Little Princess by Francis Hodgson Burnett
Hangin' Out With Cici by Francine Pascal
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Are You there God? It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

The only book I have already read is Little House on the Prairie so this should be a great way to broaden my teenage horizons. Also, this is my last year as a teenager (two more months to go!) so this will be a nice farewell for me.