It’s October and Halloween is almost here, so it’s time to read something spooky. Last year we took our trick-or-treating rather far afield, to Pu Songling’s Chinese studio, but this time, let’s spend the season closer to home and head over to the Van Tassels' Autumn festivities, over by Sleep Hollow. We’ll check out both Washington Irving’s original “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Disney’s 1949 adaptation.
Oh, but Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr.
Today, we’ll meet Mr. Thomas Carew, born in Kent in 1594 or ‘95, the youngest of three children. His early life had its ups and downs - as a young man, he meant to follow his father’s career path into law, but he studied little and that was a dead-end. He was hired into secretarial roles to diplomats in Italy and France, but shot himself in the foot by writing too frankly of a patron’s faults.
I’ve written a few posts over the last year discussing various children’s books and authors, but I don’t know a lot about the history of children’s literature or what criticism of the genre looks like. So, I decided to start looking for a general overview and began with The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel. It was published in 2009 so it’s not the leading edge of criticism, but for a general overview that seems plenty recent enough.
Did you forget this series? It’s only been, well, a long while since we met our last friend, but I’m going to reintroduce it now. You needn’t worry about it quickly falling off again, either, because the next few posts have already been written. How’s that for planning ahead?
Anyway, today we’ll meet Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was born in 1844, converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism as a young man, joined the Jesuit order, and worked as a Classics teacher and parish priest around England, Wales, and Ireland.
Library booksales are wildly hit-and-miss affairs, usually more of a miss. Once in a while, though, you can catch a break - like us at a sale earlier this year, where we walked out with several dozen books for $20. Of course, mere quantity means little if every book is rotten, but we were able to find a lot of good stuff. What helped, I think, is that staff gradually restocked the tables over the course of the morning, so the early birds weren’t able to pick out absolutely everything worth having (often to sell on eBay later, not even to enjoy for themselves!
I wasn’t able to do any seasonal reading for October last year, but now that I have a little spare time I decided to check out Pu Songling’s collection, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. I’ve read a few of these stories before in adapted form via the app Du Chinese, and eventually I’d like to read the original book. For now, though, I have to be content with the translation by John Minford.
As a person who likes Japan, likes literature, and likes what he’s read of the combination of those two, I want to like haiku. However, it’s never really appealed to me. In my experience, five-line tanka are about as short as a poem can be and still feel like it has some substance to it, and even that takes a patient sort of reading to appreciate. I also hadn’t read all that many of them though and didn’t know much about the context in which they were written, so I hoped that reading The Penguin Book of Haiku, with its large sample size accompanied by an extensive introduction and some commentary, would help me to at least appreciate if not enjoy the form.
A couple years ago I did something rather dangerous and reviewed a novel written by an e-friend, Neovictorian’s Sanity. Fortunately, the novel was in fact enjoyable and genuinely interesting. Shortly after publishing Sanity, Neovictorian announced that he was working on a sequel, Reality, and I was, for the first time since high school, looking forward to a new novel by a living author. Amazing! Being swamped by schoolwork and wedding planning kept me from starting and finishing the book until recently, well after its January 2020 release date, but so it goes.
It’s the end of the year, and now that the reminiscing and navel-gazing is over it’s time for the most important year-end festivity, looking at how many books I read. In 2018 I read thirty-six, compared to 2017’s forty-two. This year, I have twenty-nine books recorded in LibraryThing, but this excludes eight volumes of Toriyama Akira’s DragonballZ because they’re part of a box set and so, from LibraryThing’s perspective, are only one book.
For the sake of both practising my French and reading something I’m interested in, I’ve started reading through a book straightforwardly titled French Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Elliott M. Grant and first published in 1932 (my copy is a 1950 reprint). I haven’t worked through much of it yet, but I have a learned a few things about French poetry generally and now know a couple fine poets I hadn’t previously even been aware of.