January (and February) Reading

For the holidays, I asked for and received epub copies of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House novels (1932 - 1943), most of which I reread over the first half of January. They have held up surprisingly well. I was worried about Little House on the Prairie, one of my favorites, where the Ingalls family tries to establish a claim on Native American land, anticipating the government will force relocation of Indian Territory. The novel is surprisingly not-awful at respectfully presenting the Native Americans' rights to treaty land and to be treated as human beings, despite the lens of the Ingalls' prejudices and manifest destiny. And, of course, the Ingalls depart Indian territory at the end of the novel, relocated when the army tells them to leave. The tone of the departure is that the Ingalls were the problem, not the Native Americans. So it's not perfect, but it dances between the attitudes of the time and the attitudes of a more modern era in a way I can live with.

At some point, I will reread Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek, which for some reason I started and didn't finish. Oh right, my library hold for Scoundels came in.

Star Wars: Scoundrels (Timothy Zahn) (2013): ( IT'S A NEW ZAHN SW NOVEL AND IT'S HEISTFIC. WIN. Giant twist-revealing spoilers. )

Since then, I have been reading the Brick, also known as Les Miserables (Victor Hugo) (1862). The Brick's nickname is instantly explained when one holds the paperback 1,460 page Fahnestock and McAfee translation, published in 1987. I'm alternating it with Project Gutenberg's 1887 Hapgood translation as appropriate. So far I am through book one of five.

Notes so far: I am heavily influenced by cahn's reread, in conjunction with the skygiants reread. I didn't discover the bookmark function on the ereader until book 2 "Cosette", so I have very little to say about book 1. That's okay, because two opens with Waterloo, the famous 50 page break from narrative.

( I am not an English major, nor do I play one online. )

I look forward to getting back to Valjean; one gets the impression Hugo is boxing him in with tangents, cutting off the lines of escape from revolution and social justice and striving for self-improvement until those are the only choices left.

Numbers game: 7 total finished; 7 fiction. 6 reread, 1 new. Working on Les Miz.