Reading Report: Early January 2023

Posted on 01/07/2023 by chick
  • Back in November, I was happily reading several different books (Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder, Le Lion, La Sorcière Blanche et L’Armoire Magique by C.S. Lewis/Anne-Marie Dalmais, and Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis), and I had just finished Alix E. Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which I loved. That was such a great selection of books, and I didn’t feel like I could replicate it. I felt like nothing was going to satisfy, and when that happens, it’s really hard to bounce back. I’ve been struggling since.
  • But things are looking up. In late December I finished Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, making way for a new book from the Top 100 Children’s Books list. The new book happens to be The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson. It’s fairly short, and I’m about halfway through it after just a few days. Gilly is, like Harriet, an unlikable character. But if she, unlike Harriet, redeems herself before the end (and the narrative arc suggests that she will), then it will be good. Fingers crossed.
  • Also in December, I finished The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier. (In this horror story for kids, Molly and Kip, Irish siblings whose parents have gone missing, are looking for work in England. They end up in the employ of a peculiar family living in a small island with a house built around a large, ominous-looking tree in a place called the Sourwood. It’s a bad place, and they know it, but they’re so desperate that even the appearance of a creepy guy–the Night Gardener–wandering around the house, doing who-knows-what while they sleep, isn’t quite enough to make them run away, at first. But soon it becomes clear that they will have to confront the evil that is infesting the entire estate). Everything about it was reasonably good, and it had a tree at the heart of it–an evil tree!–and what’s not to like about that? But somehow it didn’t work for me. I’m laying all the blame on me, though, because honestly I cannot point to anything specific in the book that would make me not like it.
  • After The Night Gardener, I picked up Lisa Maxwell’s The Last Magician, another book I’d put aside in 2022 because I wasn’t grooving on it. It still isn’t quite working for me, but I’m near the end now (415/498 pages read), and I am at least interested in how it turns out.
  • I ordered five books of poetry from the library so that I can get started on my goal of reading at least one poem per day.
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