Ruth Krauss reviews: I Want to Paint..., Charlotte and the White Horse; Everything Under a Mushroom

That I l more or less enjoyed the strangeness of Everything Under a Mushroom makes me wonder how my appreciation of picture books has changed during this impromptu reading project—has exposure to Sendak and then Krauss expanded my view? what now might I think of those first few Sendak books? are my tastes secretly consistent, and am I just sucker for dream logic + mushroom imagery? A mystery.

Anyway Charlotte and the White Horse is the real star of this show.


Title: I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue
Author: Ruth Krauss
Illustrator: Maurice Sendak
Published: Harper Collins, 2001 (1956)
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 25
Total Page Count: 328,625
Text Number: 1169
Read Because: reading the author, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: I was caught off guard by the gentle escalation—this begins almost as a teaching text about childhood whims, and unfolds into a dreamlike narrative about creativity; it's bigger, weirder, and more evocative than it seems, but is also hard to grasp, perhaps because the theme doesn't speak to me personally, but also because of that rambling, growing structure. I like this one more after the fact, but it has its moments—like the beautifully illustrated, playful "doorknob/dearknob" panel. 2/5

( Doorknob, dearknob panel; but imagine it without color-correction from scanning, washed out and ethereal. )

Title: Charlotte and the White Horse
Author: Ruth Krauss
Illustrator: Maurice Sendak
Published: Harper Collins, 2001 (1955)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 30
Total Page Count: 328,800
Text Number: 1171
Read Because: reading the author, hardback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: This is Sendak at his rare and beautiful, with soft colors and a dreamy style (reminiscent of Kenny's Window and Outside Over There), and it's Krauss writing what feels like could only be found in children's literature or poetry, a scattershot and drifting narrative about the profound wish fulfillment of the horse-girl trope, with themes of responsibility, community, growth, and passing seasons. Krauss/Sendak combinations are usually more energetic; this has the evocative weirdness of their collaboration in I'll Be You and You Be Me, but gentled as it's spun into a longer story. I honestly can't guess what a child would think of this, but I found it delightful.


Title: Everything Under a Mushroom
Author: Ruth Krauss
Illustrator: Margot Tomes
Published: Scholastic, 1973
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 35
Total Page Count: 329,425
Text Number: 1175
Read Because: reading the author, ebook borrowed from Open Library
Review: I'd go as far as to call this Krauss's weirdest book, which is no small thing. It doesn't have a frame or narrative or genre or conceit; it's an elaborate game of pretend under a giant mushroom, sepia tones and a sometimes unsettling, sometimes dreamlike tone tying together barely-connected panels. I honestly can't say if it's good or if this kind of weirdness has grown on me after reading so much Krauss (as well as Sendak); nor can I imagine how it works for kids—is it confusing, or do they ride along the meandering logic? But I'm glad Open Library had a copy of this strange, forgotten book.

General update? books, book reviews; quiet times

I'm hardly the only one to say this, but the joy of Untitled Goose Game is that it's the "be naughty" equivalent of "do murder" in most games: I'm not supposed to do this IRL, it's probably best that I don't do this IRL :(, but it's very cathartic to do the thing in lovingly-rendered detail in game space. Anyway, I really enjoyed it.

* * *

I'm sorry that 100% of my updates have been book reviews, and that there have been so many of them.

I ran into something of a wall in processing life. I had to dump some stimuli (RIP Shakespeare project, trips to see my family, talking to almost anyone ever) & meanwhile delved deep into other stimuli of the self-discovery/-actualization and repairing my relationship with my partner after seven million years of stress varieties. Arguably these activities are also intense work, but they're less taxing and more indulgent (because sometimes they mean Acquiring Physical Goods) and just ... easier to process, especially while interfacing with the rest of the world is too hard.

So all my time has been Devon Time or Me Time or Quiet Time—

—and then I realized that I'd read [as of drafting this, numbers have since shifted] ~260 books this year with ~95 days left in the year, which means that at just over a book a day I could hit my arbitrary and ridiculous goal of 365 books in 2019. I was on track for that a few months ago, but then stopped reading Animorphs and started reading novel-length SF/F as well as playing video games and stuff.

So I went back to shamelessly inflating my numbers via children's books and manga, and now 365 is again become an achievable goal. I like it because it's (for me) not tenable, so I will never compare another year to this year & maybe learn the more general lesson that statistics are silly. Given the upcoming Macmillan and Blackstone embargoes, I imagine that 2020 will be a whole new shitshow for library users and I can only guess how it'll impact my reading—maybe it will be a year of decades-old doorstoppers to spite both publishers and statistics while avoiding holds.

I am meanwhile mostly caught up on writing reviews! ...I am still very behind on posting reviews! Between that and this rock I'm hiding under, that's all I've had the energy to post.

Book Reviews: The Secret Garden, Burnett; The Fourth Pig, Mitchison; A Line in the Dark, Lo

Title: The Secret Garden
Author: Frances Hodgon Burnett
Narrator: Johanna Ward
Published: Blackstone Audio, 2009 (1910)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 329,350
Text Number: 1173
Read Because: reread, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: This is a fascinating reread, my first in many years. Everything I loved in the text is still there: the garden is a phenomenal metaphor for cultivating personal growth and self-ownership, and the book's atmosphere, the prickly, dynamic characters and the idyllic descriptions and, most especially, the conspicuous narrator, are just as I remember and as lovely to revisit. It's a deserving classic that lands just on the endearing side of twee. But the themes have aged, and so have I, and the exaggerated depiction of the power of positive thinking reads not just as unrealistic but as profoundly flawed. It's set against substantial issues like poverty, neglect, disability, and that particularly glaring parable about the abuse victim, and these issues are erased or unresolved. This would be a different book if its theme were interrogated—certainly less escapist. But as a disabled person, that escapism already feels inaccessible to me.


Title: The Fourth Pig
Author: Naomi Mitchison
Published: Princeton University Press, 2014 (1936)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 255
Total Page Count: 329,715
Text Number: 1177
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 18 stories and poems of the fantastic. This peaks early, with the first and titular story about the fourth of the three little pigs and their intimate relationship with the wolf/death—as well as being phenomenally written, an extended but vivid metaphor, it speaks directly to my inner world and I love it more than I can explain. I worried that nothing else in the collection could live up to that, and indeed nothing does, in no small part because I bounced off of most of the poetry—which is fine, similarly strange and fantastic, but slid out of my grasp.

But Michiston's style is diverse, sometimes dreamlike, sometimes humorous, frequently evocative. She experiments with form, from dense prose to poetry to an entire five-act play (Kate Crackernuts—unexpectedly good.) Her concept of the fantastic, particularly the depiction of fairyland that reoccurs in later stories, is compelling. "The Little Mermaiden" has a unique outsider-PoV. As with all short fiction collections, the quality varies—and it has perhaps too strong a start. But Mitchison's diversity of themes and styles are effectively cumulative and distinctly her own. I expect this holds up well to rereads.


Title: A Line in the Dark
Author: Malinda Lo
Narrator: Jennifer Lim
Published: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing, 2017
Rating: 2 of 5
Page Count: 285
Total Page Count: 330,170
Text Number: 1181
Read Because: reading the author, audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: The complicated relationship between four teenage girls comes to a head when a crime occurs. I badly wish this were written more as a why/how-dunnit than a whodunnit. It has intriguing and nuanced elements—twisted teenage intimacy, flawed characters, claustrophobic inner worlds and exterior pressures like race and class, flirtations with the predatory lesbian trope; at moments, these elements coalesce. But everything about the structure is awful: first person present tense in the first half, the plague of YA and as unenjoyable here as always; in the second half, narrative contrivances which exist to maintain the mystery force a distance between the reader and the characters, sabotaging any investment in their motives or arcs. The ending twist is meant to substitute for that intimate view by casting previous interactions in a new light, but it's not smart enough to achieve that. This needed to be a book about processing, about fallout. What it is instead is mostly frustrating.