endless iterations

Earlier this year, I read Max in the House of Spies, a novel about a twelve-year-old German Jewish refugee who escapes Germany on a kindertransport… then does everything in his power to get sent back as a spy so he can try to save his parents.

I had a number of criticisms of Max in the House of Spies. (You can also read skygiants wrote a review here.) My biggest criticism was that it saddles Max with a dybbuk and a kobold on his shoulders, who serve no particular purpose but to Statler and Waldorf about how recruiting a twelve-year-old spy is in fact a terrible idea. Of course they have a point, but let’s be real, when I picked up a book about a twelve-year-old spy, I did it in the spirit of “Damn the realism! Full spy ahead!”

And when Max in the Land of Lies begins, we are indeed going full spy ahead!

( Spoilers )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

As per lucymonster’s recommendation, I read Susan J. Eischeid’s Mistress of Life and Death: The Dark Journey of Maria Mandl, Head Overseer of the Women’s Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, a compulsively readable though very grim book about how a nice German girl rose to head overseer at Auschwitz. Alongside her usual concentration camp duties, Mandl started an orchestra among the prisoners, partly as a bid for status (one in the ear of the male guards, if you will), but also out of a genuine love of music.

There’s a general western cultural belief that art appreciation of all kinds should be morally uplifting, so one might be tempted to infer from this that Mandl was a rare spark of humanity among the camp apparatus. This is absolutely not so. Mandl was famously vicious, and her other interests included kicking prisoners to death and riding through camp like a Valkyrie just to show off her power.

I picked up Simon Barnes’ How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher on a whim from a display in the library, and found it an absolute delight! Barnes offers a few tips for the novice birdwatcher (acquire binoculars), but mostly the book is about the joy that watching birds in even the most incidental way can bring to your life: the thrill of Canada geese returning in spring, that wonderful moment when a hawk swoops down and you thrill to its power and majesty.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, which I’m not loving as much as I’d hoped, but it’s still early days so perhaps it will grow on me.

What I Plan to Read Next

I picked up Kimberly Newton Fusco’s The Secret of Honeycake on a whim because I liked the cover. We shall see what we shall see!

I posted a while back that Julius Caesar was “my first and oldest Shakespearian love,” which in one sense in true, but in another sense is tragic A Comedy of Errors erasure.

When I was in junior high, the local university put on a production of A Comedy of Errors, which my mother and I loved so much that we invited my best friend and her mother to see it with us the next weekend. And then (I only learned this recently) apparently my mother snuck out one day and watched it yet another time, while I was at school! You can see why she didn’t inform me of this traitorous plan. Watching A Comedy of Errors without me indeed!

So of course I was delighted when I saw that one of the Indianapolis Shakespeare companies was going to Shakespeare-in-the-park A Comedy of Errors this summer. I retained dim memories of the plot (to be fair, the plot is basically “Two sets of identical twins separated at birth! SHENANIGANS!”) but intense memories of the hilarity, and I am happy to say that Shakespeare in the park delivered.

That formative junior high production was set more or less when and where the play was originally set, and featured actors who genuinely might be mistaken for each other as the twins. The Shakespeare-in-the-park version is set in Daytona Beach in 1984 (but a version of 1984 where you can’t contact the Coast Guard or otherwise use a telephone to try to track down your lost wife and children when you are all tragically separated in a shipwreck), and raised many chuckles by replacing the place names with cities around the Gulf of Mexico: Boca Raton, Cuba, Venice Beach.

(The merchant who is from Syracuse in the original is here from Venice Beach, and in perhaps a nod at The Merchant of Venice, dressed like the Rabbi from Robin Hood: Men in Tights, while everyone else is running around in Hawaiian shirts. Props to the actor for running around in a long coat on a hot humid evening.)

Also, every time they go to “the mart,” they replaced it with “Kmart.” I believe Shakespeare would have approved this pandering to the giggling crowd.

Also, the twins in this production were only vaguely similar, but dressed alike so you could definitely tell who was twin to whom. The Dromios were cross-cast, but the characters were still male, which made for a very funny moment near the beginning of the play right after the Dromios have been “born” (to a character who was pregnant with a beach ball): “male twins,” emphasizes the Merchant of Venice Beach who is narrating this flashback, and at once the Dromios slouch into a masculine posture and one of them grunts, “Whiskey club.”

All in all, just a grand old time, the kind of slapstick hilarity that you can enjoy even as a thirteen-year-old who is a little bit vague about what a lot of this Shakespearian language means.

Also, although I have at this point seen a number of Shakespeares, this was my first Shakespeare in the Park experience. We brought along a picnic and drank three bottles of wine between the four of us and had a wonderful time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Another Newbery! Lois Lenski’s Phebe Fairchild Her Book, which is set in Connecticut in the 1830s and features Phebe Fairchild, sent from the port of New Haven to stay with her Puritan farming cousins upstate, where she has to hide her Mother Goose because the Puritan farming cousins do not approve of silly rhymes. Phebe learns some farming skills, the Puritan cousins learn to unbend a bit, and a good time was had by all.

I’ve vaguely meant to read Liz Kessler’s The Tail of Emily Windsnap for years, and then troisoiseaux posted about it, and then asakiyume decided to read it (and later posted about it too), so obviously its time had come.

Unfortunately, I think I just waited way too long on this book. I might have liked it better if I had read it back in 2003, when I was still reasonably young and impressionable, although I might equally have been even more annoyed by the fact that mermaid society is not a thoroughly worldbuilt society in its own right, but merely an underwater reflection of the land world. The court stenographer may be writing her report in squid ink, and the presiding judge may be the King of the Mermaids himself, but otherwise the court functions exactly like a law court on a TV show.

What I’m Reading Now

Nearing the end of Lord Peter. Read the MOST HORRIFYING story this week, in which ( spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Two Newbery books left to go! The project is almost complete, a mere seven years after it began!