Reading

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books: newbery

SFF in the Newberies

I was all set to write a post about how there aren’t that many SFF books that won Newbery honors or awards, but then I actually totted them up and realized that this is a classic case of a sampling error. The problem is not that few SFF children’s books won awards, but that I didn’t read most of those books specially for this project. I read a bunch of them just as part of my general reading as a child, because the Newbery SFF books, it turns out, include an extremely high percentage of absolute bangers.

(For the purposes of this post, I’ve excluded nonsense books (which after all had their own post) and also most books about talking animals, just because I tend to see those as their own genre with its own concerns. There are a couple that in my opinion stray over into more general SFF territory, and I have included them here.)

It’s also true that the SFF Newberies tend to cluster in the more recent years, so as I’ve been working backward there have been fewer and fewer, in part perhaps because nonsense books and folktales were more heavily represented in the earlier years. The first indisputably fantasy book to win a Newbery Honor is Dorothy Lathrop’s delightful The Fairy Circus in 1932. There are just a few in the 1940s, but these include Julia Sauer’s Fog Magic (which I read and adored as a reprint in fourth grade), as well as Ruth S. Gannett’s still popular and beloved My Father’s Dragon.

But in the 1960s and 70s, the Newbery Award got on a fantasy roll, and honored classic after classic. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Lloyd Alexander’s The Black Cauldron and The High King, Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars (another reprint I loved in my early teens), Robert O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (my mom read this to my brother and me), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan (I read this within the last couple of years and it 110% holds up if you come to it for the first time as an adult), Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and The Grey King, and Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Perilous Gard (another beloved favorite of my youth! I just couldn’t get enough of the 1970s books apparently).

This amazing streak continues in the 1980s and 90s with Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm and The House of the Scorpion, Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Moorchild and Lois Lowry’s The Giver and Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief and Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted...

If someone asked for a reading list to introduce them to American children’s SFF from the latter half of the twentieth century, I think you could quite legitimately just hand them this list as a starting point. It hits many of the best authors and most famous and beloved books.

This winning streak continued into the 2000s with Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux (which I personally didn’t care for, but clearly many others do), Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy (also not a personal favorite) and Grace Lin Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (which I loved).

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon won an honor in 2010. In the fifteen years since then, the Newbery has gone a bit SFF mad (including three SFF honorees in 2024), but perhaps at the expense of its earlier all but unerring judgment. I’ve liked some of the work that has won in recent years (particularly Christina Soontornvat’s books), but I don’t think it’s as strong as the books from 1960 to 2010.

Now a skeptical reader might point out that I read many of the earlier books at an impressionable age, so perhaps the root of the problem is simply that I’ve aged out of the target audience. This is of course possible but also incorrect, as my taste is impeccable and my judgment 100% objective, but I think it also reflects changes in publishing.

First, the years around 2010 were the years of the explosion in YA publishing, which siphoned off a lot of books that would earlier have been published as children’s books. And the great YA explosion also changed the kind of YA books that were published: publishers were looking for the next Twilight, which (with all due respect to Twilight) is not likely to result in books as complex and meaty and uninterested in romance as, let’s say, The Tombs of Atuan.

At the same time, there was a wider swing back toward moralism in literature, the belief that the point of a story is to be a vehicle for good values. The values that modern-day moralists are different from the values of their Victorian forebears (very few people today are het up about the importance of keeping the Sabbath), but the basic instinct is the same, and it has the same deforming effect on literature. Not every book needs to be an expose of social injustice. Some people just want to write about fairies putting on a circus.

Current Music: Jack, "Cinematic"

I was never there, I only read the book, I only saw the film

A double-header at this afternoon's medical appointment: the tech not only expressed surprise at my calendar age, but assumed from my voice that I was either foreign-born or had spent significant time out of the country, specifically she thought in the UK. Given the current climate, I should be clear that she was curious, not hostile; one of her children had been a staffer in the Obama administration and two others had been some kind of federal employee and she had considerable feelings on subjects from vaccines to tanks. But after I had gone through the standard litany clarifying the rather pathetic fact that I have lived my entire life in New England and the Boston area for most of it, she still thought I sounded British. "You should go over there. You'd blend right in." She herself had an old-school Boston accent. "People from anywhere, they can tell where I'm from." I am not good at other people's ages, but I don't believe that I look younger than my early forties, especially after the last few ravaging years, and I expect to be heard as American by anyone who actually has one or more of the plethora of accents on offer in the UK. Weirdest instance of trying to place my voice remains the time I was told by a very drunk Australian that I sounded like a Norwegian. Someday the question of my vocal origins will come around again because it has been doing so since my childhood and I will answer "Lisson Grove" just to see what happens.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Over the years,

littlerhymes has been educating me about Australian children’s literature. Most recently she sent me Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, a slim and lovely book full of gorgeous descriptions of the barren yet beautiful storm-wracked shore where seabirds nest. Our hero, Storm Boy, lives here with his father, and befriends a baby pelican whom he names Mr. Percival. ( Spoilers )

After a gap of years since my last Ngaio Marsh, I returned to my favorite Golden Age mystery author! (Sorry, Sayers and Christie. Sayers in particular I think is probably actually a better writer than Marsh, but the heart wants what it wants.) This time, I read A Wreath for Rivera, in which a convoluted-seeming mystery winds round to a satisfyingly simple solution. The family dynamics are excellently portrayed as usual in Marsh, and although I love her mysteries I do just a little bit wish she’d written a non-mystery or two, just to see how it would have turned out.

I also finished Daphne du Maurier’s Golden Lads: Sir Francis Bacon, Anthony Bacon and Their Friends, which is one of those books that is interesting while you’re reading it but also eminently put-downable, hence the fact that it’s taken me a few months. Despite the title, it’s really a biography of Anthony Bacon, Tudor Spy, with just a bit of Sir Francis Bacon (presumably Sir Francis’s name is more marketable). Major downside of being a Tudor spymaster: you pay for the whole operation out of pocket and are rewarded, at best, with gratitude.

Continuing the spy theme, I read Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, a rollicking adventure featuring spies who are having the time of their lives. They pull off a major intelligence coup which is made into a major motion picture about fifteen years later, in which spymaster Ewen Montagu himself got to play a cameo role! Spying: extremely effective, glamorous, and also glorious. The antithesis of Le Carre.

What I’m Reading Now

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales, I just finished the tragic story “Lois the Witch,” about a girl accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. Really effectively miserable and claustrophobic. If anyone ever tries to pack you off to your sole remaining surviving family in Puritan New England, I strongly suggest that you find a job as an under-housemaid instead.

What I Plan to Read Next

Dick Francis’s Whip Hand awaits!

Current Music: Lo! Peninsula, "Quicksand (Nuffin)"

Here we are half-awake

The second-best part of this highly mediocre day was a gyro on which I put a phenomenal amount of tzatziki, to the point that by the end of it the meat was probably the condiment. The best part was taking a walk with

spatch right before sunset. I remembered to bring my camera.

( A blizzard in the midst of a sunny day. )

I am not sure that Series 13 of Doctor Who holds together at all, but since Kevin McNally was playing essentially Marcus Brody if he had started in parapsychology instead of classics, I enjoyed him very much.

Current Music: The Divine Comedy, "Assume the Perpendicular"

We just want to go to a stately home built in the Georgian style

In lesser catastrophes than the general planet, I have been noticing over the last eight months that while the majority of my audio transferred successfully from the archival hard drive that was for fourteen years my beloved Bertie Owen, certain artists seem to have gone incompletely and inexplicably missing, generally to be discovered by trying to cue up a track which no longer exists on my computer, which is what happened last night with Neil Hannon. Of the six albums by the Divine Comedy that I used to own along with a handful of random tracks and singles, the sole full-length survivors are Promenade (1994) and Bang Goes the Knighthood (2010), which are neither chronologically nor alphabetically even next to one another. The consolation lining is that at least I didn't lose one of my favorite songs which can be found on the latter, "Assume the Perpendicular." Like much of its composer's catalogue, it's a chamber-pop character sketch, wittily written and performed with a sincere straight face: trying to fix its position on the irony slider is pointless. "Slip on your Barbour jacket, jump in my old MG" sets the class bracket of its band of day-trippers, while the tenor of their conversation is nailed with equal concision by the architectural divisions of "Lavinia loves the lintels, Anna the architraves / Ben's impressed by the buttresses thrust up the chapel nave." Aside from the narrator who thought of that last line and delivers it with cheekily Coward-esque crispness, none of these people sounds like the most exciting company for a heritage day out with their diffident intentions to "make complimentary sounds and talk about nothing in particular." And yet as the song catchily progresses, these pretentious characters find themselves falling into the fun of their excursion, meandering the hedge maze, bouncing on historical beds, swinging around the library's railed ladders, and the music loosens right up along with them, the neat hand-clapped piano joined first by a brisk roll of drums and then a flourish of brass that unreel from a marching tattoo into a loose-jointed jam, until by the time a music-hallish banjo has ricky-tickied in on the action, the self-conscious distance of the original chorus has turned into "wild ecstatic sounds" and everybody including the listener is having a wonderful time tearing around this stately home where playing at aristocracy has given way to goofing off. It all ends in a little twiddle of electronica like a punch line. It doesn't really matter if it's sending up the sightseers who aren't even interested in the cider in Somerset, what it feels like as it winds down from that explosive high of exploration is a genuine invitation that I can play twenty times in a row, even if my closest examples of the Georgian style are not so much country houses as random historical registers and the occasional Revolutionary museum that I pass on the way to my parents or a supermarket.

Entry tags:

books: newbery

Nonsense in the Newberys

I went into the Newbery Project expecting to see certain changes over the decades, but some of the most fascinating changes have been the ones that I didn’t know enough to expect at all, like the rise and fall of the nonsense book.

Now let me say at the outset that I don’t much enjoy nonsense books. Until recently I would have qualified this statement by saying “except Alice in Wonderland,” but then I reread Alice in Wonderland and I guess what I enjoyed as a teen was reading The Annotated Alice and discovering that Carroll’s verses were send-ups of moralistic Victorian poems and songs? In any case, I didn’t enjoy the reread.

As such, I’ve never sought out nonsense stories, and therefore my observations about the form are offered on the basis of nonsense books I’ve read more or less by accident. However, my impression is that Alice in Wonderland popularized nonsense as a form of children’s literature in the Anglophone world, and that popularity lasted until at least the 1920s, as evidenced by William Bowen’s The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure (posts here and here), Anne Carroll Moore’s Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, and Anne Parrish and Dilwyn Parrish’s The Dream Coach, all of which won Newbery Honors during the 1920s.

But after this point, nonsense books lost the critical favor of the Newbery committee. Nonsense books continued to be published, most famously and successfully Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth in 1961. (Palmer Brown also made a career of this sort of thing in the second half of the 20th century.) But the Newbery committee had largely moved on. After honoring three nonsense books in its first decade, it honored just three more in the rest of its long life: Anne Parrish’s Floating Island (1931) and The Story of Appleby Capple (1951), and Catherine Besterman’s The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Long-foot (1948).

That was the last Alice in Wonderland-type nonsense book to be so honored. At this point, I’m not sure new ones are being published, either. I have clocked a few more recent Newberies as nonsense-adjacent (Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms (1975), Peggy Horvath’s Everything on a Waffle (2002), and Jack Gantos’s Dead End in Norvelt (2012)), but they differ from earlier nonsense books in that they technically take place in the real world and nothing exactly impossible happens… but at the same time the stories are absurd.

Given that I am, as aforementioned, not very fond of nonsense books, I can’t weep buckets over this development. But all the same, I do find something weirdly delightful about the prevalence of nonsense books in the first decade of the Newbery award, simply because they have no moral point - no point at all except the desire to delight.

Current Music: Andrew Bird & Matthew Berninger, "A Lyke Wake Dirge"

Sit thee down and put them on

I have observed Labor Day by doing basically nothing at all, but

selkie introduced me to the sea-flooded Paleolithic of Cosquer Cave with its seals and great auks and the hand-marks of children and the one unknown figure like a seal-headed man speared, which reminded me that some days ago I meant to link the Langton Herring burial with its amulet of a Roman coin and its copper alloy mirror whose bladed crescent pattern made me think at first sight of owls. The clouds tonight are too thick for the aurora and the last of the Perseids, but the light has done its knife-trick of paling suddenly to autumn, as if summer just blew off it like haze. I am sure the heat will be back, the way we have scrambled the seasons: I keep trying to look for the tells to hold on to, like the late green curl of the leaves; the last of the monarchs in milk-jade chrysalis, a record twenty-two this summer if all safely make it to flight. I could go for a small ice age if I could be assured of the megafauna.

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Picture Book Monday: Making Light Bloom

My mother volunteers at the local library, and sometimes I help her process the new books, which is how I discovered Sandra Nickel’s Making Light Bloom: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Lamps.

Picture book biographies seem to be having a real moment, which is convenient for me as I’ve apparently got a weakness for them. Most of the current run focus on a lesser-known woman or person of color who did a cool thing, for values of “lesser-known” that vary from “actually I think this person is really pretty famous” to “no one has ever heard of this person.”

Clara Driscoll definitely falls in the latter category. Not only is she not famous now, but she was unknown in her own lifetime, as she did her work under contract in the Tiffany factory. She started out cutting out glass for the famous Tiffany windows, a job that required quite a bit of artistic taste as these windows are famous, among other things, for their gorgeous variegated glass - the cutters had to select the particular part of the big sheet of glass that would look best in the whole window.

Eventually, it occurred to Driscoll that one might also make stained glass lamps. Her design for a dragonfly lamp caught Louis Tiffany’s eye, and the lamp went to the World’s Fair, where it was a big hit. Tiffany gave Driscoll permission to design more lamps, and she went on to design at least sixty, all with beautiful nature themes.

The illustrations by Julie Paschkis are in a striking stained glass style: it was this reason that the cover caught my eye. Like Tiffany windows, the colors vary within one panel, orange drifting into red and green to yellow. A rich and lovely array of colors.

Current Music: Theodore Bikel, "Dire-gelt"

?פֿאַר װאָס זאָל איך אײַך געבן דירה-געלט אַז די קיך איז צעבראָכן

The weekend continued sleepless af with a double whammy of financial stress and I got nothing done that I had wanted, but

spatch took a picture of me when I got back in from my walk that I liked, which these days is vanishing. I am not confident a normal amount of summer actually happened.

Code deploy happening shortly

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

Current Music: Mt. Joy, "She Wants to Go Dancing"

My life's a crooked mess of things I've broken with my head

My paramount goal for last night was sleep and it failed so horrifically that I have had a flat and frustratingly nonexistent day, but in listening to the three different cast recordings of 1776 which I now own—1969 Broadway, 1970 London, and 1972 film—and rewatching a handful of scenes from the handily streaming film, thirty years after initial exposure in eighth grade social studies it finally clicked with me that so much of the appeal of its John Adams is directly proportional to his being such a disaster. Especially as incarnated by the superbly obstreperous William Daniels, the delegate from Massachusetts is simultaneously an incandescent engine of rage against the machines of tyranny and an indignant wet cat of a man endowed with the inalienable right of shooting himself in the foot, cf. the opening number devoted to establishing that he has achieved the political and personal milestone of pissing off an entire continental congress. His capacity for chill is somewhere in the decatherms and he wasn't even close enough to the door to be standing behind it when social finesse was handed out. He has the self-aware saving grace of a sense of humor which quirks out in unsuccessfully repressed smiles, but he's the awkward straight man just as often as he snarks drily for the Colonies; one of the best details of his physical acting is a nervous flicker of the fingers which stands sometimes for constant restive thought and sometimes for not knowing what the hell to do with his hands. It's not a comic characterization, but it does make the moments where he lets his guard down all the more quietly effective, because too often it's punctured for him. His own personality is among the obstacles of policy, philosophy, and factionalism facing a successful declaration of independence and down to the wire the play never lets him forget it. He dances so gravely and gracefully with Blythe Danner's Martha Washington, he earns the smugness with which he calls across to Howard da Silva as they whirl into the showiest choreography of the song, "We still do a few things in Boston, Franklin!" Who wasn't supposed to imprint on that unbeatable combination of furious integrity that shouldn't be let out unsupervised for five minutes? Damn this government for making any national celebration so meanly jingoistic, I couldn't even think about attending this spring's sestercentennial of the Battle of Lexington in my eighteenth-century shirt.

Current Music: Lewis Fiander, "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve"

A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere

I had just written an intensely miserable post about the state of my life and my health and whatever was supposed to have passed for my career, but then I discovered the existence of the 1970 London cast recording of 1776 and it surprised me into laughing out loud, specifically because while I had never heard anyone but William Daniels as John Adams and I expect no one again to match his particular abrasive flint, Lewis Fiander couldn't have been terrible from the amount of incredulous disgust he puts into his "Good God." Anything to do with American democracy is of course somewhat depressing to contemplate at the present moment, but not more so from a musical than from the news. In other charms of the week, I have two different kinds of infection in a body that is already not responding as hoped to several months of medicating for an underlying condition, so anything that distracts me from mere grim hanging on to someday reading other people's death notices is a net good.

Current Music: Lo! Peninsula, "Another Divine Joke"

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patreon

So Krishna stole the butter, did he?

The joke of The Perfect Murder (1988) is that it is neither. Then again, despite its production credit, neither is it a Merchant Ivory except in the sense that it was executive-produced by Ismail Merchant in Mumbai. Directed by Zafar Hai who co-adapted the 1964 CWA Gold Dagger-winning source novel with its author H. R. F. Keating, it is an endearingly unwieldy triple-decker of comedy, crime, and city symphony, not necessarily in equal proportions or even order of priorities, but in a film so lovingly dedicated to the significance of imperfection, perhaps to expect anything else would be, like the case that gives the story its aptly misleading name, upside down.

Take the plot, a rococo compendium of cases from a smuggling ring to an attempted murder to a lost item report which pile chaotically onto the beleaguered hero only to cross-link at the last minute into the pattern so beloved of classically constructed mysteries in which even the silliest and most discursive puzzle-pieces can find a home. Or don't, since its Chandleresque twists and turns serve just as well as the frame for an essentially hangout movie that makes as much time for a kidnapping of mistaken identity as for the lie detector of a Nandi bull. Brought to the screen for the first and only time in his forty-five-year career by Naseeruddin Shah, Inspector Ganesh V. Ghote of the Bombay CID is an everyman of detectives, concerned, harassed, and unassuming in the khaki of his policeman's uniform that gives him far less authority dealing with government ministers and affluent businessmen than he might wish in the pursuit of justice. His self-deprecating honesty carries him through professional pratfalls like arresting the colleague he was sent to collect from the airport and tenacious gambles like anticipating the secret of a monsoon-drenched chandelier, but can't do much about the mundane middle-class problems of his salary and his schedule. "At the moment I'm trying to save to buy a color TV." Especially facing an impatient ACP, the last thing this modest, apologetically persistent officer needs is a wild card in the delicate negotiations of his job and of course that's exactly what he gets with the arrival of Stellan Skarsgård's Axel Svensson, Sweden's contribution to an international study of comparative police methods who wouldn't last ten seconds in a Nordic noir. It is culturally clever, but also just fun that the criminologist from the global north is decidedly the sidekick of the adventure, a lankily cheerful add-on who can be distracted by the most routine details of life in modern India—the marigold-garlanded mahurat shot of a Bollywood musical, a saffron-swathed sadhu under the colonnade of the Taj Mahal Hotel—looking at all times with his wilted straw hair as though he's been pulled out of the laundry half-steamed. "I've been running since I came to this country." He messes about the crime scene quoting Hamlet in Swedish. He moons romantically over suspects and film stars and requires as dramatic a rescue as any damsel in distress. Just this side of a jam Watson, he isn't the total drag on the investigation that Ghote accuses on the sullen, tinderous afternoon their latest failure has left them uncharacteristically on each other's last culture-clashed nerves, but even after the rains have ecstatically broken and the whole back-to-front left-handed spanner of a case with them, he remains most valuable as the inspector's wingman, his flash-temper Viking-height backing up the Maharashtrian manners of Ghote as he holds his ground against official caution and unavoidable corruption and comes up at last with the colorfully elusive truth. "Upside down!" they salute the circumstances of their bonding, an affectionate in-joke now that Axel has fallen in love with the city in all its helter-skelter absurdity and Ghote has upheld the honor of its detecting. "Welcome to Bombay!"

Indeed, in the vibrantly semi-documentary photography of frequent Merchant Ivory DP Walter Lassally, The Perfect Murder is a love letter to Bombay on the verge of its millennial renascence into Mumbai, not merely in the historical tourist postcards of the Victoria Terminus or the Gateway of India, but the street-level flânerie which does not treat ironically a stately elephant proceeding with the rest of the rush-hour traffic down Marine Drive, a Lovemate local train rattling between the washing-strung frontages of chawls, the chlorine-blue of the swimming pool at the Oberoi Towers and the cupped hands of beggars thrust like razor clams through the sand of Chowpatty Beach. The flooded green of a lawn of black umbrellas under the monsoon's curtain has no less reality than the green baize of an office inside the liner-white block of Mantralaya. It earths the Dickensian tendencies of the human characters whom Ghote has to wend his dogged way among, inconveniently factual even at their most flamboyant. Amjad Khan pulls out the Sydney Greenstreet stops as the expansively blusterous and epicurean builder Lala Heera Lal while Madhur Jaffrey in two scenes as his imperious wife blocks even the mildest hints of questioning as keenly as crucible steel. "What a woman. She was all the time giving me the feeling of being without my trousers on." Approaching the rest of the suspicious household nets a varied array of deflection, obstruction, and wasted time from Sakina Jaffrey as the languid daughter-in-law, Dilip Tahil as her ostentatiously clubbable husband, and Nayeem Hafizka as the histrionic younger brother whose room is exhaustingly tacked with self-portraits as Sherlock Holmes and posters for Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), insisting on playing the proper part of a murder suspect all the while the victim who could be a witness lies shtum under medical care and Parsi prayers, Dinshaw Daji's Mr. Perfect. "This is the sort of difficulty you have in police work in this city. If only people would behave in a simple, reasonable, logical manner!" It's too much to ask of even the heroes of this caper, out of sorts, out of place, out of luck, splashed with Holi dye or literally losing their shirt. Spouses in real life, Shah and Ratna Pathak have fun with the fractious marriage of the Ghotes, which would be far less in the soup if he would just once come home from work on time; the wistful fantasy he builds of her as the tranquil, docile, ideal Hindu wife would swerve too close to a shrew joke except for the time he brings the rescued Axel home for supper and Pratima turns on the best-bangled, bindi-dabbed, lord-and-master act with cut-diamond sarcasm. To complete the family business, their infant son Ved is an early cradle-credit for Imaad Shah. The sun in the intermingled score of synths, sarangi, and tabla by Richard Robbins, Sultan Khan, and Zakir Hussein catches on fish-scale silver, mango-skin gold, the half-risen skyscrapers of a city pushing itself toward maximum. Keating who famously wrote the first nine Inspector Ghote novels without visiting India for himself makes his Hitchcock cameo at the international terminal, waiting to catch the next flight back to Europe.

It can be an awkward movie. Its mix of Englishes and untranslated Hindi is no strain to be immersed in, but the loose, improvisatory feel of much of its dialogue means it has no pacing to speak of even when it has to hit its marks of revelation and its tonal shifts are sometimes more collision than collage; it is refreshing to find a detective film without an exchange of gunfire, but it could have deleted one of its billboard-tearing, barrow-overturning chase scenes that never fail to leave a wackier level of disorder in their wake than the sufficient bewilderment of yet another investigative dead end. All the same, when Axel with his farewell gift of a kurta draped like a college sweater around his shoulders swings back at the gate to shout his characteristically no-chill support for Ghote across the crowded terminal, the viewer may regret that with an eventual twenty-five novels to choose from, there were not more screen translations made of these odd little mysteries, "altogether upside down." I watched this one because I was intrigued by its peripheral Merchant Ivory-ness in the same way as the occasional co-productions of Powell and Pressburger for other writers and directors and as was the case with Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943), I did not regret its hour and a half of my time. I got its dead-out-of-print DVD out of the Minuteman Library Network since the quality of the version available on YouTube actually is ghastly even without the random audio drop-outs or the smear like tape across the lens. It deserves better, this sweet and slightly bemusing snapshot starring a pair of actors who have had my phone book recommendation for years. This welcome brought to you by my upside-down backers at Patreon.

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books: newbery

Newberys by the Decade

As basic groundwork for further Newbery posts, I’ve laid out some Newbery trends decade by decade.

1920s

The Newbery award was first awarded in 1922, and perhaps because the award was still finding its feet, the decade is a bit of an outlier in many respects. It’s the only decade where there were years when no runners-up were selected, and it has the highest percentage of male awardees. In 1928, Dhan Gopal Mukerji is the first author of color to win a Newbery with a story about a pigeon that I read as a child and remember as extremely dull. Lots of nonsense books of the Alice in Wonderland type, as well as many folktales.

1930s

A big swing in the opposite direction with runners-up: sometimes in the 1930s there were as many as eight. A precipitous drop to a single nonsense book by Anne Parrish, and a slightly less precipitous drop in folktales. The first appearance of non-nonsense fantasy. (Technically you could argue that Grace Hallock’s 1929 The Boy Who Was also counts, but I would argue that the magic is merely a device to explore history.) Big themes of the decade include tomboys and coming of age, sometimes at the same time. A lot of books that would probably be classified as YA today on the basis of the narrator’s age and responsibility level, but also wouldn’t be published as YA today because the romance is in the background rather than front and center.

1940s

The tomboys peter out. (In fact, in the 1940s they’re solely represented in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.) Again a single nonsense book. You might expect World War II to have a big effect but in fact it’s most evident in post-war stories about rebuilding.

1950s

The Cold War definitely had a big effect, though. The Newbery goes hard for American history (especially biographies), liberty, and God. American history and liberty were already popular in previous decades, but before and after the 1950s religion tends to appear as a cultural detail rather than a theological argument. Anne Parrish keeps the nonsense flame alight with a single winner.

1960s

American gender politics are finally starting to catch up to where the Newberys ended up after the Decade of Tomboys. A sprinkling of folktales, last seen in the 1920s and 30s. The definitive triumph of fantasy over nonsense books. At the end of the decade we begin to see the impact of the Civil Rights Movement.

1970s

A fantastic decade for fantasy. Nonsense makes a last dying gasp in Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms. A big shift in attitudes toward predatory animals: in earlier decades they’re usually just Bad, but now there’s more nuance in their portrayal. Dogs, friendly badgers, friends in general, and relatives start dropping like flies. By the end of the decade, the Newbery embraces ownvoices (although not under that name just yet). Awkwardly, one of these ownvoices authors is later discovered to be a fraud, which doesn’t stop him from getting hired as the Native American consultant for Star Trek: Voyager two decades later.

1980s

The Newbery enters its grimdark phase. Friends and animal companions kick it. Two separate genocide memoirs. There have always been some dysfunctional families in the Newberys, but now it becomes a definite theme. A drift away from ownvoices. As in all decades, there were some individual books I really liked (including some of the dark and deathy ones!) but overall there’s a lot of doom and gloom.

1990s

A hint of dawn. Some fantastic fantasy and historical fiction books. (I am of course probably biased because this was the decade when I reached prime Newbery age.) An oscillation back towards ownvoices. Fewer dead animals, more dead relatives. The Newbery has always had individual books with disabled protagonists, but now it Discovers Disability, which sounds like it should be a good thing but actually, at this point, seems to indicate a shift away from disabled protagonists and towards the protag watching someone else fight their disability and lose.

This is where my neat decade categorization really breaks down, because there’s sort of a Long Nineties that lasts until about 2014. All these trends continue. There are a couple of unexpected returns to the outer borders of nonsense territory.

2015-today

From 2015 onward, the Newbery went all in on ownvoices (and this is where the term really began to be used) in all categories: race, disability, and gender/sexuality, this last one gingerly at first but with increasing forthrightness in the 2020s. Dead relatives remain a reliable theme. There have always been a smattering of Newbery picture books, but now graphic novels appear in increasing numbers.

Entry tags:

Wednesday Reading Meme

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ruth Goodman is always a good time, and her book How to Behave Badly in Elizabeth England: A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, and Braggarts is no exception to the rule. It does what it says on the tin, except for “Elizabethan England” read “England from the time of Elizabeth up to the Civil War (with brief excursions before and after),” but I suspect that the publishers believed, correctly, that their title would sell more books.

A fun fact: quoting Shakespeare would have been seen as proof of boorishness, as it showed that you spend time at the theaters down by the bear-baiting pits and the whorehouses, like a COMMONER. I also very much enjoyed the advice manual for young noblemen in service, which begged them to “try not to murder people.” You might think that goes without saying, but nope!

Jacqueline Woodson is also always a good time, although often in a mild to moderately heart-wrenching kind of way. Peace, Locomotion is an epistolary novel, told as a series of letters from a 12-year-old boy (nickname Locomotion) to his younger sister. They’re both in foster care following the death of their parents in a fire a few years ago. A book with sad moments but not overall a sad book; I particularly enjoyed Locomotion’s journey as a poet and his poetry. (There’s a companion novel-in-verse. Woodson is one of the few authors I trust with a novel-in-verse.)

Warning: you will walk out of this book with the song “Locomotion” stuck in your head.

Jane Langton is much more up and down than either Goodman or Woodson, but I’m happy to say Paper Chains is one of the ups. Evelyn has just started college, and the novel alternates between traditional narration and Evelyn’s never-to-be-sent letters to her PHIL 101 professor, on whom she has a swooning freshman crush. A good mix of college hijinks and intellectual discovery. Just kind of stops rather than having a real ending, but it works well for the story, which is very much about beginnings.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Gaskell’s Gothic Tales! We just had one of Gaskell’s trademarked “three people of three different faiths get together to deal with a problem, and it’s good for them all!” scenes. (Okay, I’ve only run across this twice in her work, once here and once in North and South, but it’s an unusual recurring theme.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided it’s time for another Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’ve already read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. What should I read next?

Current Music: Lo! Peninsula, "Chasing Tidal Waves"

The shadows on the walls don't recognize me anymore

All these terrible people whose weight the earth cannot afford, doing their best to take the rest of us with them to their Armageddon with the most toys, and not a one of them will ever be a tenth of a thousandth as cool as the living tradition of an epic poem performed with chugging guitar riffs: Exhibit A, Ereimang's "(Kwakta Lamjel)" (2023). All you fascists bound to be boring.

Current Music: Martha, "1967, I Miss You, I'm Lonely"

When I invited Frank and you back to mine for a mange tout when I meant ménage à trois

The swallows have returned to Capistrano: last night there were three student parties on our street alone and a fourth around the corner. We are waiting to see if this weekend will bring a new installment of upstairs neighbors.

I opened the refrigerator door and the Brita pitcher fell off its shelf and disintegrated itself in several gallons across the hardwood, so the first thing I did within two minutes of getting up was essentially wash the kitchen floor. I spent the afternoon drying a load of towels and drinking cans of seltzer.

It jarred out of my head too much of the dream I had just woken up from, the slippage of a kitchen sink drama written by a less commonly revived playwright than Shelagh Delaney: a teenage girl and her father who was just about the same age when she was born and still has such a fecklessly fox-boned, adolescent look himself, the two of them as they knock about town, him getting into more fights than holding down jobs, always telling the secret histories of their city which sound half like industrial legend and half like he just made them up, are more often mistaken for a couple than his actual girlfriend with whom he seems to interact most in the form of sincerely less successful apologies. They are clearly each other's half of a double star, a nearly closed system without jealousy, only the exhilaratingly irresponsible habit of dodging the adult world as if it were the two of them against it. It is unsensationally apparent to the audience long before it would cross any other character's mind that in addition to his total improvisation of parenting, he is doing his damnedest not to pass on the next generation of his own implicitly incestuous abuse, which does him credit and gives him little help in figuring out how to support his daughter through a transition he never quite managed himself. Toward the end, it started to flicker between stage sets and the plain world, between rehearsals and history. "I won't meet you," I had to tell the actor, standing in between scenes outside the year of the original production, the same fragile shoulders and thistle-blond hair of his photographs in the role: he would be dead decades before I heard of the play, much less managed to track a copy down. I could tell him that his children had gone into the arts. Onstage she was outgrowing his frozen boyishness and if he could catch up to her, he would still have to let her go.

asakiyume linked Residente's "This is Not America (feat. Ibeyi)" (2022) and it made me think of Elizma's "Modern Life" (2025), both of which should come with content warnings for current events.

I have discovered that BBC Sounds became region-locked about a month ago, which means that one of my major sources for randomly discoverable audio drama seems to have spiraled down the drain. I am completely indifferent to podcasts. I am a simple person and just wanted to listen again to Lieutenant Commander Thomas Woodrooffe being just as lit up as the fleet.

Mississippi legal challenge: beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

Entry tags:

books: newbery

Newbery Project Q&A

As the Newbery Project draws to a close, I’ve been preparing some posts about my reading, and I thought I’d start out by answering a few… well, I can’t exactly call them “frequently asked” questions, as the only one people have actually asked is the one about dead dogs. But, anyway, these are questions with important background information.

What is the Newbery Award, anyway?

Every year since 1922, a committee of librarians has selected “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” to receive the Newbery Award. The first prize winner gets the Newbery Medal, while the runner-ups have since the 1970s been called Newbery Honor books. It’s the most prestigious writing award for American children’s literature. (The counterpart award for illustration is the Caldecott.)

What’s the Newbery Project?

The Newbery Project started when I was about eleven and decided to read all the books that had won the Newbery Medal. (The Newbery is the highest award in American children’s literature. It was first awarded in 1922 and has been going strong ever since.) The project eventually fizzled out, as children’s projects do, but in my mid-twenties I resurrected it and completed it.

Then it occurred to me that I could extend the project to include all the Newbery Honor books, which is the name given to the books that are the runners-up to the big medal. A few years, there were no runners-up, and some years there were as many as eight. Most years there are three to five runners-up. I had read a pretty good number of them as a child, so I had about 240 Newbery Honors books left to read.

Two hundred and forty books! Who wants to read two hundred and forty books about dead dogs?

(For my non-American readers, the Newbery award is famous in America as the dead dog award, because there have been a few very famous winners featuring the tragic death of pets and/or best friends. Bridge to Terabithia may have been partially responsible for the fizzling of the first go-round of my Newbery project.)

Actually, the dead dogs are fairly recent. The first dead dog in a Newbery winner appeared in Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller in 1957, but that was an outlier. Until 1970, pretty much everyone lives, both dogs and relatives. After 1970 it’s open season on friendly animals and sickly grandparents until the 2000s, at which point the Newbery awards focused more intently on dead relatives.

Two hundred and forty books is still nuts. Why did you do this to yourself?

Because I love children’s books and history, and it turns out that reading the Newbery books are a fantastic way to explore both. The Newbery committee has consistently selected a lot of historical fiction and historical nonfiction (especially biographies) since the beginning, and of course the earlier books are fascinating historical artifacts in their own right at this point.

Are there any overarching themes among the Newbery books?

Beyond history in general, the Newbery awards are particularly interested in American history and more generally the construction of American identity. There’s also an ongoing interest in the history of liberty, the latter of which means, for instance, that two separate William Tell retellings have won Newbery Honors.

There’s also a strong and ongoing interest throughout the history of the award in tales of children from around the world. This reflects both children’s tastes (before children’s literature became its own category, travel narratives were a recognized favorite reading material for children), but also a reflection of the ideal of the “Republic of Childhood,” popularized in American literature by Mary Mapes Dodge in St. Nicholas Magazine, which argues that children in all times and all places are similar to and interested in each other, purely by virtue of their shared childhood.