Books, Progress, and the Value of Stories...

This picture is the stack of unread books on my to-read shelf at the beginning of this year.  My goal was to read or otherwise deal with them before the year was out.  I’m done.  I read all of them except for the manga guides to kanji, which I started only to realize that I don’t have the brain energy to devote to the subtleties of the various systems.  I put them in the free library and someone has already adopted them!

That’s the good news.  The less good news is that there are more books on my to-read shelf now than when I started.  I will take a picture of them closer to December in hopes that I will have read a few more of them by then.

There is a little more good news.  I read two more books, both for children, but from different eras and describing significantly different worlds.  Both, however, share the common value of perseverance in the face of adversity and tell the tales of girls whose characters allow them to triumph in the end.

One of those books was Nancy Farmer’s A Girl Named Disaster.  Nhamo, whose name does mean disaster, is a girl growing up with her extended family in a village in Mozambique.  Her mother has died and she does not know her father, who lives somewhere in Zimbabwe.  Circumstances require that she undertake the journey to Zimbabwe alone.  She survives and eventually prospers due to her strong spirit and self-reliance in spite of leopards, baboons, bad people, storms, and other difficulties.  Nancy Farmer is an excellent storyteller and this book is one I would buy as a gift.

The other, Granny’s Wonderful Chair, by Frances Browne, lists a copyright of 1928 for the illustrations in the edition given to me by a bookshelf-cleaning-out friend.  The illustrations are, in fact, charming, as are the fairy tales loosely framed by the fact that they are told by the magic chair.  Good humor and good character triumph in each tale and the covetous and ill-tempered get their karmic due (although not at all phrased in that sort of way!).  Who doesn’t want to read a story about how being polite under difficult circumstances leads to happiness, particularly in these times?

Fall reading tally so far:  6 books.