1932 - Waterless Mountain

In my rating of the books from the '20s, I put the two collections of folk stories in the bottom two spots. Waterless Mountain is not really a collection of folk stories, but at least half the book is one character or another relating a folk tale. The incorporation into a narrative whole may be part of why I prefer Waterless Mountain over Shen of the Sea and Tales from Silver Lands, but there's more to it than that. The other two books treat the folk tales like mythology, or an anthropological record from another culture, even tinging the stories with a little condescension.

This one, though, is about a Navajo boy who is in training to become a medicine man, and his education in the stories of his ancestors are written in a way that make them feel like a religion, rather than superstitions. There's an aura of the supernatural throughout the narrative that gives it a similar feel to Gay Neck, that makes you want to exist in the world where the religion is perfectly apparent and applicable. Like Gay Neck, the plot is weak, but the tone makes up for it.

1931 - The Cat Who Went to Heaven

A couple notes: The Cat Who Went to Heaven is short. I've read things that called themselves short stories that are longer than this. It was kind of a nice change.

Also, the first eight Newberys were written by men, and Hitty was the first by a woman. But then this and the following eight are also written by women. Weird patterns.

Like I said, this story was short - it took me well under an hour to read - but I thought it was very satisfying. It's essentially a frame story to tell the life of Buddha, about a poor painter, his housekeeper, and a cat. The painter gets a contract to paint Buddha and all the animals who came to pay their respects at his death. The cat was the one animal who didn't listen to Buddha's teaching, which disappoints the cat in the story. Also, there are poems interspersed throughout the book from the point of view of the housekeeper.

Short and simple. I don't really have a lot of comments about the book. If I believed the story at all, I might become a Buddhist; he's portrayed as incredibly wise and kind, in all of his lives. And I kind of want the cat in the story - she's written almost like another human character.

Waterless Mountain is next, another book exploring the religion of another culture.

1930 - Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

In my ranking of the books of the '20s, I mentioned that I didn't hate any of the books I've read so far. I think I might hate Hitty.

It's billed as an adventure book, and the doll narrator definitely sees much of the United States and even other parts of the world. But unlike a book like The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, her adventures are always against her will. In Dolittle, the main characters can't wait to take off for a strange island off of South America, meet new cultures and see new things. In Hitty, she's never happier than when she's in the possession of a quiet little girl.

Add to this some casual racism. She's stolen by some "savages", whose language is described as being just grunting, and who of course revere her as a god (those dumb heathens!). She is later found by a black family, whose dialogue is transcribed in dialect, with every dropped consonant - even those that proper English speakers would drop - marked off with an apostrophe. She's even pleased when she finds out that she's not being kept by an Irish family.

Granted, this sort of racism also shows up in Dolittle. But even with the natives of the island being portrayed as uncivilized, none of the main characters are ever repulsed by them, like Hitty is of Indian people. Bumpo is unintentionally the butt of some jokes when he uses big words incorrectly, but he also is a valuable member of the crew. There's the built-in racism of the times, but the characters seem to transcend it.

This story is essentially Hitty being passed from white girl to white girl, with her being terrified in between. No thanks.

Summary - The '20s

It's not a complete decade, but I figure 1929 is a good time to look back at what I've read so far. If I had to rank the books, I'd go:

1. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
2. The Trumpeter of Krakow
3. Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon
4. The Dark Frigate
5. The Story of Mankind
6. Smoky the Cowhorse
7. Tales from Silver Lands
8. Shen of the Sea

Each book has its own writeup, with why I like or don't like the book.

After Dr. Dolittle and The Dark Frigate, I expected the language to sound really dated in all of the other books, but it was apparently due to the fact that both were period pieces. Granted, there are noticeable differences to modern books, but it wasn't distracting. (Except Smoky, which was written in a cowboy dialect.)

Out of all the books, I'd most like to re-read Gay-Neck; I feel like the themes of the book didn't become apparent until over halfway through the story, and a second pass might be even better than the first.

And it's funny that both folktale books took bottom spots at the list. I didn't hate them - I don't hate many books I read - but they just weren't very compelling. Shen of the Sea, especially, was a chore to get through. I like a solid, continuous narrative.

Well, on to Hitty, and the 1930s.

1929 - The Trumpeter of Krakow

In the introductory post of this blog, I said I had read "somewhere around 35" of the Newberys. Trumpeter of Krakow was one of those books that made that number a rough estimate; it sounded familiar, but I wasn't sure. It would have been at least a decade since I had read it last, so my memory's a little fuzzy. Now that I've read it, though, I'm almost positive I have read it before - the preface, where the author tells of a Krakow trumpeter from 1241, seems way too familiar.

With that aside, I liked this one. It's the most "can't-put-this-down" book since Dr. Dolittle. The myth books are collections of short stories, which tend to kill momentum, and Smoky and Gay-Neck had an episodic feel to them, as well. Trumpeter of Krakow has book-long storylines, with evil characters and unanswered questions. In short, it was a fun book.

The book is about a family smuggling a rare crystal out of the Ukraine, who try to present it to the King of Poland. They're followed by thieves to Warsaw, and go into hiding in the area around the city's university. It's medieval Poland, so there's an alchemist upstairs (who's being taken control of by a student). There's a minor romance that doesn't really develop between the son of the family and the daughter of the alchemist. There's a well-respected teacher who gets the father a job as trumpeter. And of course, the thieves manage to locate the family again.

My only criticism is that Eric P. Kelly sometimes dips into being a history teacher. Descriptions of medieval Krakow go overlong, and instead of being scene-setters, they can be a little boring. But this is a minor complaint for me.

1928 - Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon

A couple of meta-comments. First, how can you not giggle a little at the title of this one?

Second, the Newberys have kind of gone in pairs so far: Gay-Neck and Smoky were stories about animals from birth, Silver Lands and Shen of the Sea were geographically specific folk tales, and the Dark Frigate and Dr. Doolittle were Englishmen going on sea voyages. (And History of Mankind may as well have been two books in one.)

As for the book itself, I'm not sure what to think. Plot-wise, the story is pretty aimless. The anecdotes are mostly unrelated, although many involve the main character and a friend searching for Gay-Neck after he's gone missing. Thus, some chapters have almost no pigeon in them at all. However, others are told from the point-of-view of Gay-Neck, so there aren't any human characters involved.

I guess, then, while Smoky was about the horse interacting with humans and how that affected his life, Gay-Neck is not. The relationship between Gay-Neck and his owner is more like that of friends, rather than master-servant.

Also pervasive, and perhaps the main theme of the book, is the spiritual side of how humans and animals interact, and how they're similar to each other in a religious way. There are actual Buddhist monasteries visited in the book, but the characters also talk about their philosophies of how fear affects humans and animals, about how both view nature as a whole. Some chapters take place in the battles of World War I, and both humans and Gay-Neck are deeply affected by the killing seen on the battlefield.

So, this isn't a plot book, and I don't even think this is a character book. It feels almost like an allegory, about the spirit and how it reacts to fear, but it's hard to pin down. Like I said, I'm not sure what to think. This is the oddest of the Newberys so far, but in a way that I think I like.

1927 - Smoky the Cowhorse

I realized something halfway through this book: even though the Newbery is an award for American children's literature, this is the first that is actually set in America. (Well, History of Mankind had a few chapters on American history, but it made up a slim percentage of the book.) And even then, it's set in an exotic part of the US - looking ahead, I'm not sure when I'll actually hit a book that's set in the present day and is about an average kid.

Anyway, this book follows the life of Smoky from birth to retirement on a nice ranch. Will James obviously knows and loves horses, and I don't really feel strongly either way on whether I like the book.

It may be just me, but the chapters where Clint (the "bronc buster", who takes wild horses and makes them rideable) is breaking Smoky have a strange tone to them. It's almost like reading about a kidnapping and a rape, where the victim eventually develops Stockholm Syndrome.

"Smoky struck once; Clint dodged the front hoof and kept a rubbing. He rubbed past the left ear and down his neck till the withers was reached [...] The little horse quivered and fliched every once in a while but the rubbing process went on till Smoky begin showing symptoms that he could stand it all easy enough."

"Instinct pointed out only one way for him to act, -- it was telling him that neither the human nor the leather belonged up there in the middle of him that way [...] His head went down, and a beller came out of him that said much as "I want you" -- Up went Smoky's withers followed by the hump that made the saddle twist like on a pivot, and last came steel muscles like shot out of the earth and which carried the whole mixed up and crooked conglomeration of man and horse in mid air and seemed like to shake there for a spell before coming down."

I guess my mind's in the gutter. Oh yeah, those passages also show the dialect the entire story's written in, presumably some sort of cowboy speak. It kind of loses its charm part way through.