(YES we included Where the Red Fern Grows. Come on.)

(Gin Jenny, an automaton, cries zero times. She did get teary on Twitter today thinking about the characters in new Star Wars, though.)

You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go!

Bonus Episode 2

The wonderful Deb Reese wrote about American Indian representation in Walk Two Moons, and you can read that blog post here.

Let us know what tragic childhood books we missed! I hear there are many other dog books that are damn sad, but I just didn’t read them because after the trauma of Where the Red Fern Grows, I demand to know whether the dog lives before I will deign to pick up a book.

Get at me on Twitter, email the podcast, and friend me (Gin Jenny) and Whiskey Jenny on Goodreads. If you like what we do, support us on Patreon. Or if you wish, you can find us on iTunes (and if you enjoy the podcast, give us a good rating! We appreciate it very very much).

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour
Transcripts by: Sharon of Library Hungry

Transcript is coming soon!

The post Reading the End Bookcast BONUS: The Saddest Children’s Books appeared first on Reading the End.

I’m sleepy, it’s late, and I just recently got my typewriter back, so I’ve not got a lot to say about this book.  Spoilers will happen, I guess.  See, there were a lot of things in this book that I totally enjoyed.  There was a scene at the end that was one of the funniest things I have ever read – Poe is working to finish up David Copperfield for Charles Dickens, and he keeps asking about this undercurrent of incestuous love, and whether it’s going to end with this guy killing himself or Uriah Heep vanishing in a cloud of smoke….

Oh my God, that was funny.  But on the other hand, this was a most unsatisfying mystery.  I thought a bunch of cool things were going to happen, but there was no cool resolution.  It was all muddled and blah.  I enjoyed the book all the way through.  I read the end early on, and couldn’t make a lot of sense of it; and I kept thinking it would resolve itself elegantly, and everything would be explained.  That never happened.  Oh well.  Fie upon this unsatisfactory book.  All fooling me into enjoying it and then letting me down at the last second.

The post Not Quite Dead, John MacLachlan (a book I forgot about) appeared first on Reading the End.

The gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:”Please, sir, I want some more.”

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.

“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.

“Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”

Ah, yes, the famous wants-more-gruel kid. What a freak.

I actually picked up Oliver Twist and The English Governess in the Siamese Court at the same book sale in Maine one year, thinking I should try Dickens and also thinking that Anna Leonowens would be as good a writer as she evidently was a singer, and they were both such a depressing disappointment to me. I believe I gave the latter away years ago, but I kept the little orange copy of Oliver Twist, I suppose because it was small and portable, and now I am reading it for my Victorians class (lucky me).

When I read this book at age nine, I was vastly unimpressed, and it put me off Dickens for life. Apparently when I bought it in Maine, my mum tried to discourage me from reading it because she was afraid it would have this exact effect on me, and it really, really has. Apart from The Christmas Carol, I have never again had the slightest temptation to pick up a book by Charles Dickens. I have heard good things about The Pickwick Papers and a few people have had positive things to say about Great Expectations, and my mother has always maintained that David Copperfield is a genuinely excellent book, but I just haven’t bothered to read them. To be honest, if Oliver Twist is a fair sampling, I think Wilkie Collins had a vastly better grasp on the serial form than Charles Dickens (sorry, canon!), and I am much more in love with The Moonstone and The Woman in White than I believe I shall ever be with Mr. Dickens and his nonsense.

The only thing I remember about Oliver Twist from when I was nine is the scene where Bill Sikes calls and calls his dog and the dog won’t come.  That and deep disgust and a lasting annoyance that everyone in middle school (except me!) had to read Great Expectations when there were many better books from that time period (like Jane Eyre).  Actually I am still annoyed about that.

I liked Oliver Twist better this time around. I imagine that at nine I missed all the irony. There’s a lot of irony. It was funny in bits.  I loved the scene of the Artful Dodger in court.  I liked it when Mr. Grimwig says “It’s a trying thing waiting supper for lovers.”  So true, and I love the word “trying”.

I found the middle bits aggravating. All the stuff at the Maylie household – is it me, or was Mr. Dickens phoning it in to give himself some time in which to decide what he wanted to do with Nancy and Oliver and how (or if) he wanted to connect them with the Maylie family.  Damn boring to read.  And I didn’t like that entire thing with Oliver and Monks and his inheritance; went on for too long, and was much too contrived, as well as being boring as hell so you went through all this boringness hoping it was going to turn out interesting in the end, and it didn’t.

And now a word about soap operas and newspaper serials.

In soap operas, it takes ages for anyone to get to the point. For instance, on Guiding Light one time, Reva got cloned. I was completely hooked on this whole Reva clone thing (indeed it was the plotline that started me watching Guiding Light), because it turned out (shockingly enough) that the original Reva had not been killed in a plane crash but was alive and living on a desert island, from which she eventually returned. BUT while she had been gone, her grief-stricken husband Josh had had her cloned, and the scientist who cloned her also very conveniently had aging potion that would age the clone to proper Reva age, and the clone-Reva had fallen desperately in love with Josh and would do anything, anything to keep him!  And Reva finally got back to Springfield and the clone imprisoned her!  For a very long time in a secret cupboard and wouldn’t let her out, until! until! until Josh finally found her and they were reunited (joy!), and then the clone, seeing their true pure love, nobly took all the rest of her aging potion so that she aged to Very Old Indeed and promptly died, thereby leaving original Reva and Josh to celebrate their love forever.

But it took a long time for that to happen. In terms of plot advancement, very little would happen in one episode. Like, maybe in one episode the real Reva would hear the news that she had been cloned. Lots of dramatic music and talking about what she should do next. And that would be the plot advancement for that episode. Maybe the next day Reva wouldn’t even be on the show. Maybe that day would be completely focused on Harley and Philip (who I believe were together at this time). Maybe you’d see clone-Reva spending time with Josh.

Oliver Twist is exactly like that. Increments of plot advancement that aren’t very interesting in themselves, and then whole chapters where you’re just chilling with some characters that you aren’t awfully interested in because your main focus is when is Oliver going to get back to his old nursey. And then a few chapters where a very big thing that you’ve been waiting and waiting for finally happens.  Like Bill Sikes dying.

Basically, Oliver Twist would be better if it contained love-crazed clones. Hence the two stars – is it okay to give a classic two stars?  But I guess that’s true of everything.

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