I forgot to post this yesterday because... I forgot it was Wednesday... so that's where I'm at right now, but I have Monday and Tuesday off next week, hooray!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ralph Keeler’s Vagabond Adventures, a memoir about Keeler’s life after he ran away from home at the age of twelve. After bumming around for a bit, he found work as a traveling blackface minstrel (yes I KNOW, but this is chock full of interesting information about the 19th century entertainment industry as a whole), but after three years life in the footlights palled and he decided to go to college instead. Literally he saw the campus of a college with the college boys having a good time and decided “I’m going to go back there and study.”

After studying for a few years in American universities, Keeler worked for a few months in the post office. Upon realizing that his life savings amounted to $150, he decided to chuck the job and head for Europe, where he matriculated at a German university (did he, you ask, speak German? Not at the beginning!) and managed to eke out three years in Europe with only very slight additions to his capital by writing sketches of his European experiences for newspapers back home.

I also read Mary Stolz’s Cider Days, the sequel to Ferris Wheel, and I am a little baffled that these were published separately as they’re really two halves of one book rather than two separate books. And both quite short! Could easily have been published together! Truly the decisions of the publishing world are sometimes strange.

Anyway, much like the first book, this is a lovely evocation of Vermont - autumn this time, although despite the title no actual cider! But it meanders around without ever quite turning from a succession of events into a story.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun L. M. Montgomery’s Among the Shadows, a collection of her darker stories, which so far has mostly meant ghost stories. Nothing truly haunting yet; in fact nothing as dark as the story in one of the Chronicles of Avonlea collections (I can’t remember which) about the girl who is devoted to her brother, refuses an offer of marriage to stay with him only to be turned out of his house when HE married, only then he gets smallpox and his wife flees and his sister comes back to nurse him and dies happy because he finally needed her.

What I Plan to Read Next

After MUCH TRAVAIL, I’ve finally got my hands on Elizabeth and Her German Garden! So I’ll finally be able to finish my 2014 list, HOORAY.

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