Reading Slothfully

Well, I never figured I'd read all of the first four Betsy-Tacy books, but I did. I've got to do a better job of choosing "adult"-style books and not keep coming up with crap, which is, of course, why I kept reverting to yet another dose of Betsy-Tacy. Perhaps it's all for the best. I rather liked my delving into Betsy-Tacy, although I might now suffer from a terminal case of heart warmedness.

So, Betsy, Tacy, and Tib are now 12 and are grown up enough to do things like go downtown on their own. After some difficulties, they make friends with another girl, Winona Root, who has tickets to a theater production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. They're all smitten. And now, for all practical purposes, the threesome becomes a foursome.

The first horseless carriage comes to town. Betsy has big plans to be a writer, but her mother thinks she needs a better class of literature to read than the paper backs she gets from the housemaid. So, she sends Betsy to the newly opened library every other week. It seems that some things never change. The librarian is, of course, awesome, and opens up a whole new world to Betsy.

[Interestingly, the librarian in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was not so awesome (the first one I've ever known not to be so). However, the presence of the library in her neighborhood opened up a whole new world to Francie Nolan. God bless public libraries.

I find it bizarre that so-called "conservatives" are now calling for defunding public libraries. I gather rich people aren't able to read, or something. Or perhaps all that money just turns people into assholes...but I digress. Sorry].

Betsy makes friends of a lonely rich woman who lives in a hotel, and they plan a Christmas party to which all their friends will be invited. Later, she gets Betsy & Co. involved as extras with a traveling theater company, including Betsy's long lost Uncle Keith. And so forth. It's rather heart warming and also tells of life, albeit idealized, from a different time, e.g. 100+ years ago, shortly before my mother was a little girl.

I dunno, I never really expected to read any Betsy-Tacy, and now I've read four of them and liked them all. I find it weird that I keep reading how it is a children's classic, but I've yet to find anyone who has actually read any of the books growing up, and I have a lot of book-worm peers, and a couple of relatives who are librarians [ok, my librarian sister-in-law, whose mother was once president of the American Library Association, admits to having read them].

Also interesting to me is that the books describe kids' lives and activities at the turn of the 20th century. Other than some anachronisms, like horse-drawn carriages, the lives of the kids weren't much different from the lives of people like me in the 1950s. But, it's all different today. I'm not sure that's a good thing.