2020 Reading Thread - Jill reads slowly and pontificates

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2020 Reading Thread - Jill reads slowly and pontificates

1jillmwo
Redigeret: jan 3, 2020, 10:03 am

So the one movie I saw during the holidays was Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. (The new Star Wars movie was consistently sold out, which given the reviews surprised me.) At any rate, this got me thinking about Beth and Amy in the real Little Women and comparing the two of them with Lizzie Eustace in Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. The thing about Beth and Amy is that Beth is just too good to live (she’s the only March girl with minimal or no behavioral flaws) and Amy goes back and forth between being a decent human being and a horrible one.

Beth is always the perfect, the most womanly, the most ideally virtuous of all four of the March sisters. She loves her sisters, her music and her kittens. She’s just too excruciatingly and implausibly good. When the worst you can say about someone is that she is overly shy in speaking with other people, when she’s the one who is always the peacemaker (never the agitator), and always the one who most unselfishly minimizes her own needs in caring for or shielding others -- well, at that point, you just have to roll your eyes and keep reading until she fades into the background of the book’s action. Amy is a positive relief from that kind of thing. She is a brat in school and a brat when she destroys Jo’s artistic efforts. She struggles badly in trying to find her own feet in society and comes close to marrying for money in a way that none of the others do. It’s her upbringing that saves her.

Compare that with Lizzie Eustace who is brought up through neglect by a relative (a Navy admiral) whose main interests are “wine, whist, and wickedness”. She is imbued with no virtues, marries one man purely on mercenary grounds and then attempts to ensnare two other suitors, with an eye to ensuring her economic rise in society. Despite inconvenient legalities, she denies that the family diamonds (worth ten thousand pounds) aren’t her own property. She attempts to bribe others into spying on those who do not support her ownership. There’s not much reason to like Lady Eustace, and the reader delights in Trollope’s novel purely because one wants to see such a blatantly wicked person get their much-deserved come-uppance. (Of course, Lucy is the contrasting figure in The Eustace Diamonds and she is sadly too much like Beth for the reader to expend much time or effort in rooting for her. I for one frequently wanted to tell her to stop looking up at her suitor so adoringly. The man has very real feet of clay.) Trollope in no way tries to empathize with Lizzie Eustace’s problems. He’s much more interested in how two men deal with their dubious attraction to her. (Much of the “hero’s” attraction is due to the economics associated with her appearance of wealth.) Lizzie Eustace is cut from exactly the same cloth as Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, the unsorrowful and unrepentant widow, who maneuvers and dissembles in order to catch a second husband.

Understanding nineteenth century economics and social class environment means that one has to come out in favor of women’s efforts over seventy some odd years to gain the vote. Louisa May Alcott was a believer in women’s suffrage. She absolutely understood the economics of her time and the temptations faced when one’s position so much depended on one’s connections and marital status. (Trollope understood it as well, but in all truth, he was never as much at risk. He was male.)

I bring in this connection to women getting the vote because Louisa referenced the movement in at least two of her books, and because I have been involved with on-going research regarding the suffrage movement in America. My son gave me a wonderful book, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win The Vote, for Christmas and it’s really rather fun!

So this is how I’m opening up 2020. Happy New Year!

2Narilka
jan 1, 2020, 3:21 pm

Happy New Year and happy reading!

3Peace2
jan 1, 2020, 3:59 pm

Wishing you a great 2020 with lots more enjoyable reading.

4pgmcc
jan 1, 2020, 4:15 pm

>1 jillmwo:
Happy 2020. I hope you have a great year's reading.

5libraryperilous
jan 1, 2020, 6:03 pm

My pet peeve about Little Women is that no adaptation I've seen understands that the book is a satire for the first three quarters—until her overbearing editor made her write a moral pap ending that she didn't like.

re: Alcott understanding the economics of her time, I think the famous scene with Meg and the jelly that won't jell encapsulates that. It's funny, but we're not meant to laugh at Meg. We're meant to laugh at the absurdity of Meg being upset, and then we're meant to rage that she lives in a society that pigeonholes women as homemakers but doesn't respect the emotional legitimacy or economic value of that labor.

6Marissa_Doyle
jan 1, 2020, 10:26 pm

Happy New Year, Jill!

7Sakerfalcon
jan 2, 2020, 6:15 am

Happy new year! I look forward to following your rumination on books and life.

8MrsLee
jan 2, 2020, 9:48 am

>1 jillmwo: I always learn things when I read your threads, thank you for sharing so freely with us, and I look forward to reading more with you this year.

9clamairy
jan 2, 2020, 6:50 pm

>1 jillmwo: Happy reading, my friend. Make excellent choices so the rest of us don't have to work so hard to find our next reads.

10jillmwo
jan 6, 2020, 8:19 am

The Eustace Diamonds doesn’t have a real heroine. Lizzie Eustace might best be described as a successful fortune hunter who, being left a widow, attempts to take advantage of the privilege she holds as a wealthy, unattached woman while looking about for a second husband. She’s only twenty-two, she’s beautiful and she’s desirable as a marriage partner on the basis of both youth as well as her income. In modern novels, Lizzie might well be presented as a strong fighter/ survivor in a society that did not accord women control over their lives. The problem is that Lizzie is personally incapable of behaving well, behaving honorably or honestly. Given her skill at presentation, she might actually have been a brilliant actress, but of course, that’s not possible. She’s Lady Eustace and must abide by the rules of British society in 1871.

If she wants to marry a peer of the land and further solidify her social position, she should marry the weak and uninspiring Lord Fawn. If she wants to marry a wicked, Byronic “Corsair” who will bring poetry into her life, she should marry Lord George de Bruce Carruthers. If she wants to marry a decent man, she should marry her relatively poor cousin, Frank Greystoke. But Lizzie in the end will lose all of the three. All three of them want the ease that her income will provide to them as they pursue various ambitions, but none truly want her. Frank knows himself to be in love with the implausibly angelic governess, Lucy Morris, but she’s not got an income and he needs money if he’s to move in circles of power. Lord Fawn simply wants to maintain the status quo of his birthright and social standing but, if Lizzie is going to be shown as having behaved badly in a public setting, he’d just as soon do without. Lord George thinks marriage with Lizzie might have real benefits until Lizzie leaves him open to accusations of criminal behavior.

The titular diamonds serve as a symbolic metric of self-valuation. That’s the muddled rationale that Lizzie has for holding on to them. But as Trollope makes clear, authentic valuation of self does not reside in owning property. This is a 800-page sensation novel and any modern version would be able to tell the same story in half the length, but Trollope kept me reading throughout a two-week holiday. Lizzie isn’t an honorable woman, but with the exception of Lord Fawn’s mother and the aforementioned Lucy Morris, neither is anyone else in the novel. My next Trollope will likely be Phineas Finn but for my next TBR selection, I will probably switch to something lighter and more modern.

11jillmwo
jan 7, 2020, 5:50 pm

I am taken aback by the word, "facticity" which appeared in an academic journal article I came across today. It is a real word. It means the quality or condition of being fact. I am not sure I understand why we need this word. I am befuddled.

12haydninvienna
jan 8, 2020, 3:48 am

>11 jillmwo: In the interests of keeping the GD post count ticking, let's consider this important question.

First, it must be a real word: my Shorter Oxford includes it, with the definition "the quality or condition of being a fact" (which is not quite what you said). That may or may not mean it's a necessary word.

Second, "the quality or condition of being a fact": what does that mean? Being a fact as opposed to being something that is not a fact (such as a wineglass)? Being a fact as opposed to being an assertion that is not a fact (that is, is untrue)? Being a fact as opposed to being an utterance that has no truth-value? The first sense is a category mistake; the second has some sort of meaning but is probably doing the work historically done by true; the third seems pointless because who would want to talk about the "facticity" of "Go and clean up your room!"?

In other words, it looks to me like one of those abstract nouns that the bullsh*t industry loves to torment us with.

13jillmwo
jan 8, 2020, 5:24 pm

one of those abstract nouns that the bullsh*t industry loves to torment us with. I kind of agree with you. I honestly thought that it was a misprint in the text initially.

However, I will do a small "humble brag" and refer those who visit this page to my published piece on tech trends: https://niso.org/niso-io/2020/01/looking-trends-ten-years-back-five-years-forwar...

14libraryperilous
jan 8, 2020, 6:32 pm

Academic snobbery can take more than one form. Too much of it in this thread for me. Oh well.

15jillmwo
Redigeret: jan 8, 2020, 8:21 pm

Sorry you feel that way >14 libraryperilous:. But I think if you were to revisit periodically you might get a more well-rounded view of me as a person.

16haydninvienna
jan 9, 2020, 1:33 am

>13 jillmwo: Interesting article, Jill. I'm not surprised that concerns have been expressed about the privacy of cloud processing. My views on cloud processing are based on the idea that you shouldn't outsource a "bet the company" function. I'm not even sure where I first saw this, but it was in the context of how it might be OK for say a factory to outsource its cleaning but that a hospital shouldn't. I work on the fringes of the finance industry and I think that a bank that outsources its processing to the cloud has lost its collective mind.

Incidentally, just in case, I wasn't including what you do as part of the "bullsh*t industry". There's a certain kind of writing that's full of abstract nouns and has too few verbs—I see a lot of it. If it weren't so painful to do, I would dig out some samples, but the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (part of the Bank for International Settlements) is sometimes a good source.

17-pilgrim-
jan 9, 2020, 3:12 am

>12 haydninvienna: Your analysis is, I think, flawed. Apart from the category mistake, there is an alternative to something being true or untrue -not proven.
If I assert "all pigs have wings", that is not a fact, because it is demonsrably untrue.
If I assert, "pigs may have wings", you cannot know whether this is true or not. There may be a pig, somewhere with wings (although it seems incredibly unlikely). A mutation that has survived, perhaps (like the pig with two heads).
I could, at some point, prove the truth of my statement, by finding and producing a pig with wings, but until the unlikely event that I do, them that assertion is not a fact.

Whether we need the word facticity is another matter. The Oxford English Dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive. It records every word that has been published somewhere. It makes no comment on whether it should have been.

18-pilgrim-
jan 9, 2020, 3:18 am

>13 jillmwo: A useful and informative summary, as always.

19haydninvienna
jan 9, 2020, 3:40 am

>17 -pilgrim-: Right, as usual, although I would prefer to say "undecided" rather than "not proven". I'm not a Scottish lawyer. Come to think of it though, shouldn't your second example have been "no pigs have wings"? I would prefer to say that "pigs may have wings" has no truth value. I'm well aware that the SOED is descriptive, but I think that if the SOED recognises a string of characters as requiring a definition, the string is a word.

I wrote but deleted a rant on certain things that are going on in my workplace, to justify an assertion that half my life at the moment seemed to be devoted to flying kites and waiting for them to be shot down. Putting in the rant wouldn't have been fair because I couldn't have been sufficiently specific about exactly what the problem is. Also, it would have been far too long.

jillmwo —sorry about hijacking your thread for a little debate on logic ...

20MrsLee
jan 10, 2020, 8:53 am

>10 jillmwo: I have enjoyed Trollope the two times I've attempted the reads, but I'm afraid to try him at the moment. I don't seem to have the wherewithal to get through action-packed books in a timely manner, let alone a book that should be savored.

Thank you for your comments here. They help me sort whether or not I should make the attempt at this time. Also, you have a way of getting to the heart of the matter of your liking or disliking a book, and explaining why. Often I am only able to assert whether or not I liked a story, without understanding why, let alone explaining it.

21pgmcc
jan 14, 2020, 3:37 am

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Have a great day.

22Meredy
jan 14, 2020, 2:05 pm

>1 jillmwo: Oh, there you are, Jill. Following, and wishing you the best of all possible reading years.

23YouKneeK
jan 14, 2020, 5:56 pm

Happy birthday Jill.

24haydninvienna
jan 14, 2020, 11:45 pm

Happy birthday!

25hfglen
jan 15, 2020, 5:54 am

Hippo Birdie!

26-pilgrim-
jan 15, 2020, 6:37 am

Happy Birthday!

27MinuteMarginalia
jan 17, 2020, 10:09 pm

Happy (belated) birthday!

28Narilka
jan 18, 2020, 12:37 pm

Happy Belated Birthday!

29jillmwo
Redigeret: jan 22, 2020, 5:51 pm

Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes! I proceeded to splurge with my gift cards on some lovely editions of the works of Daphne Du Maurier. Hopefully they'll arrive soon.

Let me just add in a review of something I finished reading recently:

Dread Journey
Dorothy B. Hughes
ISBN 9781613161456

I had always thought that Murder on the Oriental Express was the quintessential mystery situated on a train. However, I’ve changed my mind -- I think now that Dread Journey should hold that title. There is a very limited number of passengers in the best carriage on the very best long-distance train called the Chief. The porter is a proud man, James Corbett; he can size up at a glance the passengers that he’s due to care for over a time-span of 3 days and he recognizes the movie people on this trip. There is the powerful movie producer -- Viv Spender -- and his private secretary -- Mike Dana. He recognizes the All-American-Girl actress, Kitten Agnew, but not the unknown hopeful who shares her compartment on the train. Gratia Shawn quietly reads Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a book that has a role in it for which she’s perfect. Her innocence is striking and her untouched appeal captures the attention of two men --- Hank Cavanaugh, burnt-out war correspondent, and Les Augustin, somewhat cynical musician. Sydney Pringle is the failed screenwriter who is being shipped back to the East Coast on the Chief.

The thing is that you’re fairly confident who deserves to be murdered in all this and ultimately the individual receives the just end. However, there’s going to be another body first -- oops, wait a minute, that would be two bodies ahead of the deserving traveler. It’s who actually does it that catches you off guard. Lots of suspense.

This was truly a compelling read (by which I mean, page-turning and impatient-to-return-to) and one that was sufficient to make me go out and get two other works by the same author to see if she’s really that good. (She also writes short books which makes it easy to finish them in a timely manner.)

30Peace2
jan 18, 2020, 10:43 pm

Belated good wishes for your birthday.

31MrsLee
jan 19, 2020, 1:45 am

>29 jillmwo: Wow, high praise indeed!

32reading_fox
jan 20, 2020, 11:21 am

>29 jillmwo: - that sounds lots of fun!

33jillmwo
Redigeret: jan 23, 2020, 9:34 pm

At ALA Midwinter this weekend in Philadelphia! With luck, I'll scope out some available advance reader copies. And what luck! Turns out my booth is literally right across from that of Penzler Publishers, so I will scope out what they've got coming out. I am *SO* jazzed by this one teeny-tiny thing. I may have to work the weekend, but it is possible I will come home w/ new books.

To be clear, Penzler Publishers is the group that published the Dorothy B. Hughes title I raved about earlier, Dread Journey.

34clamairy
jan 23, 2020, 9:54 pm

>33 jillmwo: Good luck! Rack 'em up!

35pgmcc
jan 24, 2020, 6:24 am

>33 jillmwo: Have a great weekend.

By the way, you can notch up Dread Journey as a hit from your BB gun. I downloaded it to my Kindle as soon as I read your post about it.

36Sakerfalcon
jan 28, 2020, 7:19 am

>33 jillmwo: Ooh, have fun! And remember to post photos of your book haul!

37jillmwo
jan 28, 2020, 9:29 pm

So news from ALA Midwinter. As I noted before, across from our booth was a stand for Penzler Publishing. If you're unfamiliar with the name, Otto Penzler opened up the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City which was located up in the 50's for more than a decade. It specialized in current titles in hardcover as well as mass market paperbacks and had something of a business in supporting collectors with "wish lists". About 20 years ago, they closed that very small shop and re-opened the bookstore down in Tribeca. Based on his biographical Wikipedia entry, it is now "the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstore in the world." I checked the footnote citation and it was characterized as such by the Guardian newspaper in 2016. In chatting with Mr. Penzler at ALA Midwinter, he didn't express it in such terms but indicated that they had far more space now and were carrying an even broader supply of titles. I did get two discounted paperbacks from his stand:

The Case of the Careless Kitten: A Perry Mason Mystery by Earle Stanley Gardner
Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich
I've never read anything by him before.

I have been buying the hardcover books in his American Mysteries Classics collection regularly since it launched in 2016. Were I still living in New York City, I feel confident that I'd be visiting his bookshop with absolute regularity. The man knows both publishing as well as book selling. He knows his field in depth and was charming as a conversationalist about the genre as I chatted with him. Speaking personally, I believe that is the real ticket to success in running an independent bookstore.

And when I got home, my lovely slip-cased copies of Folio Society editions of Daphne Du Maurier were waiting for me!!

But of course, February is the month when I think I'm away from home every single weekend. If anyone has any particular klout with the weather deity, could that person please schedule a nice unexpected blizzard in the Northeast for the end of the month? One that requires I stay indoors for a week?

38pgmcc
jan 29, 2020, 6:26 am

>37 jillmwo:
You are taking me back to the 1960s when my family would watch Perry Mason every week.

The folio edition of Daphne Du Maurier’s works sounds fantastic. Photographs are demanded.

39MrsLee
jan 29, 2020, 9:23 am

>37 jillmwo: Sounds like a lovely trip. I am in full agreement with pgmcc, we need a photo of the Du Maurier book.

40pgmcc
jan 29, 2020, 10:07 am

>39 MrsLee: >37 jillmwo:
...and the Perry Mason and Waltz into Darkness.

41jillmwo
Redigeret: feb 3, 2020, 9:27 pm

Photos are coming of the Folio acquisitions as well as my stack from Penzler Publishing. Have to work on lighting and positioning. But in the meantime...

The Lie Tree

An unusual YA fantasy -- it mixes the highly structured class society of Victorian England with a 14-year-old girl named Faith whose father, a rector in the Church of England, has been disgraced. We don’t learn until late in the book the cause of his disgrace. We only know that the family is living in a remote setting, one where an archaeological dig seemed to offer them a way back into acceptance by respectable society. But Frances Hardinge is actually telling a more complex story. There is a murder, there is the influence of village gossip, and there are secrets that bind Faith as much as do the constraints placed on her by society. To her credit, the author manages to render convincingly and accurately the attitudes of Victorian minds. There’s a point being made here as one might expect of a strong YA novel, a valid one certainly. For the most part, it’s handled well. Only occasionally did I tire of it, as the story wound to its end. The story did strike me as the kind of tale that kicks around in one’s brain for awhile; it feels memorable.

Hugh (hfglen) recommended this one and I sigh only because he seems generally to have a gift for finding books that I enjoy. At the same time, his recommendations arrive when other things are supposed to be HAPPENING in real life. (Like taking photos of my recent acquisitions. Not that I'm blaming anyone, you'll note.) So we’re just six weeks into the year and he gets to notch up another one in whatever spreadsheet he may be using to track these things.

42Sakerfalcon
feb 4, 2020, 6:32 am

>41 jillmwo: I thought The lie tree was excellent too. Glad you enjoyed it. I especially liked that intially it seems that all the power lies with the male characters, but as the book progresses it is revealed that the women have a lot more influence than it appeared

43hfglen
feb 4, 2020, 8:52 am

>41 jillmwo: *evil cackle* If I did use a spreadsheet at all I'd be able to report who winged me with an author bullet for Frances Hardinge. I've enjoyed all three of hers the library has locally, but there do seem to be others in more distant branches. Maybe a loan request is in order.

44NorthernStar
feb 4, 2020, 8:11 pm

I think you've winged me...

45jillmwo
Redigeret: apr 6, 2020, 7:25 pm

My husband tells a story about an old radio serial where a hero had been written into so tight a corner at the end of one episode, that the writers resorted to opening the script of the next episode with “After Jack Armstrong Got Out of the Snakepit...”, so they wouldn't have to explain how the hero had escaped all the difficulties. Suffice it to say that my absence has been due to a need to climb out of the snake pit. I have not read as much as one might expect, but I can point to a few titles where I’ve legitimately absorbed the content.

Sometimes you hit a sentence in a book that appears to encapsulate the author's entire theme. It may not be deathless prose. In context, it may just seem a pedestrian expression. But when you finish the book, that's the thing that you carry away with you. In the case of Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, the sentence is “People always said they wanted the truth, but really they were perfectly content with a facsimile.” Transcription is about espionage and a small group of people employed in that activity in England in 1940 and the following decades. You’re never entirely sure who the “good” people are because everyone is purposely using a cover. Everyone seems to be under suspicion. I believe this intended as fiction more focused on rendition of character than on action. Not much skulduggery is really going on, but you are forced to continue looking for it under every rock and in every conversational snippet.

I was reading two books on the history of women’s suffrage for a freelance writing assignment, an experience that increasingly reminds me more of writing college term papers than anything else. Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote however is an eminently readable history of the frustrating series of events that women endured in efforts to get the vote. During the period of social reform in the early 19th century, women like Lucretia Mott, Amelia Bloomer, and Elizabeth Cade Stanton crusaded for the abolition of slavery, temperance, and the vote for women. Theoretically the three causes were equally aligned but it quickly became evident that of the three, equality for women was indeed the lowest priority. Women only won the vote for themselves when they ceased to be worried about fighting for others and focused on getting what they wanted for themselves. The second book I read for the white paper was less compelling in some respects but still interesting -- Gilded Suffragists: The New York Socialites Who Fought for Women’s Right to Vote. This one focused less on famous names in the movement and more on the names of those women whose social positions allowed them to exert the greatest influence on decision-makers. I’d never heard of Alva Belmont (as one such wealthy suffragist) but it appears that she had a great deal to do with shifting popular opinion on the question in New York.

I also began to read and tried to enjoy The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh. It is part of her continuation of the Peter Wimsey stories. But it didn’t work. Mostly, in my view, because she was trying to force those characters into dialogue and behaviors less reminiscent of Sayers’ tone in the books, but more likely to satisfy readers unfamiliar with the original. So for example: “Oh, lord,” said Peter. “Sorry, Harriet. You live so closely in my mind I had forgotten that you need to be filled in. A lot has happened since lunchtime.” Maybe I’m wrong, but at the very least, wouldn’t Peter Wimsey have referred to luncheon rather than lunch time? And even if one might like to imagine Peter and Harriet enjoying a bit of afternoon delight in the bedroom, would we ever actually have SEEN IT IN TEXT ON THE PAGE?

I’m sorry. I must stop, catch my breath and regain my composure on that one. I did know better after all. I have no one to blame but myself. I knew that I’d stopped reading Paton-Walsh for a reason. But I really wanted something that would be both new as well as familiar and so I succumbed. Bah! I do have the non-fiction title about Sayers and her writers' group which is something like The Mutual Admiration Society

I have plenty of other stuff to read in the midst of a pandemic. I’ll work on some other volumes in my TBR pile.

Postscript: Why are the touchstones being wonky this evening? Are the gremlins punishing me for my unexcused absence?

46Marissa_Doyle
apr 6, 2020, 7:53 pm

You got me with Gilded Suffragists, ma'am.

I very much agree with your assessment of the pseudo-Wimsey. Walsh's first two attempts were not bad, but this one was pretty awful. As you said, it felt forced, and on more levels than one.

47pgmcc
apr 7, 2020, 4:53 am

>45 jillmwo: I think, ok, I admit, you hit me with Transcription.

Did you come across Contess Markievicz in your study of women's suffrage?

I can understand your position on the Sayers imitation. I tend to avoid books that are an author continuing the character/story of another. It is never the same.

48-pilgrim-
apr 10, 2020, 1:46 pm

>45 jillmwo: Ooh, yes, that is bad. Three phases in one sentence that all ring false. Thank you for the warning; I think I will steer clear of those sequels.

>47 pgmcc: You intrigued me with your link to "Countess Markievicz". Her husband sounds rather a chancer, from his Wikipedia articles; since when did simple membership of the szlachty entitle to you to a title? ("Lord X" would surely be the maximum honorific that you could lay claim to, through translation.)

49pgmcc
apr 10, 2020, 2:20 pm

>48 -pilgrim-: Nobody here thinks or even knows anything about the husband.

I mentioned her here in relation to votes for women. She was the firs woman elected to Westminster. She did not take her seat as per her party's abstentionist policy. You will see another woman identified as the first female MP to take a seat in Westminster. Markievicz was subsequently elected to the first Dáil and was appointed as a minister becoming the second female cabinet member in Europe.

50-pilgrim-
apr 10, 2020, 3:20 pm

>49 pgmcc: I agree wholeheartedly that she seemed a formidable character. It therefore seemed a little odd that she is commemorated under a name that prioritises her husband's somewhat dubious claims, rather than her own, clear, merits. She seems so much more than the wife of her husband!

51pgmcc
apr 10, 2020, 4:00 pm

>50 -pilgrim-: She was from quite a privileged background and the society of the time would have been impressed by any title that implied status.

52jillmwo
apr 28, 2020, 6:19 pm

Here's the proof of what I've been doing in my so-called spare time: https://www.accessible-archives.com/2020/04/13951/

My life in quarantine isn't really much different from what it was before my state got locked down. I work for a living from home; it's just that now I can't get out for a break at all. I'm not really binge-watching anything -- dip into stuff upon occasion, but not for hours and hours at a time.

Review of Mythos by Stephen Fry coming w/in 24 hours.

53jillmwo
Redigeret: apr 29, 2020, 8:45 am

Mythos by Stephen Fry has definitely been my most engaging read of the past two months. After a certain age, stories from mythology have a certain familiarity no matter who is telling the tale; what makes them interesting reading is the particular slant taken in telling the familiar tale and the tone. This is how the shape of the stories shift over time. Circe was generally perceived as a wicked seducer of heroes until Madeleine Miller reframed her in the 21st century novel, Circe. Different creators present the stories for their own time and in a particular context. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology was originally published in the early ‘40’s and her presentation of the Greek gods is very different from the presentation by Stephen Fry in Mythos.

As an example, here’s how Edith Hamilton presents Hestia. “She was Zeus’s sister and like Athena and Artemis a virgin goddess. She has no distinct personality and she plays no part in the myths. She was the Goddess of the Hearth, the symbol of the home.” Compare that with how Stephen Fry presents Hestia: “Refusing offers of marriage from the other gods, Hestia devoted herself to perpetual maidenhood. Placid, content, kind, hospitable and domestic, she tended to stay away from the everyday power struggles and political machinations of the other gods. A modest divinity…” Fry also manages to weave references to Hestia into his retellings of Prometheus and Pandora where Hamilton does not.

Fry’s version grasps the point made by Robert Graves about the purposes of mythology being (a) to answer awkward questions and (b) reinforce the existing social structure. Fry in his introduction writes “Greeks did not grovel before their gods. They were aware of their vain need to be supplicated and venerated, but they believed men were their equal. Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.”

Fry’s book doesn’t sanitize any of the activities of the god, so one wouldn’t offer this up to anyone below the age of 18. Depending upon what the bookseller shows online, you may or may not see a subtitle for the book “Ancient Green Mythology Book for Adults”) That being the case, he also doesn’t overly simplify his writing style. See this quote from a retelling of the story of a minor character:

Salmoneus himself, quite as proud and vainglorious as his hated brother, had set himself up in Elis as a kind of god. Claiming to equal Zeus’ power to summon storms, he’d ordered the construction of a brass bridge over which he liked to ride his chariot, at breakneck speed, trailing kettles, cauldrons and iron pots to mimic the sound of thunder. Flaming torches would be thrown skyward at the same time to imitate lightning. Such blasphemous impertinence caught the eye of Zeus, who ended the farrago with a real thunderbolt. The king, his chariot, brass bridge, cooking utensils, and all were blasted to atoms and the shade of Salmoneus cast down to eternal damnation in the darkest depths of Tartarus.

Absolutely indicative of the vocabulary and tone found in most of the book. Blasphemous impertinence -- to call blasphemy an impertinence suggests that you don’t take the god being blasphemed against very seriously. And when was the last time you saw someone use the word farrago in a sentence?

The physical book is lovely and the photographs of classical artwork included in the book are a nice touch that don’t overwhelm.

As a sidenote, if you have access to Amazon Video, I might also recommend the animated series, “The Great Greek Myths”. The first season covers the same ground as Fry’s book and makes for a nice supplement. (Clearly intended for educational audiences, this material will do nicely for 7th grade and up.) If you haven't got the necessary bandwidth to read but are in the mood for mythology, the series manages a nice balance between the violence of some of the stories and the romance of others.

54clamairy
apr 29, 2020, 9:22 am

>53 jillmwo: I am happy that this was such a good read for you. I just purchased the Audible version narrated by the author last month and it will probably be up next in my queue. Our tastes have been so similar over the years that I can't help but think this will be a gem for me as well.

55haydninvienna
apr 29, 2020, 10:06 am

>53 jillmwo: Wishlisted, on account of my respect for both your reviews and Stephen Fry. Great to have you back again, Jill!

56-pilgrim-
Redigeret: apr 29, 2020, 10:21 am

>53 jillmwo: My first introduction to Roman mythology was at the age of 3. I started reading my parents' copy of the two-volune edition of Robert Graves' The Greek Myths at age 9. (I found the comparative mythology of the footnotes fascinating, but some of the myths themselves eye-watering!)

I have read the classical imaginings in the plays by Euripides and Sophocles, and spent a year studying Classical Mythology as part of a degree. So you can see that it is a subject that has interested me for a long time.

Does Stephen Fry bring anything new to the table? Or is his book aimed at adult with little or no prior exposure to the subject matter?

I generally enjoy Stephen Fry, but am unclear whether this book is aimed at me it not.

57Sakerfalcon
apr 29, 2020, 10:45 am

My mum has a copy of Mythos and enjoyed it a lot. Maybe I will have to borrow her copy.

58Marissa_Doyle
apr 29, 2020, 11:05 am

Mythos has been on my radar for a while, but now in light of your review I may have to rethink paper copy vs. ebook.

59jillmwo
apr 29, 2020, 5:16 pm

>56 -pilgrim-: If you've already read Robert Graves through, then I don't imagine you'd pick up any new information from Fry's version. Fry's is more casual in tone than Graves' work and not nearly as detailed. The interest for me lay in the novelty of how Fry told the stories, even those like Pandora with which everyone must be familiar.

To Marissa_Doyle, clamairy, haydninvienna, and sakerfalcon, in this instance, I really liked having the print version. The production values were really quite good. Of course, having said that, the electronic is best for purposes of doing a quick look up.

60Meredy
apr 29, 2020, 6:03 pm

Ooh, ow. Jill, you got me with Transcription. I liked the Jackson Brodie books a lot, although I couldn't get through Life After Life. Hoping for the best, I just ordered it from Amazon.

Probably bb'd me with Mythos also. When I could barely read, I started in on Bulfinch, thanks to my mother. She liked to tell the stories from memory while she gave baths, made lunches, curled my hair, and so on. I brushed up on all my mythology last year with a distance-learning course. I know Fry's take is bound to be a little different.

61MerryMary
apr 30, 2020, 12:58 pm

>53 jillmwo: Alas, a touch. Struck in the heart. I must find and procure Mythos at once. Well aimed, good lady.

62AHS-Wolfy
maj 1, 2020, 5:27 am

>53 jillmwo: Mythos (& Heroes) are already on my tbr shelves so I managed to avoid the BB. Glad you enjoyed it though.

63jillmwo
Redigeret: maj 4, 2020, 8:34 pm

Mrs Miniver is a lovely glimpse into a rather privileged lifestyle, one which I will never know. There are tidbits in this collection of columns, originally published in a London newspaper, that make one long for a world where there would always be chrysanthemums, crumpets for tea, a fire in the sitting room as well as expensive shops with small green lizard-skin engagement books. I realize the book is incredibly selective in how it presents this woman's privileged life, but I sometimes wish I lived in that world, when women wore hats in their passport photos, sent their eldest sons to Eton and had the suitcases that could hold elegant dressing gowns when visiting country houses for the weekend. I don't live in that world, but it's rather nice as a place to visit.

Well, okay, that's true for some of the times when I have gone back and reread this book. In other moods, I'm just irritated with the narrow sphere and the fussiness and some of the inconveniences. (Like when she has to find a charwoman in advance of a dinner party for people she doesn't like and who subsequently come down with influenza.) I also don't think I would have cared to stand in a queue with my entire household in order to collect a gas mask.

Sometimes it's a restful read; other times apparently, it is not. Does this mean I have been visited by the infamous Suck Fairy?

64pgmcc
maj 5, 2020, 3:06 am

>63 jillmwo:
I love your post.

I would suggest the development of a social conscience is at work here more than the suck fairy.

:-)

65-pilgrim-
Redigeret: maj 5, 2020, 5:53 am

>63 jillmwo: . I realize the book is incredibly selective in how it presents this woman's privileged life, but I sometimes wish I lived in that world, when women wore hats in their passport photos, sent their eldest sons to Eton and had the suitcases that could hold elegant dressing gowns when visiting country houses for the weekend.

I am intrigued that you see hats as a social class indicator. My grandmother was of the same generation as Mrs Miniver. She left school to start work at 14; she was definitely not middle class. But during that era, she would not have been seen outdoors without a hat.

66jillmwo
maj 5, 2020, 3:54 pm

>64 pgmcc: What had really struck me was the idea that a woman would be wearing a hat in a passport photo. As you note, at that point in time a lady would always be wearing a hat when venturing out. Nowadays, certainly here in the states, you aren't permitted to be wearing headgear while getting a passport photo. (I think there may be certain religious exceptions.) Hats were more common for both men and women at that point in time.

Speaking for myself, I am both "sorry" that women don't wear hats as frequently as previous generations because they are frequently lovely as a finishing touch, giving one a real presence, and "not sorry" because of the expense associated with a well-designed hat, even as one suffers from hat hair and trying to keep it from blowingp off one's head. My husband thinks I'm adorable in a cloche or in a newsboy cap. I personally wish I could get away with the kind of hats they wear to the Kentucky Derby. Big, Floofy, watch-how-you-turn-your-head hats.

67-pilgrim-
Redigeret: maj 5, 2020, 5:18 pm

>66 jillmwo: I think hats were functionally necessary to deal with long hair, and no showers. People did not wash their hair nearly as often, and long, unwashed hair gets greasy and could pick up dirt unless protected.

My grandmother used to hate going "into London" to shop, by which she meant Central London, because by the time she got home, her skin was visibly blackened from the smog. Protecting hair was a necessity.

And I speak as someone whom hats never seem to fit. On occasions where hats are still compulsory, I generally have to resort to the pillbox style - which only really works when forties fashions are in vogue!

ETA: Don't forget it was extremely unusual for a woman to have s passport of her own at that time. My mother travelled on her husband's passport until the sixties. (It was more economic that way.)
So I suspect customs officials were not paying any great attention to the female photographs anyway...

68pgmcc
maj 5, 2020, 5:25 pm

>66 jillmwo: My parents would always have worn hats going out. Hatpins were commonly used by women to prevent their hat from blowing off. Men's hairstyles were so short in those days a man using a hatpin would simply be piercing his scalp.

As you might remember, one of my daughters married an American. We had the reception at an old stately home, built in the mid 1700s, near our house. Many of Phil's (Phil being my s-i-l) family and friends came over for the event. There are many stories about that weekend (Yes, the reception lasted a weekend. That led to some of the stories about the stamina of our visitors at an Irish wedding) but one story is hat related.

It is very usual for women to wear hats to weddings in Ireland, in fact it would be quite a big thing for many ladies, young and old. Phil's sister and her husband came over from The States for the wedding. Apparently it was not the custom for ladies to wear hats to weddings in the USA. Whether that is the case or not, Phil's sister did not have a hat and was most impressed with the hats on display, and somewhat disappointed that she did not realise hats were worn by ladies at Irish weddings.

Well, as the guests were being greeted by the Bride and Groom as they filed into the dinning-room, Phil's sister said to my Daughter, "I wish I'd known people wore hats to Irish weddings. I would have brought one. I would love to be wearing one. At least I know for your next wedding."

69jillmwo
maj 5, 2020, 7:54 pm

I do appreciate the humor there, >68 pgmcc:.

Here again, Americans show a certain lack of fashion flair. One of the things I have ALWAYS admired when watching royal weddings are the hats worn by the guests. There are times when I absolutely sigh with envy.

70jillmwo
maj 6, 2020, 5:17 pm

I was wondering what movies or television shows you all may have been watching during this quarantine/lock-down period. I ask because I have ended up watching some off-beat things. We had cut the cable cord at some point in the past six months and it actually has paid off to a certain extent.

For example, I saw Greta Garbo in a silent film recently, Flesh and the Devil (1926). It was surprisingly compelling. I also watched Secrets of Britain's Great Cathedrals (PBS Documentary series, 2018, Simon Callow). During Easter week, I watched at least 3 and maybe four versions of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. I admit to favoring the version with John Legend in the title role. (And yes, watching that many versions of Superstar might indeed be a bit weird.)

I have also discovered Alan Davies as an actor. My son introduced his father to QI as a television series over Christmas and Patrick has been regularly watching that. We have since sampled the man's acting in Jonathan Creek, Whites, The Brief, and in an episode of Inspector Lewis.

I have been reading and will be posting about an off-beat title (one of those older back-list books that is available in Kindle format at a price of less than $5.00 -- at least when I picked it up. You know how these things go...)

71pgmcc
maj 7, 2020, 3:31 am

>70 jillmwo: We tease my son about looking like Jonathan Creek when his hair gets long and it is long now. He will not let me have a go at it.

72jillmwo
Redigeret: maj 25, 2020, 4:20 pm

So you have a rigid, rather hard-headed, sternly focused head of state. The man has to undergo heart surgery (by-pass surgery, back in the world of 1990’s cardiac care) and the initial set up of this novel is him preparing for this life-altering procedure. He has to participate in pre-surgical counseling, learn what rehab is going to be like, how long it will take, and grasp the psychological impact of the procedure.

Being a public figure, he has to consider what his legacy is going to be, should he not survive. He’s got to clear his work desk with his secretary. The man is not entirely happy with the work he will have completed to date.

There are terrorists who have reason to want the head of state dead. As a further complication, his surgeon has political leanings that are unsympathetic to those of the patient's nation-state. Should the patient die on the table, this may or may not create additional problems. There are others focused on controlling the power vacuum that might develop with such a death, and there are those who worry about shifts in power if the man recovers.

Now, does it matter if the political state in question is the Vatican and the head of state, the Pope?

Lazarus was not a particularly challenging read. In my experience of this particular author (Morris West), his novels are less oriented around character development or even action; rather, they are a way in which he as an author argues with himself, going back and forth about the logical arguments associated with the institutional church as a political state. I’d really recommend the title specifically to those who find those kinds of abstract discussions stimulating. (If it helps you gauge my degree of enthusiasm, just know that, in some ways, I enjoyed the novel and the movie based on the novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman, as an intellectual and somewhat educational experience. But I’d never try to sell them as entertainment.

Now on to Death by Shakespeare.

73jillmwo
maj 11, 2020, 5:01 pm

>71 pgmcc: I had those conversations with my son when he went off to college and did not get a hair cut because it was "too expensive". He let it grow out and all the curls in his hair went wild with excitement.

74jillmwo
maj 24, 2020, 12:48 pm

I was lured into re-reading Out of the Silent Planet (1938) as others on a thread here in the Green Dragon were doing.

Rereading OTSP was a mix of new enjoyment, a revisiting of the responses felt during my initial reading of the book, and a recognition that age means I wasn’t reading the same book I recalled from my ‘20’s. (That part was a bit of a bummer.) I read a scattered assortment of C.S. Lewis’ books in the first half of my life. I haven’t really revisited any of them in at least twenty years. I have largely positive memories of reading the Space Trilogy as well as some of the Narnia Chronicles. (I was really quite struck by The Voyage of the Dawntreader in some ways.) I read a good many of Lewis’ spiritual books while in college -- The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce were memorable -- but again, hadn’t really revisited them since.

Let me get some of the negatives about OTSP out of the way. First of all, I found the near total lack of female characters to be off-putting. This was men talking to men and women were entirely peripheral. Secondly, I don’t think Lewis’ names for the inhabitants of Malacandra worked for me. Pfifltriggi? Everytime I read the word, it threw me out of my willing suspension of disbelief. But Lewis was going for something different.

In my view, at least, speculative fiction in the form that OSTP adopts is a means of exploring a set of ideas and assumptions and arguing in response to those ideas. Characters tend not to be individual personalities, but rather representative spokespersons for particular views. Weston and Devine aren’t fleshed out as individual personalities with rationales for their choices and behaviors. They are just straw men, whose dialogue is limited and whose reasoning is never fully expounded. One thing I noticed is that Ransom doesn’t even confront his human adversaries directly; he only conveys his anxiety about their thinking to those he meets on Malacandra.

Early on, Lewis shares Ransom’s mindset as the three men are unpacking supplies from their spaceship after they’ve just landed. Ransom thinks to himself, “Malacandra was beautiful; and he even reflected on how odd it was that this possibility had never entered into his speculations about it. The same peculiar twist of imagination which led him to people the universe with monsters had somehow taught him to expect nothing on a strange planet except rocky desolation or else a network of nightmare machines.” The quote seems indicative to me of what Oxford academic Lewis intended his reader to consider, that one’s preconceived notions may be wrong and that one has the responsibility to educate oneself, to learn whether those assumptions hold up in another context. He takes exception to the assumption that Weston and Devine seem to hold -- that the understanding and experience they have of the principles of earth and earth’s inhabitants is equally applicable elsewhere.

This is part of what Hyoi tries to explain to Ransom at one point -- that our experiences may not be immediately understood, that understanding takes time to unfold and that therefore we should not be in too great of a hurry.

Hyoi says, “What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it...What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what makes in me all my days till then -- that is the real meeting...You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?”

Lewis writes a compelling story in many ways, but the thinking behind it takes time to unfold which may not make it palatable for everyone. It's an entirely different experience from a good rousing space opera with star destroyers or something like the Penric fantasy series. As an adult woman rereading his novel in 2021, Lewis’ expression of the human experience in 1938 strikes me as lovely in some ways and limited in others. I’m still fond of the book and won’t discard my copy of OTSP, but neither am I able to quite embrace his thinking the way I once might have done.

75MrsLee
maj 24, 2020, 1:13 pm

>74 jillmwo: Why did you feel the need to travel to the future to read this book? Was it to see what was happening with the Covid situation next year? (sorry, couldn't resist)

When you mention that there were no female characters, I realize, that there were none. But it didn't really occur to me until you mentioned it. It doesn't bother me. Some novels are mostly female characters, others are mixed. I don't mind a novel of mostly men talking to men, so long as they have interesting things to say and do. In fact, I prefer it to a novel that throws in a token woman to be rescued and coddled and cause all the plans to go awry.

76haydninvienna
maj 24, 2020, 1:30 pm

>74 jillmwo: >75 MrsLee: In fact there’s one woman in it: the mother of the boy that Ransom goes to the farm to rescue right at the start. That’s the only woman that I remember, and she doesn’t even have a name.

I noticed Jill’s bit of time travel too, but MrsLee beat me to it.

>74 jillmwo: Your experience is exactly parallel to mine, Jill. I first read it 50+ years ago and a good deal of what impressed the young me isn’t so impressive now. But Lewis still has lots to say that’s worth attending to, and my admiration for him purely as a writer is greater than ever.

77pgmcc
maj 24, 2020, 1:44 pm

It was 51 years ago that I read Out of the Silent Planet and I am looking forward to reading it again.

78jillmwo
Redigeret: maj 24, 2020, 3:43 pm

Jeez louise. I've never seen people get such a cheap jolly from one itty-bitty typo. I'd edit it out, but that would deprive others of the intellectual stimulation that some of us just experienced in having to read the piece four times to pick out what in the name of sense it was that you all were talking about. (I suspect that pgmcc was simply being polite by NOT mentioning it. Either that or he's consulting the agency code book to see if there might be an encrypted meaning.)

Edited to add that the old woman only appears in the first chapter and is never provided with a name. She's just there to worry about her son who is late home from his work and thus allow Ransom to have an excuse for going to the house, known as The Rise. The house has a name, the son has a name (Harry), but his mother is only characterized as an old woman. Again, at the time Lewis was writing this, he was a crusty old bachelor primarily speaking to other men. As >76 haydninvienna: notes.

79pgmcc
maj 24, 2020, 5:31 pm

>78 jillmwo: (I suspect that pgmcc was simply being polite by NOT mentioning it. Either that or he's consulting the agency code book to see if there might be an encrypted meaning.)

Could it be that time travel is not something I find out of the ordinary? (I spotted the message; I am aware you are from the future.)

80Meredy
maj 25, 2020, 12:47 am

>74 jillmwo: Interesting comments. I read the Space Trilogy decades ago too, probably around age 20, and remember being very taken with it. The study of philology was new to me, and it appealed to me so much that I was on track to do graduate work in it at one point.

Your quote about Malacandra sounded to me as if it were meant to be a direct response to H.G. Wells's vision, and so I googled the two names together and got this:

https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2012/08/28/warofworldviews1/

81jillmwo
Redigeret: jun 25, 2020, 8:03 pm

I had discussed The Floating Admiral here in the Pub back in 2017 (https://www.librarything.com/topic/244042#5865911) As a reminder, the book is a whodunnit that was crafted by 12 members of the Detection Club in a round-robin fashion. G K Chesterton, and Canon Victor Whitechurch set up the original crime and others followed up with chapters (and a privately submitted solution to the whodunnit) with Anthony Berkeley Cox tying up all the final loose ends. In between are chapters by Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Freeman Wills Croft among others. I noted back in my posting that it was a bit of a bumpy read but still rather fun. If one wants or tends to treat mysteries as an exercise in logic, then this title was a good work-out for the brain (particularly if you read the various solutions submitted by the participants).

Fast forward to 2016 and the members of the modern-day Detection Club decided to do a follow-up novel, The Sinking Admiral. (It just took me until 2020 to get around to reading it.) In the intro, Simon Brett notes that the group of original contributors all wrote the same type of mystery (all creators of the puzzle mystery) while the modern-day contributors write across a broader range of sub-genres-- historical mysteries, suspense, etc. To smooth the experience for the reader.

Martin Edwards, the editor of the highly successful mystery series of classics published under the aegis of the British Library wrote in his blog the following: “I contributed one chapter, and found it fun to write...However, we did reach a point, with a couple of chapters to go, where we still had not decided on the solution. Simon duly organised an unforgettable dinner at the Groucho Club where we worked it all out, and elected two brave souls to do the necessary writing.”

Personally, I thought the ending a bit rushed without adequate build-up to the revelation of the murderer, in terms of leaving sufficient clues for the reader. I was also a bit disappointed that there was never any indication provided as to who wrote the specific chapters; Simon Brett’s introduction to the 2016 novel very coyly indicates that the 14 contributors who knew certain professions well would be responsible for composing the bits about suspects in that role. If you wrote books set in the world of high finance, then you would write the portions of the book having to do with the techno-whiz suspect, earning piles of money in the stock market. What this translated to was ensuring that The Sinking Admiral would seem more credible to the modern reader and thus ensure greater sales.

The other “too cute” element to the previous work was that surnames of the dozen contributors to The Floating Admiral were each assigned to one of the characters in The Sinking Admiral. I admit that this didn’t really become obvious to me until I was actually jotting my list of suspects down and caught Chesterton, Berkeley, and Sayers as character names. It’s the kind of homage that allows one slightly more knowledgeable set of readers to feel faintly superior to readers who are less up on their Golden Age writers. It doesn’t interfere with one’s reading; it’s just the smugness that’s annoying.
When set against a true Golden Age mystery -- something well-crafted like Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh -- this one just seemed a tad simplistic, almost as if modern authors weren’t up to the complexity of constructing a puzzle mystery, even if they could handle police procedurals or historical thrillers. In Artists in Crime, Marsh seemed to me to offer a better set of personality conflicts and more precise misdirections. The Sinking Admiral did not establish the same degree of friction between the suspects put forward and, as previously noted, the ending felt as if the murderer’s name had been indiscriminately pulled from a hat.

And in one final snarky note, the 2016 physical production values (at least for the hardcover) were AWFUL.

All this said, the book is a bit of a bouncy read if one goes into it with no great expectations. That was where I think I went wrong...

82clamairy
jun 26, 2020, 3:23 pm

>81 jillmwo: Good to see you posting, stranger. Hope all is well otherwise.

83pgmcc
jun 26, 2020, 3:32 pm

84jillmwo
jun 27, 2020, 4:15 pm

Just got off the phone with a friend who I hadn’t heard from in recent weeks. We were comparing reading experiences while living in lock-down, and both of us noted that we were coping by doing a fair amount of re-reading. I have plenty of untouched volumes about the house, but mostly I was looking for reading material that would be non-confrontational with regard to pain, violence, and death. (It does occur to me that reading mysteries is probably not the right genre for this mood. But hey, those are my standard fare in some respects.)

Back in 2017, I encountered the Rowland Sinclair mystery series by Sulari Gentill. The first two I had read were relatively mild - not overly cozy but not chock-full of serial killers and/or bloody instruments of mayhem. It’s a historical series set in the 1930s and the ones I read were set largely in Australia. They seemed to be well-researched and, while Gentill’s writing wasn’t lyrical, the books were plausibly and competently constructed. I therefore thought I would be safe picking up another one in the series.

I did realize that I had skipped over one or two titles that had been published in the interim, but casually picked up Gentlemen Formerly Dressed. (I think it’s number 5 in the series or thereabouts.) At any rate, it became clear in the initial pages that the previous title in the series (which I’d not read) had taken a particularly dark turn in terms of what had happened to the lead character. In the opening pages of Gentleman, Rowland Sinclair is recuperating from a run-in with Nazi forces in Munich; he has managed to escape to London and reunite with his brother who has traveled over for a peace conference. One of his arms is broken and we learn there are severe burn scars on his back. Sinclair somehow encounters a dead body in his hotel (one that is embarrassingly garbed) and the book unfolds as Rowly and his friends attempt to ensure that the dead man’s niece isn’t wrongly convicted of the murder. The mystery was sufficiently complex to at least keep my intellectual interest up, but I did find the “torture” element very difficult to read in light of recent protests and conflicts with police.

Similarly, I tried to read The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey, but reading about the cultural practice of purdah in India in the 1930s simply fueled quarantine/confinement nightmares. The writing is excellent, but I just couldn’t continue.

I then took a "safe route" of watching a television detective series from the 'nineties and, after watching one two-part episode, seeking out the book on which it was based. The author is apparently known for writing safely non-gory titles. Anyone here familiar with W.J. Burley and his Wycliffe novels?

I’m looking at my shelves and wondering what from the TBR shelf is safe to read and finding that at least some part of me wants to stick to the tried and true, the familiar, even as I recognize that living in an imagined world of Regency and Victorian novels probably won't help me stand up straight as I navigate the current upheavals of life in these United States.

Oh, and my Thingaversary is coming up in the next week or two. I feel like I may want to appease any enforcers who may be eye-balling my thread and going tsk-tsk. What's good, folks? What might be a calming read with -- I dunno -- a happy ending?

85-pilgrim-
jun 27, 2020, 4:24 pm

>84 jillmwo: I would not rate Wycliffe as particularly safe and cozy. They do not go into excessive detail about gore and torture, but they are not afraid to tackle the more disturbing types of crime.

86jillmwo
jun 28, 2020, 4:44 pm

>85 -pilgrim-: Thank you for the warning! I will try one just to see if it's bearable, but I'll also have my radar up when I do so.

87pgmcc
jun 28, 2020, 5:16 pm

>84 jillmwo: I was about to recommend Transcription (Touchstone not responding appropriately) by Kate Atkinson when I recalled that it was a book bullet that hit me when fired from your gun.

88jillmwo
jun 28, 2020, 5:17 pm

A case of richochet recommendations, pgmcc?

89pgmcc
jun 28, 2020, 5:19 pm

>88 jillmwo: A case of shaky recall.

90jillmwo
jun 28, 2020, 5:21 pm

>89 pgmcc: Shaken, not stirred?

91pgmcc
jun 28, 2020, 5:21 pm

>89 pgmcc: I have just had a look at the list of books I have read so far this year (Post #1 at the top of my reading thread) and I see four titles that are directly from your shooting. Can you name all four?

92jillmwo
jun 28, 2020, 5:30 pm

Well, after studying your list here https://www.librarything.com/topic/320090, I think I might take credit for the titles by Cyril Hare, Kate Atkinson and maybe the books by S.A. Chakraborty. Was Josephine Tey the fourth? (I can't believe you hadn't read Tey before now. Didn't you and I and MrsLee talked about some of her stuff a while back? Or am I confusing it with DuMaurier? Yes, to quote an Agatha Christie title, elephants can remember these things...)

93pgmcc
Redigeret: jun 29, 2020, 5:11 am

>92 jillmwo:

Dread Journey by Hughes is number four.

ETA: My apologies for my faulty recall. I am totally wrong in my memory. The City of Brass was a direct, between the eyes, hit from your book bullet gun. That means FIVE of my reads this year are as a result of your influence. This makes Empire of Gold number five.

I think you might be remembering conversations on Du Maurier as the first time I became aware of Tey was when I met my long term online friend from the Philippines in London in Foyles’ Bookshop in January of this year and he made a gift of the book to me.

94pgmcc
jun 28, 2020, 6:44 pm

I am delighted to see you in a position to post more than one post a month. We have missed you.

95haydninvienna
jun 29, 2020, 12:39 am

>94 pgmcc: Seconding what Peter said.

96pgmcc
jun 29, 2020, 5:15 am

>92 jillmwo:, see >93 pgmcc: for my memory correction confession. You are the source of my Chakraborty delight.

97pgmcc
jun 29, 2020, 5:32 am

Looking back over threads from last year I noticed your talking about a Josephine Tey novel. It had not registered with me until now. Having been introduced to her reading with The Daughter of Time I have left myself open to another direct hit from you; Miss Pym Disposes is now on my Kindle. Good shooting.

98jillmwo
jul 4, 2020, 4:27 pm

A couple of brief reviews of mysteries from the past few months:

The Case of the Wandering Scholar by Kate Saunders -- This is the second entry in an historical mystery series featuring clerical widow, Laetitia Rodd, as the quiet, discreet investigator. It’s a series attempt at classical puzzle mysteries. I guessed the solution in the first volume, but not the very tangled solution in this second volume. Not bad, but not compelling.

Gentlemen Formerly Dressed by Sulari Gentll -- Back in 2017, I encountered the Rowland Sinclair mystery series by Sulari Gentill. The first two I had read were relatively mild - not overly cozy but not chock-full of serial killers and/or bloody instruments of mayhem. Gentill’s historical series is set in the 1930s and the ones I read were set largely in Australia. They seemed to be well-researched and, while Gentill’s writing wasn’t lyrical, the books were plausibly and competently constructed. I had skipped over one or two in the series but then picked up one entitled Gentlemen Formerly Dressed. (I think it’s number 5 in the series or thereabouts.) At any rate, it became clear in the initial pages that the previous work (which I’d not read) had taken a particularly dark turn in terms of what had happened to the lead character. In Gentleman, Rowland Sinclair is seen recuperating from a run-in with Nazi forces in Munich; he has managed to escape to London and reunite with his brother who has traveled over for a peace conference. One of his arms is broken and we learn there are severe burn scars on his back. Sinclair somehow encounters a dead body in his hotel (one that is oddly garbed) and the book unfolds as Rowly and his friends attempt to ensure that the dead man’s niece isn’t wrongly convicted of the murder. The mystery was sufficiently complex to at least keep my intellectual interest up, but I did find the “torture” element very difficult to read in light of recent protests and conflicts with police.

I tried to read The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey, but reading about the cultural practice of purdah in India in the 1930s simply fueled quarantine/confinement nightmares. The writing is excellent, but I just couldn’t continue.

Collected Short Mysteries by Ngaio Marsh. This worked for me because of the short story format which sometimes fit better into available time slots. In this particular collection, two of them reminded me (somewhat) of plots found in full length novels I’d read with Inspector Alleyn as the primary detective. The third Alleyn short story found here was on the lighter end of things but unfamiliar to me. There were three other very short non-Alleyn stories (one on the dark side), followed by a teleplay that Marsh had done for a show called Crown Court.

On the up side, pgmcc, my much-delayed copy of Empire of Gold did finally arrive late last night.

99pgmcc
jul 4, 2020, 7:28 pm

>98 jillmwo: On the up side, pgmcc, my much-delayed copy of Empire of Gold did finally arrive late last night.

Great!

Enjoy.

100jillmwo
jul 7, 2020, 8:18 pm

You know, whether due to feelings of charity or not, this crowd was surprisingly silent over the odd repetition of reviews appearing in both >84 jillmwo: and >98 jillmwo:. I repeated reviews there in the middle of #98 (clearly having forgotten in the space of ten days that I'd already posted those comments). This was not an instance of the LT gremlin duplicating a single message; this was good old fashioned HUMAN ERROR.

You all notice the itty bitty typo in a date back in one of the May postings, but not the major whopper of an error in July?

Are you all so deep in your cups sitting here in the Pub? Did someone uncork the last batch of Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters?

101pgmcc
Redigeret: jul 8, 2020, 2:46 am

>100 jillmwo: We just didn’t like to say.

I was also taking note of your second shot at me with Ngaio Marsh.

102jillmwo
jul 8, 2020, 4:52 pm

>100 jillmwo: There's another one headed your way so keep an eye out...

103pgmcc
jul 8, 2020, 5:08 pm

>102 jillmwo:
Whenever I see you have put up a post I automatically crouch down behind any available cover. You still manage to strike home.

104jillmwo
jul 11, 2020, 5:10 pm

Two clips of prose from A Clutch of Constables

The first:

The night was warm and still and the air full of pleasant scents from the lock-keeper’s garden: stocks, tobacco flowers, newly watered earth and at the back of these the cold dank smell of The River. These scents, she thought, made up one of the three elements of night; the next was composed of things that were to be seen before the moon rose: ambiguous pools of darkness, lighted windows, stars, the shapes of trees and the dim whiteness of a bench hard by their moorings. Troy sat there for a time to listen to the third element of night: an owl somewhere in a spinney downstream, the low, intermittent colloquy of moving water, indefinable stirrings, the small flutters and bumps made by flying insects and the homely sound of people talking quietly.

And the second:

Murder doesn’t scream instantly from the walls of a room that may be drenched in blood. Clean the room up and it is just a room again. If violence of behaviour or of emotion does, in fact, project itself upon its immediate surroundings, like light upon photographic film, the process seems to be cumulative rather than immediate. It may be a long time after the event that people begin to think: this is an unhappy house. Or room. Or place. Or craft.

There isn’t that style of ruminative writing throughout every chapter of the novel, but now and again, Marsh includes an evocative paragraph of this sort and one is mentally transported to England in the late ‘60’s. This is supported by the alternating structure of the story telling. There are the chapters told by Inspector Alleyn to a ballroom of fellow professionals and the chapters captured in Troy’s letters to her husband as she allows herself a brief vacation interlude. It provides an odd mix of that cold reality associated with modern policing and the charm suggested by a leisurely river cruise from Norminster to Longminster (*)

Of the dozen or so Inspector Alleyn titles I've read, this is one of the best. Intellectually challenging and vibrantly told. (The others are Light Thickens, Night at the Vulcan and Death and the Dancing Footman. I am pleased that I still have another dozen of Ngaio Marsh’s books left to read.)

(*) Based on less than 15 minutes investigation, I was able to determine that Longminster might well be intended to be Yorkminster but I couldn't work out what the other end of the route (Norminster) might be. And the river that the canal boat is on is never named. Any LT Brits able to help me sort out the geography here?

105-pilgrim-
jul 11, 2020, 5:25 pm

>104 jillmwo: You could, I think make it from York to Ripon by water, using the River Ouse and the Ripon Canal. Both are cathedral cities and have minsters.

I don't know the waterways personally though, so I recommend not taking my word for it without checking.

106MrsLee
jul 11, 2020, 5:53 pm

>104 jillmwo: Lovely excerpts. I enjoy Marsh now and then. A steady diet is too much, but now and then she suits a mood.

107pgmcc
jul 11, 2020, 5:54 pm

>104 jillmwo: Is this part of your firing BBs at me? Is A Clutch of Constables a good place to start with Marsh, or would that be enjoying the best before reading less impressive tales?

108jillmwo
Redigeret: apr 24, 2022, 10:27 am

>107 pgmcc: Well, first of all, let me note a correction. Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 novels featuring Inspector Alleyn and I've not read more than a third of that number. My perspective is therefore limited. Some of that third I did not finish -- I've never gotten through Death in Ecstasy, for example. I have a stash of unread titles from Marsh that I'm slowly working my way through, because as >106 MrsLee: notes, too steady or excessive a diet isn't necessarily enjoyable. I"d recommend starting with either Artists in Crime or with Death and the Dancing Footman as there is still a bit of the traditional country house set-up in those titles. See how you do with those. I thought Light Thickens was outstanding because it focused so much on a theatrical production of Macbeth; speaking personally, I think that one was really her best. Serious criticism would point you to Died in the Wool as one of her best but I have not read that one. I also enjoyed Night at the Vulcan, again because it was set in the theatre world and Marsh does that environment very well.

One of the virtues of reading Marsh's work is that they're all of a length that is readily read within the space of a weekend. (Looking ahead to a full week off, I am feeling a bit more comfortable with trying to get through Empire of Gold without interruption, which means I'll save more of the Inspector Alleyn titles for the future.)

Updated to add: pgmcc, unless you have a fondness of medical murders, I do not advise either The Nursing Home Murders by Ngaio Marsh or The Dutch Shoe Mystery by Ellery Queen. Both to my mind were irritatingly tedious.

109jillmwo
jul 12, 2020, 8:33 am

>105 -pilgrim-: THANK YOU. It was a niggling question that I had no way of investigating. The cruise as outlined in Clutch of Constables takes five days. Would that work for your proposed route of Ripon to Yorkminster and back?

110-pilgrim-
Redigeret: jul 13, 2020, 8:58 am

>109 jillmwo:
I have checked, and the Ripon Canal-River Ure-River Ouse route is navigable over the entire route.


As to how long that would take:
There is a nice interactive map about navigating the Ure here:
https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/enjoy-the-waterways/canal-and-river-network/ure-n...

So, about 10 miles for the Ure. And according to this:
https://www.waterways.org.uk/waterways/canals_rivers/ripon_canal/ripon_canal
2.3 miles for the Canal.

You need to add the relevant stretch of the Ouse to that, of course, which (from that first map), looks to about double the distance.

I don't know how fast your boat goes, and you need to remember to allow time to pass through the locks, but does 55 miles return trip sound like a viable speed for you?

If you want to play around with other possible stretches of waterway, I recommend the PDF downloadable from the www.waterways.org.uk site.

111pgmcc
jul 13, 2020, 8:19 am

>108 jillmwo: Artists in Crime ordered for my Kindle. You can cut that notch on the stock of your BB-gun.

112jillmwo
Redigeret: jul 26, 2020, 5:59 pm

Up there in #45, I noted that sometimes a quote from a book can grab you as being the central point of the work. I just encountered the following in Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels by Rachel Cohen*.

There's a balance in reading as in all things -- to read in a desultory, uncommitted way shows a want of exertion, to live in books to the exclusion of one's neighbors a want of compassion. Although we now think of reading as a generally solitary activity; in Austen's day people often read aloud to one another. Her family did this nearly every evening. They judged books by how they sounded on a second reading, a third. Austen's characters learn to read and to re-read...

I'm only about three chapters into this title and as substance goes, this is pretty good.

*Touchstone associated with book had been wonky, which was due to an error on my part. It's fixed now.

Edited to note that I realize that this may not make as much sense out of context as might be necessary. However, I've been unable to immerse myself in any particular title lately and the reading I've done in some instances HAS been desultory. (There's also been the issue/impact described in Nicholas Carr's old article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. Some people are also saying that the pandemic is having an impact on our brains. I dunno which variable is most at fault.) But Cohen had been talking about her own insight into Austen talking about what her characters are reading and why it matters. And her memoir is about her own reading of Austen and why it matters.) Sometimes I think my issue is due to too broad an array of books being available to me; it's just too easy to put something down and go to a different volume of distraction.

113-pilgrim-
Redigeret: aug 29, 2020, 11:05 am

>112 jillmwo: If you think how much a book cost then, then it is understandable for people to have smaller libraries, which forces the rereading habit.

Then one expected a book to be a thing to be treasured. I think it is the fact that if a book is bad, we simply move onto the next, which has massively changed how we read. We are more tolerant of poor writing, because we can simply discard the book and move on.

I have been reading The Way of the Pilgrim recently. The author is a disabled Russian peasant. He owns two second-hand books. He walked miles to find a bookseller who he had heard had an affordable second hand copy of his second book. When it is stolen he chases down the convict chain that includes the criminals who took his book, and pays all the money that he has in the world (with the exception of the Bible, his clothes and his sack) to get it back from them. And that for a book that he has already read many times over!

There is much of that era that I certainly would not want to go back to - but I think we could learn much from an time where a writer could spend a decade lovingly crafting his book, and his readers them going on reading and reading it for decades after.

114jillmwo
jul 26, 2020, 5:58 pm

>113 -pilgrim-: I do seem to find re-reading stuff to be easier in some ways, given the current stress in the general world situation. One of the things about Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels is that it caused me to reconsider aspects of Austen's novels, which I have re-visited regularly in recent years. I am not immediately dropping everything to re-read them but a lot of this afternoon was spent thinking about S&S in response to what Cohen was writing. She associates S&S with a period of mourning in her own life and notes that Elinor and Marianne are themselves in an early period of mourning for the space of the book. I doubt that my husband would have any interest in re-reading the novels aloud to me in the evenings, but re-reading for myself (or even reading what others are saying about their own reading of Austen) allows me to re-consider the meat of the very familiar story lines in these five novels. I don't see them as anything like the light romance novels that they were originally sold as being. At the same time, I don't overvalue much of the tightly-focused academic interpretations that I have seen spilling out from publishers over the years. I've been surprised by Cohen's writing and her prose is fabulous, but my enjoyment here has been being recalled into Austen.

115-pilgrim-
jul 26, 2020, 10:04 pm

>114 jillmwo: I agree totally that Jane Austen's novels were never intended as light romances.

Each book is a bitter critique of what she saw wrong with how the society of her day treated women. Pride and Prejudice attacks the way the laws of entail prevent a father from making provision for his daughters, forcing them to marry for money. Sense and Sensibility is about how the lack of a son means that a family life not only their father and husband, but also their home. Persuasion is about the double standard of the short "shelf life" for women, whilst men become more desirable in their thirties, because their careers and character are established, not merely "promising".

Why I consider her a genius, is that she hides the theme within a romance. Dickens, for example, trends to beat you over the head with social justice issues - you know he is right, but you are also aware of being lectured. Jane gets her message out more subversively.

If she had not, her books could not have reached such a wide audience. Many autocratic parents and husbands would have forbidden their daughters and wives a book on the subject of the oppression of women - but "a silly little romance" is not something that they are going to bother to inspect. Jane Austen's pastiche of the Gothic novel,, Northanger Abbey shows that she was well aware what novels "like hers" were thought of by a male audience.

You make Austen Years sound very tempting.

116jillmwo
Redigeret: aug 2, 2020, 9:03 am

Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels is a lovely read. Recommended, if only because it drives revisiting the various Austen titles themselves.

117jillmwo
Redigeret: aug 2, 2020, 5:51 pm

I am now reading an odd example of what has been called Blitz Lit -- this is British fiction written during or about London during the Blitz. I am currently gulping down Table Two. The story is populated by a variety of odd women working as translators for the Ministry of Foreign Intelligence. The main characters are an older woman, unhappy with her current lot, unpopular with her colleagues and whose internal miseries are clutched tightly to herself. The second is a young nineteen year-old, naive and poorly prepared for real life but still trying to earn her way. The story opens just at the point where the Blitz is beginning and while the prose itself is absolutely pedestrian, the episodes described are vivid in their experiential detail. Something I read last year, I remember summarizing by saying that the novel should be read primarily as social history rather than because either the plot or the characters were particularly compelling. That's the case with this one as well. Still worthwhile.

118Sakerfalcon
aug 3, 2020, 5:52 am

>117 jillmwo: Table two is on my TBR pile and I hope to get to it this month.

119Sakerfalcon
Redigeret: aug 28, 2020, 6:59 am

>117 jillmwo: I've just finished Table Two and agree with your description of it as a good representation of social history. I felt it really brought home the experience of living and working during the Blitz. I have to say, I think if I had to work with most of those women I would have been driven mad though!

120HannahGibson
aug 28, 2020, 7:30 am

Denne bruger er blevet fjernet som værende spam.

121reading_fox
aug 28, 2020, 5:02 pm

>110 -pilgrim-: just passing by - canal/narrow boats travel at about 2mph (max is 4mph) and may average even less if there's many locks or other traffic to pass. 5 days is just about feasible, but they'd be very long days on the water, tiring and need to be summer to have the daylight.

122-pilgrim-
aug 29, 2020, 10:44 am

>121 reading_fox: That's useful to know. Thank you.

123-pilgrim-
Redigeret: aug 29, 2020, 11:04 am

>116 jillmwo: You have persuaded me.

>117 jillmwo: I read fiction written in the forties, but I confess I find the modern trend of fiction written about that period extremely irritating. I would much rather read accounts from people who were actually there, and displaying the actual mentality of the era, than people trying to imagine what it was like.

I had plenty of elderly, and not so elderly (some are still around!) relatives who were Londoners who lived through the Blitz, so I got my accounts of what it was like from them.

I find inaccurate historical fiction infuriates me. And I remember my father watching the TV detective drama, Foyle's War with thunder on his face. Whilst the critics, who were too young to remember the period, were praising its attention to historical detail, my father spent the entire time muttering things like: "Rubbish! He would have been court-martialled for that!", "Why is he not wearing a hat?", "Keeping his hat on while talking to a lady? Disgraceful manners!" and so on - the entire time. It mattered to him, because he felt it an insult to that generation, and those that did not survive those years, to misrepresent them cavalierly. I understand his reaction, and probably share it.

I am currently reading one of my father's old books: a collection of articles written for the RAF in house magazine during the war years. The level of understatement in some of the accounts is truly wonderful

124MrsLee
aug 31, 2020, 2:17 pm

>123 -pilgrim-: For the same reason, my brother who is a retired policeman, can only watch police dramas as fantasy.

125-pilgrim-
Redigeret: aug 31, 2020, 4:12 pm

>124 MrsLee: I can only imagine. I expect that the reality of police procedure would not fit well into the conventions of an hour's drama.

126jillmwo
sep 4, 2020, 6:16 pm

I have spent the past two-three weekends researching and writing a white paper for a client. I am now looking at a THREE-DAY-WEEKEND where I can read what I choose. YAY *sound of masses cheering*

For those of you who like reading science-based non-fiction, I found Viruses, Plagues, and History by Michael Oldstone to be very readable and very interesting. It has chapters on smallpox, yellow fever, polio, and similarly horrifying diseases that have caused consternation in the midst of daily life.

127pgmcc
sep 4, 2020, 6:18 pm

>126 jillmwo: Enjoy your three day reading weekend.

128jillmwo
sep 5, 2020, 12:40 pm

Kenneth Brannagh’s film version of Death on the Nile opens in October. That’s fine. I liked the cinematography of his Murder on the Orient Express and it had a great cast, although some of the scripting was a "off" in my view. Due to the pandemic, I am unlikely to see Death on the Nile in the theatre; I will hope instead for it to hit the streaming services quickly. But reading some of marketing materials set me off down a rabbit hole this week. According to advance publicity quotes from Brannagh, his focus for the film has been on the idea of lust. Lust, steamy on-screen lust. Well, that’s his view, and I can find statements in the book that support that interpretation, but I really don’t agree that lust is the central theme of DOTN. Sex sells, an important factor in movie-making, but sex isn’t the sole way in which we make ourselves and others sufficiently miserable to inspire murder.

DOTN is all about ownership, past, present, and future and the characters’ willingness or unwillingness to let things go. It’s about misperceptions of ownership as a source of happiness. Why should life’s gifts of wealth, beauty, brains, etc. be so random in distribution? We hear from a variety of characters that it’s just not fair. Throughout the novel, Poirot reacts to a variety of spoken statements where an individual moans that another has all of life’s benefits! Beyond the murders occurring on board ship, there are a number of other crimes to be dealt with. Most film versions of DOTN end up eliminating a number of secondary characters in order to tighten up the plot line. Based on advance publicity for Branagh’s movie, he’s done the same thing of melding multiple characters into one. (Example: Annette Bening has been cast as a character named Euphemia and there’s absolutely no character with that name in the book. Heaven knows what function Euphemia plays in the screenwriter’s adaptation. I’m wondering if she’s a nod to Mrs Allerton, the overprotective mother of a young male passenger in the story.)

I keep returning to Christie and finding the novels less superficial than they’re popularly viewed as being. She’s not overly deep in presenting the psychological motivations -- not like a Ruth Rendell or a Tana French -- because she’s usually focused on creating a complex puzzle rather than on complex characters.

At any rate, it’s fun to revisit DOTN (even when one already knows whodunnit and why) and consider how one might adjust the plot if responsible for directing a new film version. I’m less about re-casting the film and more about ensuring people get the author’s original intent.

129Narilka
sep 5, 2020, 5:46 pm

>128 jillmwo: Funny you should mention that. His audible recording of the book released recently and I just started it. I love his narration. This is my first time through the story.

130jillmwo
Redigeret: sep 7, 2020, 3:43 pm

Oh, I have so enjoyed reading The Other Bennet Sister this weekend. It's SO, so well-done. Not perhaps the right book for you if you're enjoying wallowing in Murderbot or in Chakraborty's Empire of Gold, but perfect if you want to read a nice, thoughtful novel, that hearkens back to its original source material without its losing sight of its own original thought. I'm giving it five stars!!!

If you can't recall who Mary Bennet is from Pride and Prejudice, she's the middle sister who reads Fordyce's Sermons and has a conversational knack of saying things that are either tactless or overly didactic. She's not as lively or as pretty as either Jane or Lizzie, but neither is she as silly as either Kitty or Lydia. She's just incredibly awkward and ultimately Austen leaves her stuck at home with the wretched Mrs. Bennet.

In The Other Bennet Sister, Hadlow actually does a wonderful job of getting inside Mary's head and situation. Mary is the plain daughter with even fewer marital expectations than her four sisters. She overhears her mother say this and the novel then follows the process of self-actualization that turns Mary from a sad, unhappy girl into a young woman of confidence and maturity. (For myself, I will never view Mary the same way ever again as I read P&P.) There are swords crossed with the likes of Caroline Bingley, Charlotte Lucas Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, but I was thrilled that these interactions did not dominate the novel. We do see a good deal of the Gardiners and their happy family life. Mary gets to visit the Lake country with them as Elizabeth did not.

What really makes this novel enjoyable for the Austen are the passing phrases that occur hearkening back to other Austen novels; one line revisits Captain Wentworth's letter to Anne Eliot and I just sighed happily in recognition of the significance. There are discussions of poetry and the expressions that have meaning to adults who are balancing between sense and sensibility as qualities. As a character type, Mary has many parallels to Fanny Price of Mansfield Park. The story of Mary’s romance is a bit more center-stage and therefore a bit more satisfactory than Fanny’s (which is tied up in the same of a mere page and one half), but Hadlow’s book is not just an Austen sequel or a costumed regency romance novel. It has it's own story line, it's own point about human relationships, and a highly satisfying resolution.

Marissa_Doyle, this is one you will enjoy if you haven't already!!

131-pilgrim-
sep 7, 2020, 5:27 pm

>130 jillmwo: I don't usually like novels that borrow their characters from other authors, but you are really tempting me here...

132jillmwo
sep 7, 2020, 8:54 pm

Well, don't do anything just yet, >131 -pilgrim-:. I gather that Marissa (who knows far more about the Regency period than I) was not overly impressed so there may be a massive error that I missed in my reading. I'll tend to trust her input on things like this. I enjoyed the book as a casual read but someone with real background in the field may have seen something I missed.

Actually, like you, most times I don't like it either when people draw on other established literary figures to write their novels. I was in the right mood for this kind of a novel this weekend.

133Marissa_Doyle
sep 7, 2020, 10:17 pm

>132 jillmwo: I was about 90 or so pages in (I forget--should check my e-reader) before I had to stop. There were a few errors that really bothered me: Sir William Lucas was not a baronet--he was knighted. There's a big difference, though the title for both is "Sir"--a baronetcy is hereditary, while a knighthood is not. And he was not wealthy--that was why Charlotte Lucas was so happy to receive Mr. Collins's proposal. Had her father been wealthy, she would have had enough of a dowry to attract suitors. Then there was the assembly ball: having Mary and the young optician (Sparrow?) be unaware that one did not dance more than twice with someone you're not engaged to was like someone from today having to be told some basic etiquette rule that is simply part of the culture--how did they get to be old enough to attend a dance without knowing that? Yeah, I know she did that to forward her plot...but it was ham-fisted plotting. About then I gave up.

Things like this bug me perhaps more than they do other people...but why did the author make those mistakes? If you're writing a pastiche (or, essentially, fan fiction), you'd darned well better be in command of the details of the world you're writing in. Then, down the road, why didn't the editor or copyeditor notice these errors and clumsy choices?

But beyond that, the writing simply didn't grab me. Mrs. Bennet and Lydia were caricatures of themselves (well, Lydia was one in the original too, but you had to feel sorry for Mrs. Bennet worrying about what was going to become of her five daughters once Mr. B cocked his toes up. There was some reason behind all her vapors and palpitations.)

134-pilgrim-
sep 8, 2020, 5:20 am

>133 Marissa_Doyle: I am glad to see someone else appears to share my view about the irresponsibility of Lizzie's darling father's behaviour.

But Mrs Bennet is the reason why I agree with you wholeheartedly that it is impossible for Mary to have remained ignorant of the expectations of polite society. If both parents had been rebels, who had decided to ignore the "rules" then it might have been possible for a girl who considered herself above (or ineligible for?) such things to have remained ignorant, but Mrs Bennet would never have permitted a daughter of hers to remain ignorant, and thereby hamper her marriage chances.

And of course the lack of money in the Lucas family is why poor Charlotte has to marry for it. She is not naturally avaricious, just desperate, and aware how limited her options are. I didn't rememberv that Sir William did not have a hereditary peerage though. Do we ever learn what he was knighted for?

After reading both your reviews, I think I will stay away. It's a pity, because I always felt Jane Austen dealt harshly with Mary. She is always emphasising that Mary has no real intelligence or love of learning, and that it is simply and affectation - but isn't that just the standard response of a middle child, who knows she is not as pretty as her sisters, desperately trying to find her "thing"? "The bookworm" may not have been a good label in that era, but "the plain one" is worse.

135Marissa_Doyle
sep 8, 2020, 10:44 am

>134 -pilgrim-: This, from P&P: "Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune, and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the king during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business, and to his residence in a small market town; and, in quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and, unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him courteous"

There's an implication that he may have purchased his knighthood, and spent the "tolerable fortune" on it--the selling of knighthoods was a bit of a fundraiser for the Crown at the time. And by doing so, he ruined his ability to marry his daughters off...hence poor Charlotte's decision.

136-pilgrim-
sep 8, 2020, 1:32 pm

>135 Marissa_Doyle: Thank you, Marissa. It has been a long time.

I am not sure whether I would agree that he ruined his daughters' marriage chances, though. Without it, they would have suffered under the stigma of his being "in trade".

And whereas there were (and are!) always impoverished songs of the gentry ego need to marry for money, conversely there would also be families, with money enough not to care about the dowry, for a marriage that would give them an entrance into society. Charlotte is so limited in her options because she would consider it beneath her to marry the sort of young man who would consider her "a good catch".

I am currently reading a Georgette Heyer novel, and am pleasantly impressed at how well she seems to be catching the 18th century attitudes.

Which historical novelists would you commend for their accuracy?

137Marissa_Doyle
sep 8, 2020, 1:42 pm

>136 -pilgrim-: One of the best historical novelists is actually a science fiction writer--Connie Willis. Her Doomsday Book is astonishing for its depiction of the medieval mindset. I'll think about who else.

138jillmwo
sep 8, 2020, 7:40 pm

>133 Marissa_Doyle: I agree with you about the two-dance rule to some extent. Like you, my immediate reaction was that they should have known about that unspoken rule of etiquette. In thinking about it later on, my theory was that the author was underscoring the neglect that Mary endured -- the mother who couldn't be bothered to properly supervise, her older sisters who were distracted by their own heart burnings, etc. It is Charlotte, a non-family member, who notices and warns Mary. And as you note, the author had her own very particular point to make and took a less-than-ideal way of moving her plot along.

Personally, I don't think Hadlow did particularly well in capturing either Mr. Collins or Charlotte; their time "on-stage" later on in the novel becomes pivotal to Mary's growth and the lack of the distinctive nature of Mr. Collins' dialogue was noticeable. I know other reviewers have complained that the pacing was needlessly slow. Did the author really need 466 pages to tell this story? On one level, she did because the point of the story was the slow process of Mary's development and the narrative needed to match that. That said, I found myself speeding along through the very short chapters -- in part because I really wanted to see where she was going with the novel. Could she work the transformation of a plain, priggish teenager into a believably confident young woman? The process she showed in the book for me was believable, even if some of the mechanics weren't.

With all of the novel's faults, I thought Hadlow did successfully weave in the place of poetry as a mature form of emotional expression. Wordsworth isn't everyone's cup of tea these days but the slow ascent to Scafell is something of a parallel to the slow process needed for Mary to come into her own

Reading The Other Bennet Sister was my treat for a long weekend. I was reading quickly because I didn't want to give into the analytical, critical side of my brain. I just wanted to be wafted away to a different setting. For purposes of discussing it, I'm glad you picked up on the flaws. And now, I'm sure, >131 -pilgrim-: you understand why I thought we probably would want to hear from Marissa!

At some point, I would like to spend time talking here in the Pub about when it is okay to diverge from historical accuracy for the sake of telling a story and when doing so is just a dodge and sign of laziness.

139-pilgrim-
sep 13, 2020, 4:05 am

>138 jillmwo: At some point, I would like to spend time talking here in the Pub about when it is okay to diverge from historical accuracy for the sake of telling a story and when doing so is just a dodge and sign of laziness.
I think that would be a very interesting discussion.

140jillmwo
Redigeret: sep 29, 2020, 7:40 pm

Sometimes you go off on a bout of reading that is more like the dipping in and out of reference books. The activity is more like what one does writing a term paper or research project than it is a straight-forward progression through one book at a time. That’s rather where I’ve been these past two or three weeks. I haven’t been able to settle in with any fiction so I turned to non-fiction.

I had already been stuck in the 19th century amid discussions of deadly (and frequent) epidemics of cholera and yellow fever while working on a freelance assignment about U.S. quarantine stations. At some point, I watched the PBS Documentary, Death and the Civil War, which then drove me to the book on which it was based -- The Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War. The book opens by considering what the act of death demanded of members of a civilized society in the 19th century and discusses in interesting ways how those considerations in a horrific war changed American ideas of what a government is obligated to do for the families of its fallen dead. It was a bit grim, but my interest was caught by Civil War history. This meant that I dug out the Pulitzer Prize winner Reveille in Washington: 1860 - 1865, which is a lively account of Washington D.C. during that period. Reading the early chapters about Lincoln’s inaugural introduced me to Kate Chase Sprague, who was the daughter of one of Lincoln’s political rivals, Salmon P. Chase. She had a life “fraught with incident”, managing to famously snub Mary Lincoln, be escorted around town by James Garfield, and end up a divorced woman for having an adulterous affair with Roscoe Conkling.

Salmon Chase served as Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and ultimately he became Chief Justice of the United States. His portrait is currently on the $10,000 bill (not that I’ve ever seen one of those) for the work he did in keeping the US solvent during the Civil War.. He was an out-spoken abolitionist and supported the enfranchisement of black men.. He oversaw the impeachment proceedings against Andrew Johnson as well as working out an acceptable handling of the trial of Jefferson Davis. Some of what I learned about him came from American Queen which is ostensibly a biography about Kate Chase, but there was much more to be gained from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals.

So this isn’t really straightforward reading (well, at least, not linear reading) because it’s jumping from one thing to another. it's just what I’ve been doing to keep the little grey cells active.

Edited to fix a typo

141BrokenTune
sep 27, 2020, 5:34 pm

>140 jillmwo: Does reading always have to be straightforward? I also enjoy a bit of a research project every now and then. Your project sounds both grim and fun.

142jillmwo
sep 28, 2020, 7:33 pm

Grim and fun Yes, it's an odd combination, BrokenTune, but it's kind of where I am. At one point, someone on a previous thread of mine noted that the folks leaving comments in the discussion sounded very much as if they were all particularly well-read axe murderers. (We had been figuring out how to hide a body at the time.)

143-pilgrim-
Redigeret: sep 29, 2020, 3:46 am

>142 jillmwo: Why use an axe? An outdated and inconveniently messy method, IMO. ;-)

ETA: It must be something about the Green Dragon. BookstoogeLT's thread contains a debate on bank robbing...

144pgmcc
sep 29, 2020, 4:17 am

>142 jillmwo:

Jill, you are not supposed to give everything away. Mum's the word. Say nought!

145haydninvienna
sep 29, 2020, 9:07 am

And what with the secret agent activities of another GDer who shall not be named here ...

146pgmcc
sep 29, 2020, 9:42 am

Did I mention I was reading The Quiller Memorandum?

147SamLongworth
sep 29, 2020, 10:02 am

Denne bruger er blevet fjernet som værende spam.

148BrokenTune
sep 29, 2020, 10:58 am

>144 pgmcc: LoL. Is it weird that this conversation brightened up my day?

149jillmwo
Redigeret: sep 30, 2020, 7:11 pm

A different kind of reading experience today. I was reading for Storybook Hour at our church. We're still under pandemic conditions so it wasn't me reading to a real circle of small fry, but rather the youth coordinator used an iPad to record the event. The book was a delightful picture book The Quiltmaker's Gift. Nice story -- not sappy and with a proper whiff of folk or fairy tale -- with gorgeous illustrations. Bright colors. The bit where the quilt maker goes and makes a pillow for the grouchy hibernating bear in his cave includes a series of small illustrations of the bear trying to sleep on a bed of boulders. At her recommendation, the bear gathers pine boughs and she stuffs the boughs into her red shawl so that the bear has a pillow and so he won't be quite so uncomfortable. At any rate, if you've got kids or grandkids, I heartily recommend it.

150jillmwo
okt 18, 2020, 3:59 pm

The first hundred years of Christie are currently being celebrated. (The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920.) I have still not read everything she ever wrote in part because I don’t like some of her later ones. That said, I was looking for some pandemic binge watching in recent weeks and watched some of the Poirot series that included one I’d not watched -- Third Girl. The David Suchet television version was set in the rather rigid culture of the 30’s but the actual title was actually written and published in the swingin' sixties. I wanted to see how much they’d actually felt they needed to adapt for viewers in 2008. So I finally got around to reading this particular Christie.

It differs from most of her other ones in terms of narrative structure. There’s no actual corpse available to Poirot and Ariadne Oliver to investigate until Chapter 24 or thereabouts. The book's theme is more about how one sorts through information and events when there is no discernible social model or common behavioral conventions to go by. Is the motive (behind a crime that no one has actually yet committed) to do with youthful misunderstandings of how adult life unfolds and the regrets that subsequently emerge or is it about losing a sense of shared foundation? Is it lust, lucre, or loathing that drives this? You really don't know until you've got to the final chapters of this one. To be honest, the television version tidied up some of the sillier elements of the text but the text version actually had a much clearer theme to get across. I wouldn’t say I recommend this particular Christie as it was very “talky”, but it was interesting to see how she fit the pieces together and to look at the underlying structure and where/how clues got dropped. There are times when Christie is sadly underrated.

Then I did with a book group (safely-distanced over Zoom) of one of the early Gideon Oliver mysteries Curses which was just not very good. Too much description of weather and a Mexican resort with insufficient character development. But it wasn’t my choice of a title this time around.

Then I went and re-watched the Scorsese version of The Age of Innocence and thought I’d re-read that one. I’m not that far into the re-read as yet and so far, I’m finding myself a bit annoyed at seeing that story solely through Newland Archer’s eyes. Ye G-ds, the Gilded Age didn’t have much to recommend it in some ways. On the other hand, it’s a lovely hardcover Franklin Library (second hand) edition so I’m enjoying the production values.

I am still reading Reveille in Washington. But that is non-fiction where I have to scribble down names to go look up later. Pandemic binge-watching plays a role in that one as well. There was a 45-minute documentary called Lincoln’s Washington in War that seemed to have a good deal of cross-over material with Reveille in Washington. Snappy for a documentary but really, why not just refer those interested to the original Pulitzer-Prize-winning source material?

151Majel-Susan
okt 18, 2020, 5:06 pm

>150 jillmwo: I'll confess that I've read very few of Christie's novels, but I love the Poirot series with David Suchet, especially the older episodes with Hugh Fraser. Definitely one of my all-time favourite series!

152BrokenTune
okt 18, 2020, 5:36 pm

>150 jillmwo: Third Girl was an odd book and an odd adaptation. I also found the story to be more readable in the book, but liked the adaptation for leaving out some of the details.

Her later books definitely are not on par with the early ones, and most definitely nowhere near as fab as her middle period. :D

153Sakerfalcon
okt 19, 2020, 9:03 am

>150 jillmwo: Your point about seeing the events of The age of innocence solely through Archer's eyes makes me wonder if that is why it's not among my favourite Wharton's. I admire it greatly, yet The house of mirth and The custom of the country are the ones I return to most often. I also like The fruit of the tree a great deal; it seems to be overlooked, perhaps because it's not set in gilded New York.

154clamairy
Redigeret: okt 20, 2020, 10:04 pm

>150 jillmwo: & >153 Sakerfalcon: I enjoyed The Age of Innocence and I thought the film was very well done. I had completely forgotten that was Scorsese! I am not a huge fan of The House of Mirth, but adored Ethan Fromme, (not sure which one of those two is more depressing. LOL) and her short story collection with Roman Fever in it is also wonderful. Has anyone ever made a film version of that? I must move The Custom of the Country up my pile. I don't think I have even heard of The Fruit of the Tree. Great... another bullet.

155jillmwo
Redigeret: okt 24, 2020, 3:14 pm

>153 Sakerfalcon: and >154 clamairy: Some 10 or 15 years back, I binged on a whole lot of Edith Wharton novels and short stories. I read The House of Mirth (depressing as all get out), Ethan Frome, Custom of the Country, and others. Her ghost stories were fun as well. But my favorite Wharton short story is "Xingu" (available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20021120051401/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/...

The story skewers the way people "fake it" in book club discussions. (I say that recognizing that I've probably been guilty of it upon occasion.) Sometimes I read it and think she was being unkind; other days, I read it and can enjoy it as really rather funny.

156jillmwo
Redigeret: okt 25, 2020, 3:24 pm

Having finished my re-read of The Age of Innocence, I am left with more questions than conclusions. This time around, I did not see it as the love story that Martin Scorcese portrayed on film. It seems more to me to be a meditation on the tensions between being true to self and satisfying the demands of community. The love between Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska was more a vehicle than anything else. (And can I just say that I have NEVER met a man who ever felt moved to kiss a woman’s shoe or the hem of one’s gown. I don’t say that as any reflection on current or past loves. I just have doubts that any human male has ever done it during either the Gilded Age or in back in 1920 when the book was published. I didn’t buy it when it showed up in The Scarlet Pimpernel either.) But I don't see it as a denunciation of the Gilded Age which I think is the general perception.

I was also a bit miffed that no comment was offered on the economic problems that Countess Olenska must have faced. She behaves honorably. She leaves Newland to May on the basis of May’s expectations of a birth and goes with cousin Melora Manson (dreary creature that she is) to live in Paris. (Which put me back in mind of The Disinherited and the Sackville-Wests.)

Given the lack of warm fuzzy feelings about it, normally I’d pitch a book like this into the Goodwill box or share it in the Little Free Library that my church maintains. But I may need to wait another 5-10 years and re-read it again just to see if I still feel this way. After all, age grants wisdom. Maybe I'll grow up at some point.

On the other hand, one thing I learned this past week was that this book won the Pulitzer Prize the year it was published; Wharton was the first woman to receive the award. But what makes it interesting was that apparently the favored candidate for the Pulitzer that year was actually Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. But that title was deemed just a little bit too edgy so the committee gave it to Wharton instead. Humph...

Edited to Add: Am now about to begin Square Hauntings as my next read. Oh, and I read (rather rapidly and shallowly) a Ngaio Marsh title, Overture to Death. Not bad, but I suspect I ought to have been reading it more slowly. Reading on the Kindle really doesn't always work for me.

157pgmcc
okt 25, 2020, 3:42 pm

>156 jillmwo:
Reading on the Kindle really doesn't always work for me.

You are not alone.

158jillmwo
Redigeret: nov 17, 2020, 8:12 am

Reynard The Fox

I first encountered this author on Twitter. She writes delightfully soothing stories about anthropomorphic animals living in a lovely, peaceful domestic England. There is Old Fox, Pine Marten, Wolf. A sample is here: https://twitter.com/AnneLouiseAvery/status/1272628642519154688 Her tweets which combine lovely sentences with lovely physical objects of art kept me going through much of the pandemic’s initial wave. I ordered her book from Amazon but found myself to be so exasperated with the US publication date of late November that I just said to hell with it in October and ordered a signed copy from Blackwell’s in Oxford. (Which came with two lovely bookmarks included in it.)

Well, I am glad I did. (I even squealed out loud when my husband brought the package into me with the rest of the daily mail.) Because this is the book that actually captured my attention in a way that I hadn’t experienced since January 2020.

I knew virtually nothing about Reynard the Fox as a literary character or the tales that are traditionally associated with him. I knew he was supposed to be a trickster figure, but not much more than that. I certainly did not expect the substance that I got in the 450 pages here. Anne Louise Avery has done a new translation of the Caxton tale for the Bodleian Library but has amplified the relatively brief traditional tales with her own prose. You start out chortling over the way in which Reynard tricks Sir Bruin and Sir Tyburn. Then you find you share the animals’ outrage over the ways in which Reynard flouts expectations, causes trouble to others, and then smoothly lies to extricate himself. His arch enemy is Isengrim the Wolf and a more wicked villainous wolf is hard to imagine. However, just when you think he has exhausted the patience of everyone, Dame Rukenawe stands up in front of the court and articulates the truth of co-existing with others -- that one should should not overlook the character flaws of one’s friends any more than one should overlook the good characteristics that are part of our most loathed enemy. There is even the remarkable final battle between the good guy and the bad guy that works out quite satisfactorily.

As an example of her style, Avery writes of a relaxed summer afternoon shared by the members of the royal court at one point “They stopped for a long rustic dinner at Lokeron cheese pancakes and cold ham and onions and thick slices of ontbijtkoek, spiced honey cake, then walked in groups of two or three, laughing and philosophizing and putting the world to rights.” The comfortable prose stands up well to being read aloud. (Not that I’d recommend this one for those who are under the age of 12.)

She doesn’t excuse the fox when he prevaricates and misleads, but asks “Do you believe the fox? Do you believe his whole account? Why he is born to rob and steal and lie. Deceit cleaves to his very bones.” The whole book becomes a consideration of managing expectations of ethical behaviors in a cruel and unfair world. Yet, it’s not moralistic or didactic in tone.

Additionally, may I just note that the end papers of this particular volume are gorgeous replications of old maps of Flanders. The production values are fantastic. I don’t know that this one will be a best-seller or if it will even be to the taste of most readers here in the Pub, but I loved this one. I’ve already bought additional copies to stick in stockings this Christmas. You all might want to buy this one. I think I'm going to reread it over my Thanksgiving holiday.

159haydninvienna
nov 17, 2020, 12:45 am

>158 jillmwo: Jill, your touchstone goes to a book by J W von Goethe. No bad thing in itself.

Yes, that book does look gorgeous. As you say, it’s probably not for everyone though. Blackwell’s is almost a local bookshop for me but of course England is in lockdown and all the bookshops are closed, or so I think.

160pgmcc
nov 17, 2020, 3:27 am

>159 haydninvienna: The bookshops here are closed but are taking orders by phone/email and posting them out. Some are doing click and collect.

161Sakerfalcon
nov 17, 2020, 6:22 am

>159 haydninvienna:, >160 pgmcc: And now there is bookshop.org which I'm very excited about!

162jillmwo
Redigeret: nov 17, 2020, 8:16 am

>159 haydninvienna: Thanks for the heads-up haydninvienna. I fixed that touchstone. (Posting in the evening does nothing for my credibility as someone who knows what she's doing, does it?)

>160 pgmcc: and >161 Sakerfalcon:, I really liked ordering from Blackwells. The whole transaction was easy and efficient. I haven't been there since the '90's but I was glad to have an opty to support them.

163pgmcc
Redigeret: nov 28, 2020, 5:51 pm

>158 jillmwo: Do you have no mercy for your victims? Do you have to hit them with a book bullet and then follow up by bashing them over the head with the rifle?

Beautiful post, mercilessly delivered.

I shall now have to write an e-mail to Books Upstairs ordering a copy.

164jillmwo
Redigeret: nov 17, 2020, 5:59 pm

>163 pgmcc: It's definitely your kind of book! Does Books Upstairs offer rush shipping? If you're going to be locked in for any length of time, you'll want this one.

Since it was already out in the UK, I figured you might already have seen it in the store windows!

165pgmcc
Redigeret: nov 17, 2020, 8:24 pm

I have only been in Dublin city centre once since March. Non-essential shops closed for browsing but some, including Books Upstairs, take orders by email and post them out. Post Office has given bookshops special low price for posting books during pandemic.

166suitable1
nov 17, 2020, 8:41 pm

>160 pgmcc:

"click and collect"?

167pgmcc
nov 18, 2020, 2:56 am

>166 suitable1:
The customer orders on-line (click) and collects at the door of the shop (collect).

168haydninvienna
nov 18, 2020, 8:37 am

>165 pgmcc: Always knew An Post was a civilised organisation.

169pgmcc
nov 18, 2020, 9:02 am

>168 haydninvienna: Irish Times/KPMG Company of the Year 2020.

Its performance during the pandemic played no small part in its achieving this award.

170BrokenTune
nov 18, 2020, 4:00 pm

>162 jillmwo: Blackwells have been my bookish lifeline this year. I made a promise to myself to not buy books from Ammy this year and instead find bricks'n'mortar bookshops that were shipping books. I found three local(ish) bookshops that were good but Blackwells was my go-to shop for things I couldn't find elsewhere or were shipping added up a fortune. I love their free UK shipping. And their bookmarks.

171jillmwo
nov 18, 2020, 5:30 pm

>163 pgmcc: I think I forgot to tell you about the footnotes. Highly reminiscent of those found in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Much fun to be had.

>170 BrokenTune: The bookmarks really are a selling point, aren't they? And yes, the free US shipping was remarkably efficient.

172pgmcc
Redigeret: nov 28, 2020, 5:33 pm

>171 jillmwo: When I saw the word "footnotes" I immediately thought, Susanne Clarke. Snap!

E.T.A. Just to confirm it is now on order with Books Upstairs. You can carve that notch on the stock of your BB gun.

173Jim53
nov 18, 2020, 7:41 pm

Jeeze and Crackers. I stop in and poke around a little and am too slow to duck before taking a couple of bullets. I'm hoping Chester County will reinstate its practice of having me request books and make an appointment to pick them up from the library lobby (sounds like the "click and Pick" that Peter mentioned somewhere).

174jillmwo
nov 27, 2020, 4:22 pm

Well, things have clearly fallen out of control here. Two books I had ordered earlier in 2020 never got added to my catalog here on LT. How the heck did that happen? I went in to verify publishing information and LT spat nothing back in response to my query. Now I have to wonder how many other books have entered the household without being properly listed in inventory. Some part of my librarian soul is screaming at the oversight. I mean, when did I stop doing this relatively automatic step? My order history suggests this happened over the summer, but who knows? What else is lurking in the piles by the baseboards that I’ve not captured? (The non-librarian part of my soul may be rolling eyes at the ceiling.)

To keep the (internal) peace, I have now added the two titles, but more on why this has created a further issue.

The first book was The Widening Stain, written by W. Bolingbroke Johnson, one of the titles in the Otto Penzler American Mystery Classics series. The author name above is actually a pseudonym used by a male academic affiliated with Cornell University.

There’s a humorous tone here, an sense of academic satire in the book’s dialogue and an alarming number of bad limericks. Which prompts one to ask whether limericks were particularly big back in the forties? The text was originally published in 1942. A single sentence might give a flavor of the book’s light and irreverent prose, “The Library paid its minor employees on about the same scale as the five-and-te and got away with it because it is so respectable and elevating to work among great books.” (Sadly, the part about salaries hasn’t really shifted very much…)

The amatuer sleuth in this traditional murder mystery is a female librarian (not the University Librarian, who would certainly have been male back in the mysogyniistic ‘40’s), but a woman with significant day-to-day responsibility for managing the holdings of a major research library. Gilda Gorham is really the brains of the outfit, working even as idiot scholars try to wheedle their way ‘round her. She’s not a termagant; she’s simply got her eye on the ball in protecting the library’s assets and policies. Meanwhile there’s a particularly idiotic assistant professor vying for promotion who gets murdered on the evening of the President’s Reception. Gilda works out whodunnit, more through logical considerations than via clues and pursuits.

Not a great work of literature, but light reading when you’re in the mood for something frivolous. (Oh, and I forgot to mention that halfway through members of the Faculty Club consider how best to do away with particular colleagues. Rather a parlour game of sorts…)

The second cozy mystery is one by Jeanne M. Dams, whose Dorothy Martin series I’ve been reading off and on since I picked up a printed early excerpt from a Sisters In Crime booth at an ALA back in the mid-90’’s. Dams still has it. The writing in Death Comes to Durham is tight and the plot is for the most part relatively plausible. There are one or two instances of too-convenient encounters and/or revelations but I actually thought it worked. How do you solve a mystery of a death in a nursing home when there is no clear time of death and no reliable memories among the residents? The mystery broadens beyond the nursing home to Durham Cathedral and the University of Durham so the reader gets some local color, but nothing too obviously drawn from a travel brochure. (I did chuckle occasionally over the issues of so many stairs to be climbed by elderly sleuth Dorothy Martin and Alan Nesbitt, her husband, both of whom are visiting the city of Durham in northern England when they get dragged into the investigation.) Oh, and there are references as well to Gilbert and Sullivan in this one. Death Comes to Durham is not as humorous in tone as The Widening Stain, but it has its moments.

175Jim53
nov 27, 2020, 7:26 pm

Bad limericks? Gilbert and Sullivan? You may have hit me twice.

176jillmwo
Redigeret: dec 23, 2020, 2:29 pm

The questionnaire that i have seen completed by others here in the Pub. However, pgmcc credits fuzzi with its creation so YAY fuzzi. I rather enjoyed responding to this one.

1. Name any book you read at any time that was published in the year you turned 18:
The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip

2. Name a book you have on in your TBR pile that is over 500 pages long:

An Illuminated Life by Heidi Ardizzone A biography of a remarkable woman, the first librarian hired to manage the Morgan Library in New York. J. Pierpont Morgan gave her free rein. As an another bit of intriguing background, she was a woman of color who had an extended affair with Bernard Berenson, the art historian.

3. What is the last book you read with a mostly blue cover?
The Widening Stain, a mystery with limericks in it. (Not good ones, but still.) And if one were to get picky about it, the color of the cover is right there on the line between being a blue and being a green.

4. What is the last book you didn’t finish (and why didn’t you finish it?)
My brain is balking at this one. If I didn’t finish it, it was probably pretty bad.

5. What is the last book that scared the bejeebers out of you?
I don’t read books that scare me. I’m a wuss about these things.

6. Name the book that you read either this year or last year that takes place geographically closest to where you live?

The American Plague is all about the horrors of yellow fever. Philadelphia being a major port city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had one of the earliest established quarantine stations because of the fear associated with yellow fever. (Also nicknamed Yellow Jack, if you’ve ever watched Bette Davis in Jezebel.)

7. What were the topics of the last two nonfiction books you read?

Both pertained to the Civil War --Reveille in Washington and American Queen

8. Name a recent book you read which could be considered a popular book?

Reynard the Fox I even wrote it up for the Scholarly Kitchen blog as my best book of 2020. I hope that by doing so, I’ve helped to push it into that category. While the author is an art historian, the book is a translation of tales and Avery has created a version that EVERYONE can enjoy and take something from.

9. What was the last book you gave a rating of 5-stars to? And when did you read it?

Again, Reynard the Fox. I think I read it mid-October through mid-November of this year. It might have warranted six stars.

10. Name a book you read that led you to specifically read another book (and what was the other book, and what was the connection)

I watched a documentary during lockdown that led me to The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and somehow that led me to American Queen which led me back to Reveille in Washington which reminded me that I hadn’t yet read Team of Rivals.

11. Name the author you have most recently become infatuated with.

Hmm. This is a tough one. There’s Ngaio Marsh who I didn’t properly appreciate 20 years ago when I was initially introduced to one of her books. So now I’m reading through a number of her Inspector Alleyn series. There’s also Anne Louise Avery who wrote the aforementioned Reynard the Fox. That I believe is her first book, but I could be wrong. She is an art historian and they are obliged to write books professionally.

Earlier this year, I purchased two books by Alan Jacobs whose book The Pleasure of Reading in An Age of Distraction I'd enjoyed. (I’d missed that there was a trilogy of publications by him). The other two titles in that trilogy are Breaking Bread with the Dead and How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. (And those titles are another two books that I haven’t yet added to my LT Library. Dagnabbit!)

12. What is the setting of the first novel you read this year?

Nineteenth century Victorian England. Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds

13. What is the last book you read, fiction or nonfiction, that featured a war in some way (and what war was it)?

Didn’t I already answer this question? See foregoing response to Question 10.

14. What was the last book you acquired or borrowed based on an LTer’s review or casual recommendation?

Well, the two that are sitting in front of me and glaring balefully at me from the shelf were recommended either by HadyninVienna or by hfglen. Rituals of Dinner and Much Depends on Dinner. Both recommended back in 2019. (By way of explanation, I have this on-going nightmare that I will retire on a fixed income and have no money with which to buy books so I have to buy books now so that I will have a sufficient supply to read in my old age. It may be another decade before I get to those.) I also read The Disinherited and Inheritance in 2019 at the recommendation of someone here in the Pub. Thoroughly enjoyed both.

15. What the last book you read that involved the future in some way?

Emergency Skin by N.K. Jemison. A book group buddy recommended it. Very well done, as I recall, but I can’t recall why I say that. (Awkward admission, that.) And it wasn’t very encouraging about where the world was headed.

16. Name the last book you read that featured a body of water, river, marsh, or significant rainfall?

I can’t remember what would have been the last one, but I can point you in the direction of The Essex Serpent which might have been read back in 2017 or 2018.

17. What is the last book you read by an author from the Southern Hemisphere?

(Jill mumbles something and scuffs toe in dirt, hoping no one will notice the lack of clarify in her response.)

18. What is the last book you read that you thought had a terrible cover?

Hmm. There was a particularly lurid cover on a book that I read back in 2018 as I recall. I was so embarrassed that I removed the dust jacket from it so that I could read a simple mystery with some dignity on the flight to ALA in New Orleans. I don’t believe the book is still here in the house. It involved a murder using an obscure South American poison.

19. Who was the most recent dead author you read? And what year did they die?

Ngaio Marsh would qualify and she died back in the late seventies or early eighties. Wikipedia says 1982.

20. What was the last children’s book (not YA) you read?

Two excellent picture books that I read as the church storybook lady -- The Quiltmaker’s Gift by Jeff Brumbeau and one other, What is Given from the Heart by Patricia McKissack. If you are looking for Christmas books for small children, either would be good.

21. What was the name of the detective or crime-solver in the most recent crime novel you read?

Dorothy Martin, the senior citizen sleuth created by Jeanne M. Dams. If you want to begin at the beginning with Dorothy, I recommend the first in the series, The Body in the Transept. It’s well suited to this time of year, because it opens with a murder in a British cathedral on Christmas Eve.

22. What was the shortest book of any kind you’ve read so far this year?

Emergency Skin. The N.K. Jemison title. (see question 15)

23. Name the last book that you struggled with (and what do you think was behind the struggle?)

Define “struggle”. If we’re talking about philosophical irritants, probably The Age of Innocence. I’d read it before so it wasn’t a difficult re-read, but I did get ticked off with Newland Archer and with Edith Wharton for not conveying properly what a lousy life the Countess Olenska must have had, trying to make it through without having the money her family withheld from her when she went to live in Paris.

If by struggle, you just mean slogging, due to general lockdown malaise, it is probably Square Haunting which is not a difficult book at all. But any form of biography (or nonfiction, for that matter) requires that one have the capacity to process facts with some degree of retention. A lot of the nonfiction I’ve read this year has demanded that I take written notes about the content. Come to that, a good deal of the fiction as well.

24. What is the most recent book you added to your library here on LT?

LT tells me that it is The Grell Mystery, a very practical police procedural from the ‘thirties.

25. Name a book you read this year that had a visual component (i.e. illustrations, photos, art, comics)

I read Mythos earlier this year (or was that last year?) and I have the second volume by Stephen Fry which is entitled Heroes. Both have lovely, lovely photographs of classical art.

BONUS QUESTION!
26. What is the title and year of the oldest book in your physical library that you have reviewed on LT?

Heaven knows. I think the oldest book that is sitting on my shelf is an edition of The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison, and while I think it likely that I have written about it in some fashion here, I can’t prove it.

177Narilka
nov 28, 2020, 5:16 pm

>176 jillmwo: Another great list!

178pgmcc
nov 28, 2020, 5:54 pm

>176 jillmwo: Great time reading your answers. I see you have not ceased your barrage of shots about Reynard The Fox. My copy has not arrived yet. I am looking forward to reading it. Your praise of the book is building up my expectations.

179MrsLee
nov 28, 2020, 6:21 pm

I am very happy to see that I'm not alone in my neglect of Southern Hemisphere authors. For me, I don't pay much attention to where an author is from unless they blow my socks off and I want to know everything about them.

180-pilgrim-
Redigeret: nov 29, 2020, 1:49 pm

>179 MrsLee:
Fortunately, I tag my books with the nationality of the author. I find it enlightening, as background tends to inform perspective.

And so, I can say without hesitation, that I too have read embarrassingly few authors from that hemisphere.

181-pilgrim-
Redigeret: nov 29, 2020, 1:55 pm

Bearing in mind your love of Jane Austen, I thought you might be interested to know that there is a reading of Persuasion currently available among BBC podcasts.

That is possibly my favourite Austen novel; listening to it was helping keep me sane during the period when I couldn't see to read at all. (Vision currently blurry; so can now read for small periods only. Am continuing to listen...)

182Sakerfalcon
nov 30, 2020, 6:41 am

>176 jillmwo: I loved reading your answers! I have recently been indulging in Gladys Mitchell's Mrs Bradley mysteries, which makes me wonder if I should look into Ngaio Marsh as well. My mum enjoyed her books and although I only read one or two of them as a teenager I seem to remember enjoying them.

Trying to ignore all the mentions of Reynard the Fox .... it does have a gorgeous cover. Is the book illustrated?

183pgmcc
nov 30, 2020, 7:08 am

>182 Sakerfalcon: jillmwo had no mercy for me when she hit me with Reynard the Fox. It is now on order from Books Upstairs, my go-to independent bookshop. I love the cover too.

She also did not bat an eye when she hit me with the Ngaio Marsh bullet some months ago. I have Artists in Crime sitting on my Kindle awaiting attention.

jillmwo has not been posting as frequently as she used to, but when she does post she is very accurate with her shooting.

Claire, do you think she can hear us when we are talking about her?

184Sakerfalcon
nov 30, 2020, 7:30 am

>183 pgmcc: Jill is a librarian and therefore all-powerful. I am sure she can hear us.

185pgmcc
nov 30, 2020, 8:50 am

>184 Sakerfalcon: I had better be careful what I say.

186pgmcc
dec 1, 2020, 8:20 am

jillmwo, your bullet has arrived from Books Upstairs. It is a beautiful volume. I had a quick read of the first few paragraphs of the introduction. It looks like I will be fascinated. You are right that it will be right up my street. Allegorical work on the world as it really is.

Thank you for picking me out of the crowd with your BB sniper's rifle.

187jillmwo
dec 1, 2020, 6:06 pm

Well, pgmcc, I'm glad that it arrived safely. Amazon (US) has been playing games so I'm still waiting for copies that I'm hoping to give as Christmas presents to be shipped.

And for the record >184 Sakerfalcon: Yes, I can hear you. I'm lurking here in my invisibility cloak but I'm paying attention (which is how I have become all-powerful in the first place. Good old fashioned work at eavesdropping.). Look carefully for the coffee cup that appears to be hanging in mid-air. That's me.

188clamairy
Redigeret: dec 16, 2020, 6:46 pm

Just offering hugs in here, jillmwo. Hope you're doing okay.

189jillmwo
Redigeret: dec 26, 2020, 2:41 pm

Okay, stepping back from both personal griefs as well as professional concerns, this is the first two-week vacation I’ve had in memory. We did a very low-key and isolated Christmas -- no family visitors, etc. This means I have literally NO excuse to not read.

What books was I provided with as gifts?

The one that had been on my wish list for the longest time is The Kitchen Counter Cooking School which was originally published back in 2012. I can only imagine that someone like MrsLee put me onto this one, because I can’t think how otherwise I would have encountered it. The award-winning title covers a cooking course (The Project, as it is called) where the author-chef grabbed a dozen ordinary women and taught them some portion of what she had learned when she was a student at Le Cordon Bleu. It’s a mix of discussions of cooking techniques, the ins-and-outs of the food supply chain, learning to trust one’s instincts in the kitchen and generally trying to reduce the fears of how one operates in the kitchen. I’ve gotten halfway through it (to the discussion of her trip as a cruise ship chef and how one makes paella) just in less than 24 hours. So far, so good. Some of this I may never adopt as common practice, but I can certainly take what I’ve read and chat about it with the son who (alone in an apartment on Christmas) had found a recipe for making duck in the Times and was feeling adventurous enough to try it for himself. (As an irrelevant tidbit, this is frequently characterized as being a memoir which may again explain some of its appeal.)

That same son gifted me with Martha Wells’ full length novel, Network Effect. I shall enjoy that read as well. (He admitted that he’d flipped through it before sending it on and he was tempted to learn more of Murderbot.)

The other son picked up a mystery that billed itself as being a puzzle constructed like one of Agatha Christie’s. The Forger’s Daughter is about literary manuscripts and the thefts and forgeries of same. I shall enjoy that one, I think.

Then as a freelance reference work, my husband gave me the Library of American collection on women’s suffrage and right beside it, the recent work by the Chief Librarian of the Bodeleian entitled Burning The Books which is all about the destruction of knowledge as housed in famous library collections that have been burned, pillaged or otherwise dispersed. (May I again complain about the practice of releasing UK editions with much better dust jackets than those released for the US editions? Really makes me quite grumpy.)

And because I've been absent in recent weeks, may I take this opportunity to express my hope that everyone has enjoyed the holiday season in whatever way most cheered and benefited them?

Random Postscript: I also have yet another new handbag this Christmas. I can't think why as I suspect it will be another 9-12 months before any of us are back out on the road for explorations, expeditions, and adventure.

190MrsLee
dec 28, 2020, 6:47 pm

>189 jillmwo: Glad you are enjoying that book, but I can take no credit. I've never heard about it, but it does sound like one I would enjoy as well.

Good to see you here.

191clamairy
dec 30, 2020, 6:04 pm

>189 jillmwo: Yes, so happy you've found your way back in!

I never heard of that book either, MrsLee. And a quick search of LT says no one in this group has ever mentioned it before.

192jillmwo
dec 31, 2020, 3:42 pm

Okay, I did want to finish up this (dreadful) year with noting a few more bits and bobs -- titles that I did read, if not review here as I normally might have done.

Two old titles (published back in the ‘90’s originally) The Becket Factor and Dark Provenance, both by Michael David Antony. Escaping from the duplicity of espionage and intelligence work creates problems for Colonel Richard Harrison even as he tries to adapt to the job requirements of being a cathedral administrator. Both of these books were interesting stories, both dealing with the tensions between the need for investigation into criminal behaviors and communal demands of ethics and trust. I’m always a sucker for cathedral mysteries, as the communities tend to be close-knit and familiar with ways and means. I had read The Becket Factor some years back but had forgotten some of the set-up so re-read it and then read Dark Provenance, which is quite frankly the better of the two. The Becket Factor focuses largely on Harrison extricating himself from the intelligence service network even as he works to unravel three threads of mystery -- the death of a clergyman, the discovery of what may be the remains of St. Thomas a Becket, and concerns regarding the background of the proposed next Archbishop of Canterbury. Dark Provenance has another member of the clergy dead but has the larger discussion of nations entering into wars with the appearance of virtue but with the darker intent of mining the value of less wealthy countries. I have not been able to enter into the third volume of this series which is Midnight Come. I seem to recall talking about this series to someone here in the Pub (perhaps Jim53 or suitable?)

One new title read in the past week or ten days was a deceptively short book on Jane Austen entitled, Jane Austen: Writing, Politics, Society. The thing is only about 40,000 words in length, which isn’t at all what I thought when I purchased it and I’ve been wondering who this book might be targeted towards. I don’t think you’d give it to undergrads, unless maybe juniors or seniors sitting in seminars on Austen. It does provide a contextual overview of the six novels, but assumes an awful lot of familiarity on the part of the reader as it covers current literary thought on each of the titles. Unlike the Austen Lives memoir I read earlier in the year, this is not inviting you to reread the books, but seems to intend to serve as more of an orientation for the reader as to what innovative approaches Austen used and/or introduced to the novel as well as touching on aspects of the real world that might have influenced Austen as she composed each manuscript.

I am closing out the year with a re-read (?) of Bath Tangle as a nod to the Bridgerton series. (The original novel by Julia Quinn on which the Netflix series is based might legitimately be classified as soft porn, in my view.) I don’t remember reading this particular Heyer novel before but I’m sure I must have done at some point. It’s very well-known as a regency romance, one of Heyer's best.

I do wish I knew more about the background historical research that went into The Crown. I recall a perfectly awful gossip ridden thing that Kitty Kelly wrote about the Royals but doubt that it would be trustworthy as source material.

Happy 2021 to all of you. I'll start up the next thread tomorrow, primarily n the hope that I"ll spend more time with this group in the new year.

193majkia
jan 1, 2021, 9:04 am

Happy New Year!

194jillmwo
Redigeret: jan 1, 2021, 9:46 am

To you as well, majkia

One quick and last minute notation here: In terms of statistics, my data would seem to show that, in terms of gender split, I read 70% female authors in 2020 and 30% male. The split between those who were new to me and those authors whose work I'd sampled before was largely 50/50. It was mostly fiction but with a higher percentage than usual of non-fiction as the pandemic continued. (Facts. One requires factual information in settling one's nerves. I spent a lot of time with a mix of biography and history. As Lin-Manuel Miranda noted in Hamilton, it is important who tells your story.)