tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61712525428737966792024-01-21T15:06:36.420-06:00Contractually Obligated to Like BooksJamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.comBlogger147125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-91367365656165730872017-06-22T06:51:00.000-05:002017-06-22T06:51:04.570-05:00Wilkalong Part One: The WilkeningOnce again, I am attempting a read-along at the prompting of the one and only <a href="http://www.reading-rambo.com/2017/06/wilkie-collins-bio-readalong-signup.html" target="_blank">Reading Rambo</a>.<br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Look, I've got the logo and everything</td></tr>
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The book is <i>Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation</i>, by Andrew Lycett, a book which has not even been released in the United States yet, but which those of us who experienced the glory of the <i>Woman in White</i> or <i>Moonstone</i> readalongs have instinctively sensed is probably going to be full of amazing stuff.<br />
<br />
The book is divided into "epochs" for some reason, and the First Epoch deals with Wilkie's family background, childhood, and youth. I hadn't realized that Wilkie came from a family -- two families, actually -- that were so involved in the arts. At the very end of this section, Lycett is setting us up for a Collins-Dickens convergence which is slightly less surprising when you realize just how artsy and well connected his parents and brother were.<br />
<br />
As is becoming usual with biographies, I found sufficient grounds to grump about the author having or giving too little context. For instance, when the family moves to Italy so that Papa Collins can see great art and produce some primo paintings, Lycett seems to see this trip in a vacuum. In particular, he seems to see it as obviously a disruption to young Wilkie's education -- but this seems like an era with a pretty flexible educational structure, and one which would potentially have regarded time abroad as inherently educational.<br />
<br />
Wilkie's parents were intensely religious, specifically in a way that led them to take sides in church debates and seek out pastors who saw things their way. "The nectarine incident" (page 29 if you missed it), in which Collins Senior is a dick to his neighbor for doing some gardening on a Sunday is great, and telling. Wilkie's parents appear to have shifted their allegiances a few times or latched onto various preachers/writers, but I did wish for a bit more clarity and specificity on this angle. When Wilkie is sent to a very strict and repressive boarding school run by a Reverend, I don't think we are ever told how this guy fits into the Collins' religious landscape. It's perhaps a small detail but I think it's significant. <i>Surely</i> of all people, Mr and Mrs Collins knew exactly what this guy thought and had views about it. Did they pick the school because they agreed with him, or in spite of it, because they felt their wayward son needed the discipline even if the headmaster was Wrong About God?<br />
<br />
That being said, the general picture that emerges is of young Wilkie, an insufficiently docile young man who gives his parents headaches and writes wonderful letters. Seriously, my main takeaway from this section was that Wilkie's letters sound delightful. (Although, LYCETT, it obviously means nothing if his letters from Paris TO HIS UBER-RELIGIOUS MOTHER don't mention sexing up women!! Lycett obviously is very amused by Wilkie's self-image as a teenage Italian milf-banger, but his hunt for further evidence of precocious lasciviousness in family letters seems... misguided.)<br />
<br />
One other small highlight from this section: a brief mention of someone called Elizabeth Buller-Yarde-Buller.<br />
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<br />
Well, time's up for me this week, folks. Head over to the <a href="http://www.reading-rambo.com/2017/06/wilkie-collins-beginning.html" target="_blank">mothership</a> for more hot Wilkie takes and I'll see you next week.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-16088921884501411522016-02-27T10:39:00.000-06:002016-02-27T10:39:04.816-06:00On "normal" saints: I'm going to need a bigger tweetRecently on Twitter, a complaint was raised that saints like Elisabeth Leseur get promoted as normal, relatable people despite having social privileges that the targets of this promotion lack.[1] The response was made that holy men and women are never "normal" -- because their holiness makes them unusual, and their lives are always going to be distinctive as a result. This is an interesting discussion to me, and as you can tell, I already have too much to say to be able to say it on Twitter, not least because I think there are some important distinctions that need to be drawn -- so here we are.<br />
<br />
So what exactly are we talking about when we talk about "normal"? We have to make a distinction between the spiritual and the historical here. The objection that saints are never spiritually "normal" is exactly right, of course; holy men and women get held up as spiritual role models precisely because they are not normal, and this spiritual excellence often (although I don't think always) puts their lives on a different track than if they weren't so holy.<br />
<br />
Historically, though, we can absolutely talk about saints being "normal" -- although it's a fuzzy and, I think, ultimately pretty unhelpful label, although you can't beat it for being popularly accessible I guess. What we're really talking about is how unusual a particular person's background and circumstances were for their time. Is this someone who had a lot of advantages or disadvantages? Were these activities or those choices pretty typical? This is obviously essential to understanding how someone's spiritual life played out in practical terms.<br />
<br />
However, the root of the complaint that started all this is in "promotion". Members of the church in all states of life recommend particular saints as role models, and in the modern era there has been a special emphasis on finding "normal" saints who can be relatable to a wide variety of "normal" people. It's at least a post-Victorian thing [2] but John Paul II's unprecedented burst of canonizations was meant to strengthen the saints as agents of teaching and evangelization precisely by increasing their diversity. Eagerness to find a saint for every demographic is part of what gets Elisabeth Leseur a spot in the saint rolodex even though she's not quite there yet.[3]<br />
<br />
So at last we come down to the nut of the question: is it classist to suggest that Leseur is a good role model for wives struggling in a marriage to a difficult and irreligious man? Leseur was a wealthy woman at the head of an affluent upper middle class household in 19th century France. Her life was worlds away from what is the average in North American and Western Europe today. I don't know much about her, but I would assume that her job was primarily to direct and manage servants, and to ensure that she and her husband maintained their social status. She certainly didn't have to worry about a career and as far as I know she didn't have to worry about money. <br />
<br />
Suggesting that Leseur is relatable for 21st century women can feel, from this perspective, a little bit <a href="http://stylecaster.com/gwyneth-paltrow-most-ridiculous-pretentious-quotes/" target="_blank">GOOP</a>-y. However, I would push back against the inclination to dismiss her as an unrealistic, impossibly privileged role model. For one thing, it's undeniable that women <i>do</i> find inspiration and role models in women like Martha Stewart, Gwyneth Paltrow, and a whole host of impeccably curated instagram/pinterest/reality tv stars. Yes, these figures can inspire feelings of shame and inadequacy, but I don't think we can say that's <i>all </i>they inspire, and women so reliably flock to such figures that it's just not true to say they aren't relatable. They clearly are on some level, if only in the realm of fantasy and aspiration. In that sense, Leseur's material circumstances can't be an absolute barrier to being perceived as "normal" and her life story as encouraging.<br />
<br />
More importantly, however, Leseur <i>was</i> normal for a woman of her time and social position. The older I get and the longer I spend studying history the more profoundly I am struck by the fact that we all live our lives in a historical context that is totally out of our control. The elements of a holy life are timeless, but we don't live our lives in a vacuum. The options that are available to us -- even to those who are willing to break out of the mold and forge new paths and whatnot -- are limited. Leseur was a married woman who lived a married life that must have looked pretty normal to her contemporaries. As such I think it's perfectly valid to put her forward as a model for women whose lifestyles wouldn't raise any eyebrows, even though that looks vastly different these days. It's true that none of us are nineteenth-century haute-bourgeoisie [4] but I am tempted to say
that's the whole point. She didn't live in a vacuum any more than I do.<br />
<br />
If there's a problem, it's less about the desire to find "normal" saints who can help people with the problems in their lives and more about a narrow approach to the saints as historical figures. If we expect "normal" people in the past to look like "normal" people today we're setting ourselves up for failure, or at least fiction. We shouldn't waste time with such an unrealistic expectation. Granted, I <i>would</i> say this, but a good social-historical perspective works wonders. The saints become a million times more interesting and inspiring when we stop trying to set them up as <a href="http://www.americangirl.com/shop/dolls/truly-me" target="_blank">"just like me" dolls</a> and start trying to understand them as people who were called to live in the times they happened to be born in -- which <i>is</i> in fact "just like me" -- and succeeded.<br />
<br />
This point also applies if we step from the historical to the spiritual side of things, incidentally. The saints have achieved holiness precisely because they have followed God's call to address the particular weaknesses of their personality and the sins that are especially tempting to them. My particular struggles might not match exactly with a saint but that doesn't mean he or she can't help me; or my triggers to pride might not be exactly like a particular saint's occasions of sin, but his or her struggle with pride can still give me the example I need.<br />
<br />
Ultimately I think that while the communion of saints provides us with a wide range of role models (as well as "holy helpers" with the inside fix), the saints also call us to learn solidarity across time and place and difference. Studying the lives of the saints should provide us with moments of insight into our own lives and connection -- think CS Lewis's definition of friendship as a "me too" moment. But it should also open our eyes to the diversity of human life and struggle. And of course, it's precisely through that diversity that God's mysterious unity becomes clear. I'll end this off before I go too far out of my depth, but I'll just note how struck I always am, when you start looking at saints in aggregate, by the way that diversity starts to align around the same simple (!) characteristics. There isn't anything new under the sun even as the past is a foreign country; and when I get to a paradox I consider I've arrived in the right place.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[1] Leseur is actually a Servant of God, so rather far from being
canonized, but she is often held up as a role model, so for the sake of
our discussion I think we can elide the distinction. I will come back to
this.<br />
<br />
[2] One of my favorite books of saints is the 1949 collection edited by Frank Sheed, <i>Saints Are Not Sad</i>; the title is taking aim at the somber plaster statues of the 19th century.<br />
<br />
[3] Although given that for centuries the process for canonization was
basically popular acclaim I think it's fair to say that Catholics have a
venerable tradition of not worrying too much about promoting people
before their time.<br />
<br />
[4] I
look forward to being corrected in the comments. Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-21103105082915490802016-01-22T21:57:00.002-06:002016-01-22T22:25:13.022-06:00Young, scrappy, and hungry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
It's that time of week again -- not quite the time when <a href="http://www.reading-rambo.com/2015/12/hamilton-readalong.html" target="_blank">#Hamalong</a> posts are due, but a little afterward.<br />
<br />
We're just on part three of the readalong (chapters ten through fourteen) but I may be starting to flag a bit. Only... four hundred pages to go?! Geez. This book is so unnecessarily long it makes me mad sometimes. You need look no further for an example than page 247:<br />
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
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CHERNOW, this is why your book is so long bro <a href="https://t.co/qyPQm4x5M8">pic.twitter.com/qyPQm4x5M8</a></div>
— Julie (@jfount) <a href="https://twitter.com/jfount/status/689514630583095297">January 19, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>Sometimes you come across a conflict in your sources, and you have to make a decision: do you think one or another option is more convincing, or do you present both and give them equal weight? But you know what you do first? YOU SHOULD CONSIDER WHETHER ANYONE, ANYONE ON EARTH, CARES OR SHOULD CARE. Honest to goodness, it's a scandal the way publishers cut corners on editing these days. <br />
<br />
I've seen other Hamalongers commenting on Chernow's fanboying over Hamilton, and on that note my criticisms <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2016/01/your-obedient-servant.html" target="_blank">from last time</a> stand. The thing I would add to that, which comes to the fore especially in this section as we get lots and lots of constitutional wrangling, is that he has what I would call an American historian's narrow vision. Yeah, that's right! I went there!<br />
<br />
So Hamilton apparently gave an insanely long speech at a confidential convention (so it's poorly documented) that is a Big Deal because many people have taken this speech as characteristic of Hamilton's real opinions, and not in a good way. I say "apparently" because Chernow approaches this event as someone who has read and re-read every two-bit Hamilton biography ever attempted: that is, he eagerly jumps into discussing this speech as something that obviously we all know is a big deal. I thought he could have done a better job with setting this up, but ok, whatever.<br />
<br />
The thing that got me -- and it's not just Chernow I'm picking on here -- is that apparently Hamilton's suggestion of an "elective monarchy" is some huge unforgivable sin. <i>R U SRS?</i> Constitutional monarchy -- yeah, the hereditary kind -- remains a very respectable liberal goal in Europe for at least another hundred years. I really don't understand why it's so outrageous for Americans to be putting forward ideas that are really not that far off the wall in any context except comparing them to what actually happened and we've decided has worked and therefore, in retrospect, was "right". Or, okay, I can understand why people might feel this way, but I don't understand how people who call themselves historians can write history this way. (I may be a little tired and cranky as I write this. Or a lot tired and cranky.) It's bizarre. Chernow himself writes that "admiration for the British political system was still widespread" right in between calling Hamilton's proposal "atrociously misguided" and a "blunder". The last two judgments appear in the text as Chernow's own.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I don't want to just be negative. I was gratified by Chernow's statement that "those who criticize Hamilton for having engaged in a propaganda exercise in <i>The Federalist</i> must reckon with the tremendous continuity that connects the <i>Federalist</i> essays to both his earlier and later writings" (257). This is the kind of judgment that I am happy to accept from him. Maybe it's just the weight of being further along in the book, but this thesis about consistency is convincing and a satisfying way to understand a life. Incidentally, this characterization is part of what makes the musical so great too.<br />
<br />
In this section I kept thinking about Hamilton the auto-didact: has there ever been any other time in history when someone could be so well self-taught? I mean, in the 18th century not only were there low barriers to obtaining the latest and greatest in any field at all, but few enough barriers on someone who had actually taught it to himself instead of having a degree to certify it. I suppose part of it was that the system of academic disciplines we take for granted today hadn't formed yet. Men of the Enlightenment weren't studying economics; they were (or thought they were) simply observing trade and drawing conclusions. Anyone who could, could play along. Hamilton had quite worldly reasons for pursuing his advancement this way; he seems like the ideal type of the Enlightenment scholar but maybe with a little more unapologetically practical ambition.<br />
<br />
Confession time: here's what I got. I didn't actually make it through Chapter Fourteen yet, which I'm kicking myself over because flipping ahead it looks pretty good. If it is, maybe I'll include it next week. And on that note, adieu until next week!Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-75813339090774148032016-01-16T09:37:00.001-06:002016-01-16T09:42:30.349-06:00Your obedient servant<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Just now noticing that the N in "Readalong" is retained from the original cover. Nice work.</td></tr>
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<br />
It's the Hamilton Readalong with <a href="http://reading-rambo.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Alice</a>!
This week we're through chapter nine, and if I'm scandalized by the
revelation that Baron von Steuben was a fake baron, I'm also delighted
that Peggy Scuyler was way cooler than the musical lets on.<br />
<br />
We
get a fairly important thesis statement on page 158: "Hamilton's life
was to be all of a piece... His views did not change greatly over time
so much as expand in richness, depth, and scope." If you feel at all
like Chernow is reading opinions or interpretations backward or forward
in his subject's life this here would be why. I have to say, I am not
used to reading biographies or history books written for the popular
press, and I keep stopping to remind myself that this isn't an academic
monograph. It still feels strange to have statements like this just thrown in, with all the
argument to support it made implicit.<br />
<br />
Chernow's
research is deep but not wide, which frankly I think is the privilege of
someone whose job it is to write giant award-winning bestsellers for
the popular press. There are a lot of points in this book where I
suspect something Chernow flags as unusual is actually rather common.
For instance, on page 85, where he describes the newspaper boilerplate
of "may hear something to his advantage" as a "cryptic sentence". Even
stranger is page 129 where he breathlessly comments that "Hamilton must
have been struck by the coincidence that his paternal grandfather,
Alexander Hamilton, had also married an Elizabeth who was the daughter
of a rich, illustrious man." Or... those are pretty common names? And
again, page 170, this confusing little thing where Hamilton writes some
essays and then, we are told, must have "lost or misplaced" them based
on the fact that when they were published they were described as "lately
recovered". Setting aside the fact that I do not understand what we are
talking about here or why this is important, is there some reason to
think this is a trustworthy publishing history? It's a strange detail.<br />
<br />
A
more extended example of this is the discussion of dueling on page 117
where it becomes clear that Chernow can't get past the idea that the
practice was "anachronistic" and "a barbaric relic of a feudal age". It
had been my understanding -- and five minutes of quick searching around
has not turned up what I read that I'm thinking of -- that duelling
enjoyed a resurgence in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the
Enlightenment's print culture brought with it a new codification of the
procedure. In other words, it might have been "ancient" but it was also
trendy. Like mason jars. Is there some reason why Hamilton <i>would</i> have thought of dueling in those negative terms? That to me is the question that really needs answering.<br />
<br />
The
big place where I find myself wanting more breadth is in Chernow's
readings of personal letters. It might just be that I'm more skeptical
than he is, but I read things like "Alexander's sincere entreaties that
[James Hamilton] come to America" (148) or "in a poetic conceit that he
often played with but never acted upon, he toyed with abandoning worldly
pursuits to luxuriate in her company" (160), and I think: come on, man,
exercise those critical faculties. Now, Chernow's readings deserve
respect: reading a person's entire body of writing can give you an
intuitive insight into what is unusual in someone's writing. It's
probably the only way to be able to reliably draw evidence out of
something like the appearance of someone's handwriting (not that I've
seen Chernow make those kind of points so far, I don't think). And look
-- all of us who have exchanged emails with a crush know the
difficulties of interpreting the intentions behind a letter. But, even
though it's not my specialty, I feel morally certain there must be a
significant literature about 18th/19th century epistolary conventions
and the interpretation of "flowery" language. Right? And yet the letters
are so often taken at face value -- well, except for John Laurens.
Chernow knows how to soft-pedal there.<br />
<br />
I'm not
"trashing" the book or questioning his conclusions; I'm just trying to
identify what he's doing and not doing. Just to issue a disclaimer
before you hit the comment box, it is after all almost literally my job
to find the edges of what other people have done in order to find where
questions can be fruitfully asked; in short, it's my job to criticize.
People often approach popular histories in particular with a kind of
good/bad attitude: is it good? is it trustworthy? What I'm seeing here
is a book which gives us an extremely detailed view of one man's career
and writings, but which is pretty thinly connected to anyone else's work
on the time period more broadly which might provide us with context to
interpret that life. In the bigger conversation, Chernow provides a
characterization and a set of conclusions which can be debated using
more specialist knowledge; especially since in this case he doesn't seem
to have taken much notice of that specialist knowledge at all. That's
scholarship: everyone putting their little specializations together.<br />
<br />
This
book is giving me a great refresher (*cough*) on the history of
revolutionary America, which I don't think I've studied since high
school. And even then, I sort of skipped that founding fathers bit
because my American history class in Virginia glossed over it on the
grounds that you'd get it all in your Virginia history and civics class
the following year, which in my case was taught by a very young woman
constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. So I am learning a lot
here.<br />
<br />
And I did draw one heart in the margins in this
section: "Hamilton could also be quite waspish about his chosen
profession, telling Lafayette that he was busy 'rocking the cradle and
studying the art of fleecing my neighbors'" (168). D'awwww.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-49369136971180932792016-01-08T08:23:00.000-06:002016-01-08T08:23:01.331-06:00I don't write like I'm running out of time, unfortunately.Welcome folks! TO THE HAMILTON READ-A-LONG.<br />
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Hosted by <a href="http://www.reading-rambo.com/2015/12/hamilton-readalong.html" target="_blank">Alice</a>, this is where we all permit our love of what must be the most incredible piece of American art of the 21st century so far lead us into reading an absolute doorstopper of a book.<br />
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Unfortunately for me, in this first week we've pretty much covered the part of this story I was most curious about. Having special professional interest in the British empire, I was hoping for a juicy exploration of Hamilton's childhood in the Caribbean. Chernow's done good work with not much to go on -- the acknowledgments (at the end, but as every historian knows, worth skimming at the beginning) are an adventure in their own right, with a fleet of research assistants and helpful archivists on the various islands and at Kew (and in Denmark!), and hooray for that. Listening to the musical, I could hear exciting echoes of the live-fast-die-young planter mentality, and I was gratified to find the biography describing this environment as a key influence.<br />
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I did frown a bit at: "Appropriately enough, this boy destined to be America's foremost Anglophile entered the world as a British subject, born on a British isle, in the reign of George II" (17). Uh?? Is this not true of all the founding fathers?? I mean, I know the American colonies are Special and Touched by Destiny and all?? Granted that I could have dwelt on this part of Hamilton's life for twice as many pages; but nevertheless I thought the weakest aspect of this part was the lack of consideration given to the question of British Atlantic identity. This <i>is</i> an open question among scholars, as far as I know; that is, the extent to which any given white colonist from Virginia or New York might have regarded a white colonist from Jamaica or Barbados as a foreigner; but while those differences were clearly acknowledged, I would hesitate to assume that they were a big deal to any particular person at the time. It's evident even from these chapters the degree to which people were circulating. I guess I would have liked to see a little more engagement with the issue of imperial identities here although one always hesitates to make such criticisms of EIGHT HUNDRED PAGE BOOKS.<br />
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One point of characterization I struggled with a bit was Chernow's description of Hamilton as fearing anarchy; "he would always be an uneasy and reluctant revolutionary," says Chernow (46). Indeed, "Hamilton would have preferred a stately revolution, enacted decorously in courtrooms and parliamentary chambers by gifted orators in powdered wigs" (65). Really? This sat a little awkwardly with the all-out, slash-and-burn rhetoric for me. This guy did not seem worried about disturbing the peace, and he certainly jumps into the war with gusto. However, I was struck by the account Hamilton wrote of the attack on Rivington's print shop for the St Croix newspaper, particularly this: that the mob "put an entire stop to his business, and reduced him at upwards of 50 years of age to the sad necessity of starting the world again" (qtd 69). Chernow describes this as "horror at such mob disorder" and that it is, but I might put a little finer point on it and say that this was a man intimately familiar with how precarious life could be, and what it meant to lose your livelihood. When you're swept up with anger, it's easy to cheer when someone who "deserves it" loses their job or has their business shut down. I wonder if Hamilton was the person who couldn't help but be aware of the long-term suffering that would follow. Would he have preferred a talking revolution? I find that hard to believe, but it seems like an entirely likely outcome of his background in the West Indies that he would be preternaturally conscious of what could be lost, and the need to preserve one's income (or the nation's income). Most people in the 18th century lived fairly precarious lives -- thus the importance of observing conventions and maintaining social networks -- but the West Indies always had a reputation for being particularly brutal for life's losers. Gentlemen with large estates could trust that land would always have value, and rest on a hazy confidence in their own self-sufficiency. Anyone from the West Indies would know that utter ruin and destitution was a real thing and it could happen to <i>you</i>.<br />
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So that's the first hundred pages down, and mainly what I've learned is that the musical is delightfully true to Chernow's research. So 700 more pages OR just listen to the musical another fifty times.<br />
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...<br />
<br />
Oh fine, I'll keep reading.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-66913966077401708882015-10-03T08:12:00.000-05:002015-10-03T08:12:17.676-05:00Mindy's back!I realize that I'm the Girl Who Cried Busy, and I fully accept that no one really believes how insanely busy I've been since I graduated in May but <i>wow.</i> Busy.<br />
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I did finally read something though, and I make no apologies for it being a celebrity memoir (it's too much work to incorporate "collection of personal essays" into this sentence grammatically) because <i>Mindy Kaling!</i> I loved her first book and when I realized the second one was coming I actually preordered it -- in hardcover! That's how much I was committed to this book.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Things I learned finding this image: Enrique Iglesias has covered a song titled "Why Not Me"</td></tr>
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I've set you up for a "but" there, but I didn't mean to. This is a book with a different character compared to the first one, but if you like Kaling's sense of humor you'll like this book too. I habitually make a distinction between things that I like, and things that I think have objective merit (which is obviously a subjective judgement, but just go with it); I think <i>Why Not Me?</i> is maybe a little less meritorious than <i>Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?</i> but both are definitely things that I like.<br />
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<i>Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?</i> was a seriously polished book. In <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2012/01/thing-i-bought-that-i-love.html" target="_blank">my post about it</a>, I talked about how well-written it was, and it definitely felt like someone absolutely putting her best foot forward on a project that meant a lot to her. Multiple times since I read it, I've thought that I should re-read it, and I've always felt confident recommending it to people because I don't think you have to be predisposed to like her in order to find the book funny. <i>Why Not Me?</i> is a little more disjointed -- in the foreword she describes it as "more personal" and it certainly is. Structurally, the chapters are of very differing lengths and some feel a little more like filler than others. They are laugh-out-loud funny but often end with some very heartfelt reflection. I think it's a testimony to Kaling's talent that those sincere "moral-to-the-story" parts landed with me and didn't feel lame or tacked on. The whole book feels a little more relaxed, like the kind of friendship where you can just talk about what's going on without putting a spin on it or making it feel like a story that's going to have a tidy ending. Kaling can bring the comedy but she can also tell you what she's learned, if anything. <i>Why Not Me?</i> really does feel more personal, not in a schmoozy <i>60 Minutes</i>/<i>People</i> interview kind of way, but in a really honest way, like someone who doesn't have anything to prove. That does mean, however, that I think you have to have some prior goodwill in order to really fully like the book.<br />
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I definitely recommend this book, especially if you liked <i>Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?</i> I think the last chapter is one of the best; it's a really good essay about confidence. The chapter where she outlines her working day is fascinating, and puts my "crazy" schedule to shame. Maybe for most of you this is a library wait-list book, and it's worth a spot on that list. Meanwhile, I will be ready for whatever question comes next. <i>Is That What I Look Like From Behind</i> maybe? Or <i>Who Do I Have To Kill To Get Some Licorice In Here</i>?<br />
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PS, how on trend are the colors on that cover? Those are basically
the colors of my dream living room, the one in the alternate universe
where I am not an impoverished slob.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-29392710417017207492015-07-29T20:59:00.000-05:002015-07-29T20:59:06.829-05:00The heart wants what it wantsPeople never say that about things that are, like, convenient. <i>Oh, that's completely in line with my plans! The heart wants what it wants!</i><br />
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I have acquired a lot of books -- in my life, yes, but more specifically, in the last four months or so, and they have been arranged into a perfectly logical priority order. There are some awesome-looking books in that stack, and of course I have a staggering amount of professional reading I should be working through.<br />
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But <i>man.</i> I just have not wanted to read any of those things. Just about the only thing I have wanted to read is Aubrey/Maturin books.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The only illustration anyone needs for this topic</td></tr>
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It's gone exactly according to script. Maybe two months of not reading anything at all, then finally, I give in and suddenly I'm reading all the time, in all those situations when I was so frustratingly stuck before: just not what I was so stubbornly focused on making myself read. So that's where I'm at: I have nothing to report except comfort reading: many books about ships.<br />
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It's so good, though. O'Brian has an almost Wodehousian ear for language, I think; both authors have those perfect turns of phrase that make me stop and laugh out loud in sheer appreciation. Much more importantly -- and I'm only just putting my finger on this -- O'Brian is like Jane Austen in that he generates humor as well as character by slyly slipping into a character's own perspective (if not his or her own voice) as part of the narration without giving any particular explicit indication that he's doing so. He also does the Austenian thing of reporting conversations telegraphically which just always tickles my funny bone. I probably mentioned these things the last time I wrote about these books? It's all still true.<br />
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So in short: I hope you are also reading things you enjoy this summer.<br />
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<br />Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-20244874265093844212015-05-14T09:01:00.000-05:002015-05-14T09:01:00.187-05:00Russia, where everything's terribleAlice and I were at our favorite used book store recently and I pulled a book confidently off the shelf. "What's that?" she asked. "I don't know, but it's Melville House," I answered. Some publishers are just kind of cool and niche, or they seem that way to me, and I naturally pay attention to their books. It helps that Melville House has super cool cover designs. <i>I am shallow.</i><br />
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<i>The Duel</i>, by Alexander (or Aleksandr, as the website puts it) Kuprin is one of several novellas with that title published by Melville House. Interestingly, while I sort of expected the whole book to revolve around a duel, the duel crops up right at the end. It's not out of nowhere, but at the same time the main character has so many other problems and relationships and worries going on that the duel is both a culmination and the triumph of a minor thing over major things. Essentially it's a book about a young man on the edge -- he's on track to totally waste his life, and he knows it, but he's not sure if he should or can escape. The parallels to the author's life are fairly obvious from the very short blurb in the back flap, and that probably explains the vividness of the main character's dilemma. It was obvious how brutal and pointless his current path was, but at the same time I could understand why it might suck him in.<br />
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This is quite possibly the most Russian novel ever: toward the end our main character receives nihilistic enlightenment from a man dying of alcoholism, among other things. The description promises "an absorbing account of the final days of Czarist Russia" and I was not disappointed in that regard. Probably going along with this is the fact that the women in this story are evil, manipulative harpies. There is really no other explanation for the things they do and say. Of course, the men in the book are all pretty seriously debased, so they're not alone in that.<br />
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What I wanted from this book was an interesting story and a little historical detail, and what I got was lots of very interesting historical insight and a solid story, so I'd recommend this book to others. Plus you get to feel cool carrying around that very cool cover, so win-win-win.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-54424629236455280342015-05-11T07:31:00.002-05:002015-05-11T07:31:25.207-05:00Ahhh, FlorenceProbably the most exciting thing about this book -- <i>Death in Autumn</i> by Magdalen Nabb -- is that it's the book <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2014/07/adventures-in-giallo-literature.html" target="_blank">I saw in the airport at Rome, didn't buy</a>, and then couldn't find again. So how did I find it, you ask? I picked it up at the Open Books/Reader book swap. Pure serendipity. I see from that old post that I thought the book I was looking for had an Italian author, which is what tripped me up trying to find it again; Nabb is (or was) British.<br />
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And this story has a further happy ending, because I enjoyed this book. It's not very long and it's a good, focused mystery story that manages to also have plenty of good characters and local color. I liked that the main detective, the Marshal, and his senior, the Captain (am I going to go figure out their names? no I am not) were working together on the case. In fact, on the whole, this was a very competent group of police with little internal tension, which is rare. Usually, even if you have a clever police detective in a novel s/he is working against corruption or laziness or bureaucracy or stupidity in their own force, so I thought this was a nice change of pace.<br />
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I don't have much else to say about this, I suppose, except that I am looking forward to returning to this series. Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-39208048238706863022015-04-27T20:44:00.000-05:002015-04-27T20:44:31.265-05:00"For such a little girl, you know, you're neurotic."Portia is 16. (It's the 1930s.) Her parents have died, and she's been sent to live with her much older half-brother and his cold and stylish wife in London for a year. It's awkward. The wife's volatile and ambitious admirer flirts with Portia a bit, Portia falls in love as only a girlish teenager can do. You know this can't end well, right?<br />
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Well, actually it doesn't end all that badly. No one dies or suffers any huge injustice or gets pregnant or ruins their life (well, they don't ruin their life in any way that they weren't already doing so). <i>The Death of the Heart</i> is more of a psychological novel: when you boil the plot down, there isn't much that's all that remarkable. But the personalities are thoroughly and carefully described, so that even where I felt like I recognized a type each character felt like a real person, and I was interested to keep reading and understanding each one more thoroughly.<br />
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There are sparks of wit in the story, and the conversations are really brilliantly captured, but Elizabeth Bowen's writing style felt a little overdone to me. It didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book at all; every once in a while, though, I'd just sort of think, "yeah, ok, reign it in." Still, on the whole it's beautifully written, full of little observations.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved in part of one's self-respect... Alone, one has a rather incomplete outlook---one is not sure what is funny, what is not. One solid pleasure of love is to check up together on what has happened.</blockquote>
The humor part of it is fairly understated; it's not so much humor as, again, observations, but it's still really enjoyable and certainly capable of making me smile now and then.<br />
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<i>Pas Avant les Domestiques</i> might have been carved on the Peppinghams' diningroom mantelpiece, under <i>Honi Soit qui Mal y Pense</i>. </blockquote>
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What's interesting about this is that Portia's personal history and connection to the other characters is so odd, and yet her experiences felt quite relatable. Portia is the product (that's kind of a gross word but it's hard to word this sentence otherwise) of her half-brother's father's late-in-life affair. Her quiet, apologetic upbringing, moving from cheap hotel to cheap hotel on the continent, was the outcome of her father's sense of shame and loss. When she comes to live with her half-brother, her mother has just died. I sort of thought this background would play more of a role than it did. I mean, it's the explanation for why she's so childish and mousy, for why she has so little experience of friendship or family, for why her half-brother and sister-in-law have so little affection for her, for why it's so awkward for her to be living with them. But, I don't know: Portia's feelings of loneliness, her uncertainty about her place in the world, and certainly her innocent experience of heartbreak all seemed fairly universal for a teenager. I mean, the whole thing hinges on Portia melting down because someone's been reading her diary! Teens!Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-44792301830446410802015-04-19T20:17:00.001-05:002015-04-19T20:17:45.385-05:00Thank you!You were right. Yep, I feel pretty confident in predicting (projecting?) that <i>you</i>, dear reader, probably read <i>The Rosie Project</i> and then wrote a blog post or a tweet or something about how cute it was. When I saw that, I made a little mental note. And you were totally right!<br />
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I was at a book swap event* and spotted this being put out onto the Romance table, and immediately I thought, <i>That's that book my dear internet friend -- yes, her/him -- said was adorable! Gotta grab that one!</i> So thank you for that recommendation, because it <i>was </i>adorable. I read the whole thing today, start to finish, breakfast to dinner. I thought it was like having a really good burger and fries and beer at the end of a long day. There might not be anything especially innovative or surprising about that, but it's so satisfying.<br />
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* The book swap was quite interesting. I can't help myself, I am always interested in how things get organized and I've been thinking about the concept of book swaps lately since at least three have appeared on my radar this month. The one I went to was totally free (*fist pump*). People arrived with their books (the organizers requested a maximum of 15). They dropped the books off at the front table. The organizers then assembled stacks of same-genre books and carried them out to the genre tables as rapidly as they could. Us patrons milled around in an addicting loop examining the tables. It was all extremely simple, and devilishly hard to leave because there were new books being put out constantly and <i>what if</i>. In this case, the leftover books were going to be donated to Open Books, Everyone's Favorite Book-Selling Chicago Literacy Organization. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the books (although of course there were some clunkers being offloaded too). I brought eight and left with five, which I was quite pleased about.<br />
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As so often is the case, the ending of <i>The Rosie Project</i> was less fun than the rest of the book, but that was ok. The best parts were the "Don is oblivious" parts so the conclusion was bound to be a little underwhelming. I mean: <br />
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'You want to share a taxi?' asked Rosie.<br />It seemed a sensible use of fossil fuel.</blockquote>
Adorbs. I saw the ending coming from a mile away but it was fine; just because you know that burger and fries are going to be awesome doesn't make them any less awesome.<br />
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I was sort of intrigued by the little author interview in the back of my edition, where Simsion reveals that the book is actually the product of many years chasing a passion for screenwriting. I have to admit, that's not the kind of thing I expect someone to admit to: a kind of Plan B success. Or Plan C, I guess, since Simsion had a career in IT that he quit for film. I feel like this little anecdote will be useful in the future.<br />
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Oh, and I scored 61 on the questionnaire (also in the back of my edition).Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-29751699006120776052015-04-02T13:02:00.001-05:002015-04-02T13:02:27.740-05:00A good old-fashioned murderbookI have to admit that when I hear the word "academic" used with a negative connotation, it makes me feel a little downhearted. I get that not everyone enjoys school things, but I have <i>always</i> enjoyed school things and even when a subject seems narrow or uninteresting to me, I enjoy enough niche things to appreciate other people's interest. And then all my close college friends went to grad school (I think 50% of the people at my 21st birthday have now finished their PhDs), and my own department is so friendly that I've had remarkably little exposure to conniving, petty, self-important types. Plus, a lot of grad students develop awesome hobbies and side projects in grad school (not me, I'm lame). When I think "academics" I think adorably nerdy people who are about as intimidating as a muppet.<br />
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And when I think "academic books" my heart warms, because what is better than an academic book? Academic books have a clearly defined focus, they delve deeply into their subjects, and they provide you with all the information you need to judge them -- or if they don't, then there's your assessment right there. But I appreciate that for plenty of people none of this is true, and alas, "academic", which is a rather accurate descriptor for me, is not a positive for the general public.<br />
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All of this is a long lead-in to an excellent book that strikes a happy medium between academic and general interest. The University of Chicago Press has clearly pulled out the stops to make <i>Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago</i> accessible for the general book-reading public. It's very reasonably priced, for one thing, and has a catchy title. It has maps, illustrations, a cast of characters, and a glossary. There are no superscript footnotes, and the technical parts of the introduction (historiography, methodology) have been pulled out and placed in a separate section at the end. It starts with an attention-grabbing introduction and carries on from there. Very easy to read. At the same time, it's well researched and all those important citations are there as endnotes, formatted in a gratifyingly efficient way for those of us who like that kind of thing. Seriously, I hate endnotes but these are very easy to use.<br />
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The book itself, as the subtitle suggests, tells the story of a sensational murder that took place in Chicago in the late nineteenth century. It's very much a narratively-driven book: it introduces the players, describes the victim's disappearance, the discovery of the body, investigation, and trial, before concluding with some considerations about the legacy and impact of the case. Now, murders are fairly interesting in themselves, but this was a case of a member of a secret Irish republican society being bumped off by his rivals within the group, so the story encompasses terrorism and financial misdeeds as well as nationalism and racism. Oh! And also the interplay of the press and the justice system. There's a lot here, is what I'm saying, but it's all straightforward and readable. If you like historical murder things -- and I know you do -- you'll like this.<br />
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(PS. I am delighted to find I already have a tag for "murder".)Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-79827236869562701622015-02-21T08:55:00.000-06:002015-02-21T08:55:33.650-06:00Hewers of wood, drawers of water, and inspectors of prisonsI have a long relationship with the cover of this book (<i>Parrot and Olivier in America</i>, by Peter Carey).<br />
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Gosh, I love that cover art. The red ink, the handwritten title! Every time I went into a Waterstones I would end up picking it up and considering it, but it's a chunky book to have to fit in your suitcase, not to mention the price of hardcovers; and then the description just didn't seem all that interesting. "An irrepressibly funny portrait of the impossible friendship between a master and a servant." The heart wants what it wants, and the heart likes the cover art way better than that description. But sometimes fate intervenes: I found a copy of the UK hardcover at the Newberry book sale over the summer priced at only $2 ("...that must be a mistake!" said the checkout volunteer as I mentally willed her to just finish the transaction) and <i>obviously</i>.<br />
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This was a very enjoyable book in the end, although it gets off to a slow start. The story is told from the perspective of Olivier, the French aristocrat, and Parrot, his multi-talented servant/secretary, in alternating chapters. Parrot is pretty clearly the "main" character here in terms of development/mystery/conflict/interest, although, fittingly for the society they're living in, Olivier's chapters provide the real start-to-finish timeline for the novel as well as the engine for the plot in the novel's present. The book starts out with each character narrating his childhood; you then get Olivier narrating up to the "present"; then Parrot comes into the story, and we find out about his intervening years as we go along.<br />
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Parrot's life in particular is shaped by a whole slew of historical forces, and I recognized a lot of the things Carey was playing with in terms of the movement of people and ideas. I feel like there's a more sophisticated reference to make here than Forrest Gump, but let's don't stand on ceremony; Parrot's life story at times feels a bit Gumpian, not because he crosses paths with <i>famous</i> people and events but just because of the sheer number of settings he goes through. He's also blessed by his author with intelligence and skills that make him an equal with Olivier. It's not just "a master and his servant" in other words, but rather more a story of how <i>this guy</i> ends up as a servant as one odd episode in a life full of odd episodes; odd episodes that are nevertheless all firmly within the experience of the working class at this time. I felt aware of all this as I read, but I was still moved by the pathos of his situation.<br />
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The inside flap of my copy describes the book as "an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville" and although that description made me skeptical at first, in the end I was totally on board. Somehow Carey manages to strike the right tone of being historically inspired but not quite claiming to be historical fiction, if you follow. Describing it as an "improvisation" is actually perfect: it's pulling out the really fascinating aspects of Tocqueville's life and world and blowing them up so you can get inside and really look at them. As you know(?), I often approach historical fiction with a heavy dose of skepticism, but this book seems like a good example of how fiction can be a means of interpreting and commenting on a particular time and place. Plus it's just plain fun to read (once you get past the childhood chapters, those are slightly rough going although key to the character development).<br />
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Now: a final note; an extremely mild observation. This book seems like an example of something else, the <a href="http://bookriot.com/search/diversity" target="_blank">diversity problem</a> in publishing, as it was apparently shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Now, I don't know how those awards work and I have even less clue what else was eligible in 2010, but while I enjoyed this book and thought it was really masterfully written I have a hard time seeing it as major-award-worthy. This isn't to take anything away from the book or its author <i>whatsoever</i>, and I've already noted that it succeeds at something I don't often see books succeeding at; but just, when I think about the whole world of UK publishing and English-language writing... it just strikes me as a data point that would, on its own, support the notion that the publishing industry favors established white guys writing about white guys. I will leave the strong criticism to people who actually have a clue about the real world. If I'd read this in 2010 it might have made it onto my shortlist of best books published in that year, but as we all know I only ever read two books a year that were actually published in that year so that's not a particularly high honor.<br />
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If there are awards for cover art though, I'm behind it all the way.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-78727776437352112022015-02-12T17:03:00.000-06:002015-02-12T17:03:34.498-06:00Getting real about Lent (sorry, not a book post)I have not one, not two, but <i>three</i> books to write up for you (<i>Parrot and Olivier in America</i>, <i>Youth Without God</i>, and a Don Camillo collection) -- but I wanted to write up something about Lent so I'm going to go ahead and do that first. Sorry. I do fully intend to write those three up soon, before I totally forget what I had to say about them, so please excuse this digression and we'll be back to our contractual obligations soon.<br />
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Right, so. Lent.<br />
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I have an abysmal track record when it comes to Lent. As a kid, my family always attended (and not infrequently was in charge of) Friday Stations & Soup nights during Lent, but I had little notion of "giving something up" until I got to high school. Then, it seemed to be mostly a matter of making a big fuss anytime someone (probably me) dared to eat something chocolate during Lent. <i>UGGGGGGH, DON'T EAT THAT IN FRONT OF ME, I CAN'T EAT CHOCOLATE CUZ IT'S LENT, UGGGGH!!!! </i>Between religion class and school Masses I was pretty much aware of the degree to which these various girls did not actually believe in Christianity/Catholicism (<i>Ed. according to them! this is not just me being judgey!</i>), so the whole "giving something up" practice just seemed illogical, hypocritical, and/or superstitious. My Lenten problem was only heightened in college, where the Catholic center seemed to agree with my view on "giving something up" but didn't seem to have much to offer in terms of making sense of Lent. The approved view was something along the lines of "doing something nice extra" but it was nothing on the scale of or with the same tone as those childhood Stations & Soup nights and so it wasn't at all clear what we were doing differently from any other forty days of the year. Really, it's only been in the last five years or so that I've not only gained an intellectual understanding of Lent but also begun to spiritually understand it (that is, understanding it from a more organic place).<br />
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Still, even in these last five years, I've struggled to effectively do <i>anything</i> for Lent, because as it turns out I have very little will-power when it comes to small day-to-day choices. A priest once described sacrifices as "practicing saying no to yourself" which really turned a light on for me... which then made it clear how infrequently I really succeed in saying no to myself. Those girls who mechanically gave up chocolate for Lent were actually doing something I would find at least as difficult to do for any reason. It's one of the major recurring spiritual lessons of my life, really, that being perhaps a more intellectually inclined person doesn't let you shortcut around the basic training you get from practices like saying rosaries or novenas or "giving something up". I definitely grew up in an environment that valued, say, meditation over vocal prayer, and being in the top ten of my class academically made me think I was on some kind of spiritual AP track too and shouldn't have to "bother" with the "basics"; but what I've found is that I make more progress in the former when I pay humble attention to the latter. Anyway.<br />
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With that lengthy bit of background, I have hopes for this year. I want to try, and to succeed or fail as it may be, with as little fudging of the goal posts as possible. This blog post is part of that, as I tend to sort of throw together a Lent plan on Fat Tuesday and then retrospectively tweak it. So here I am, putting it all in complete sentences on the public internet.<br />
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As our friend Count Fosco would say: <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2012/04/woman-in-white-4-endening.html" target="_blank">"Behold -- the programme!"</a><br />
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<b>Fasting</b><br />
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As I mentioned above, this is a hard one for me, and I am aiming high this year. <b>No snacking. </b>I am a big-time stress eater, and I <i>know</i> it's a spiritual problem for me and not just a diet or budget problem. It's stress, but it's also boredom and escapism. I know from long experience at this point that when I let myself get into a habit of lots of extra treats and snacks during the day and in the evening, it's a sign that I'm not dealing with what I need to be dealing with. This has certainly occurred to me as a possible Lenten sacrifice before, but I've avoided it out of either pride ("giving up snacks? boring") or cowardice ("too hard, I'll never be able to do it"). This year, though, I'm taking aim. I'll probably want to complain about it like those girls in high school, and if it's super hard, it's super hard. As a corollary: I will be focusing on eating three proper meals in the day (except the big fasting days obvs) in order to counteract the drifting.<br />
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<b>Prayer</b><br />
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This devotional site <a href="http://blessedisshe.net/">BlessedIsShe.net</a> sort of came out of the blue for me; I had never heard of it, and I think it's new, except I haven't seen anything announcing its newness. I just saw a retweet and when I clicked through liked what I found. Anyway, I ordered their <a href="http://blessedisshe.net/product/2015-lent-journal-digital-download/" target="_blank">Lenten journal</a> (you can get it as a digital download) and I'm going to give the prayer journaling a try. I already have a few "extra" prayers and novenas going on for various intentions so there's that too; but praying with scripture is something I'm a bit lazy about so I want to make an effort to stay on track with it this Lent.<br />
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<b>Almsgiving</b><br />
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The funny thing about the three parts of Lenten sacrifices is how very bad I am at all three of them. I guess that's, like, the human<b> </b>condition but there you go. Anyway, I think what I need this Lent is to be more hands-on. Some years I feel like what I need is to put a crowbar in my wallet and give some money away, but this year I think I need to actually perform some service. One of the young adult groups I attend does a monthly Saturday mission helping with a parish food bank, and so I am tentatively planning to participate in one of those Saturdays (I haven't seen the dates yet, so assuming that works out). Otherwise, I am "challenging" myself to participate in some other service day (there's always a few during Lent). Again with the pride: I tend to think that I, in my specialness, don't need some kind of National Honor Society-style pre-packaged service day, but that's ridiculous.<br />
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So there you go: an actual three-point plan for Lent, formulated nearly a week in advance of Ash Wednesday. *makes pumping iron gesture*Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-86150566710843364842015-01-07T11:10:00.002-06:002015-01-07T11:10:25.788-06:00In which the Polar Vortex forces me to write a postI think I would have to rank <i>The Way We Live Now</i> among my favorite book titles ever. It's maybe not a particularly original phrase but something about the rhythm of it appeals to me. It's evocative and immediate; as soon as you read the phrase it conjures up something of the change we all have to deal with in our own lives. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, not only is it a nice little string of words, it also fits the book perfectly and even lends a little focus to a fairly wide-ranging plot.<br /><br />
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Y'all know <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/search/label/Trollope" target="_blank">I love some Trollope</a>. Apparently this is one of the books that gets singled out as his "masterpiece" and I can see that. There's a lot going on, but the book never gets lost in the weeds or bogged down (or other landscape metaphors). Even as I was reading I was impressed by the way the different elements unfolded, and pleased to find that there were no over-the-top satirical digressions like some others of his books (yaaaaaay). <br />
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At the center of the book is change, and particularly change around the relationship between money, honor, and social acceptance. The sinister Augustus Melmotte is making unheard of sums of money, and he has a daughter who will presumably be the heir to all this. Although he, his Jewish wife (yes, it goes there, or skirts close), and the mousey daughter are completely uncouth, various impecunious nobles and members of respectable society start cosying up and/or scheming to become part of his business or to marry the daughter. Melmotte is making his money through -- brace yourselves -- SPECULATION<br />
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which obviously makes everything worse. Trollope's big point is that there's no there there, both in terms of the money (that's not really a spoiler, is it?) and in terms of Melmotte's social acceptance. People don't <i>really</i> want to associate with him, but the fact that other people apparently are willing to tolerate him (for his ££££) makes them willing to go along too. Here, this passage captures the line of thinking at the heart of the novel nicely:<br />
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There is money going. There must be money where there is all this buying and selling of shares. Where does your uncle get the money with which he is living like a prince at San Francisco? Where does Fisker get the money with which he is speculating in New York? Where does Melmotte get the money which makes him the richest man in the world? Why should not you get it as well as the others?</blockquote>
Trollope obviously has a problem with Melmotte as a foreigner, and the book certainly leaves the door open to anti-semitism, at the very least. It's interesting that Melmotte himself is not Jewish, but his wife, who basically does and says nothing, is Jewish; and also that in an episode in which a young lady decides to marry an old rich Jewish guy for the material advantages and gets rejected by her parents for doing so, it's the Jewish financier who comes off best of all. So while Melmotte's cosmopolitan background and association with, yes, Jewish moneylenders, are all very sinister, Trollope seems to be pretty deliberate in trying to make his book <i>not</i> about evil Jews corrupting everything. Certainly he's not up to modern post-Holocaust levels of decency and sensitivity, but he does also seem to be trying, in the context of his own time and contemporary developments, to align himself on the progressive, open-minded end of things. And in this book, it's actually America that is the most consistent source of sketchiness and danger. Anyway, just as important is the fact that the "respectable" English characters do not cover themselves in glory. There's lots of shameless conniving around cash-grab marriage matches; the young heirs to respectable positions are pissing away their inheritance and youth gambling and corrupting young working women; and of course everyone's primarily concerned with what everyone else thinks of them. <br />
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Well, that's what Trollope's concerned with, but it's an entertaining book because the characters are interesting. Trollope does his thing with the romantic pairings, showing how love is both a natural phenomenon that can't be helped or created, but also something that can be influenced by circumstances and even rational considerations. I just like the way he writes these things; it's not just overwhelming romantic love that wins the day, but rather a combination of (irrational) affection and (rational) admiration that lead to a happy pairing. Trollope likes giving counter-examples, where people are attracted to each other or respect each other but the match just doesn't work because the other half of the equation is missing, and while the mother or the lover or someone else might urge the girl (it's usually the girl) to go through with it anyway, Trollope upholds the ideal that both things ought to be there. Well -- he upholds it for the middle class at least. Ruby Ruggles has affection and romance confused (due to reading novels, bad girl), but I don't think she ever had much affection for whats-his-face the miller.<br />
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A surprise awesome character in this book is Dolly Longstaffe -- Dolly, short for Adolphus, he's a dude and yes that threw me for... a while. If we're keeping a list of proto-Bertie-Woosters, he goes right on there, not least he becomes the one who sets the ball rolling for the great unraveling in the final third of the novel. He starts out as a kind of nothing background character and, thanks in no small part to his own clueless bullheadedness, becomes a kind of hero in the end by sticking to his guns and refusing to play the game(s).<br />
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FINALLY, I come to the thing that prompted me to actually sit down and write this. Hilariously (to me), one of the great modern social evils Trollope wanted to expose in this book was the evil of authors and reviewers colluding to promote books. That's right: threats to the social order, new forms of financial trickery, and FALLACIOUS BOOK REVIEWING, oh noes! So in service of this very important theme one of the main characters is Lady Carbury, who is seeking literary fame. (There is a lot to be said about Lady Carbury, and how she is a much more sympathetic character than Trollope means her to be, and how his solution is for her to just support a male writer, but dammit this post is already too long.) At one point she starts writing a novel and she names the main character Cordinga, "selected by Lady Carbury as never having
been heard before either in the world of fact or in that of fiction." Which I was reminded of when I read <a href="http://www.reading-rambo.com/2015/01/carmilla-if-you-were-less-pretty-i.html" target="_blank">Alice's post about <i>Carmilla</i></a>, because I was all "that's not a real name, silly Victorian authors."<br />
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UGH FINE I will make brief comments about Lady Carbury. If you read her plot as "Trollope is offended by no-talent people who only write for the sake of getting attention, and who are willing to game the system to get that attention," it's like, ok T, you're kind of an elitist dick, but if you're seriously bothered by this, fine, whatever. But the fact that she's a woman, and her failings as an author seem characteristically feminine -- well. And then he gives her this super-sympathetic backstory, where she's had a really shitty life, including an abusive marriage, and so she has set her cap at literary fame to redeem her life now that she's a widow. So while she behaves really awfully to her children, it's hard to see her literary aspirations as anything other than mildly humorous, and certainly not as a point against her. Again, as an individual character who doesn't have any particular love or talent for writing, it kind of works for her to end up settling to enjoy the literary scene through a social connection to it rather than as a celebrated author -- but that's not actually it, is it: it's that her proper role in the end is as <i>wife</i> and <i>hostess</i>. Mmhm.<br />
<br />
Anyway. As usual, I did really like this book even though Trollope is like, Dead White Guy Number One. I read it over Christmas and even though it's a big ol' Victorian novel I happily picked it up whenever I got a chance. Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-85946562575447402422014-11-22T11:45:00.003-06:002014-11-22T23:23:36.665-06:00#Minithon (updated with thrilling conclusion)I feel the need to record my mini-participation in today's Mini Readathon.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Click for other, more awesome posts</td></tr>
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I woke up this morning at about 7am, mostly because my head is full of Sinus Death. And then I had breakfast of sausage links (mini-er than normal grilling sausages), pills (small things, obvs), and coffee (first rule of Minithon is that the coffee is never mini).<br />
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My mini reading material of choice this morning was <i>comic books</i> because those have a mini word count. And because when you are feeling a bit beat up and lazy, no one understands better than Hawkeye.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Someone else put this on the internet, for the record</td></tr>
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My other reading material today is the <i>London Review of Books</i>, issues of which are piling up on my couch. Although it is printed on satisfyingly large paper, the LRB is in fact made up of reviews and essays, both of which are pretty mini, so there.<br />
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And just to amplify the mininess of the day, I actually am probably not doing much reading this afternoon because I promised a friend to help with childcare at an event she's hosting today, so there's further smallness for you. Mini on, fellow mini-ers.<br />
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<b>Update:</b><br />
I read volumes 1 and 2 of <i>Hawkeye</i> and loved them all over again. Because, boomerang. Then I went and did my babysitting thing, which took me up to the end of the official Minithon time frame, but I ended up reading about a half of an LRB anyway. I'm a doctor, not a timekeeper! (No, really, I'm a doctor now, Alice isn't just trolling me in some inscrutable, vaguely complimentary way.) And then I watched 30 Rock and knitted. Well done, Minithonners! Let's all drink little airline bottles of booze in celebration.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-52591530330224077552014-11-07T11:20:00.000-06:002014-11-07T11:20:00.743-06:00Haven't we had enough voting this week? -or- Waiting for Goodreads to send my dang stickerI don't really use Goodreads. I like the scanning of barcodes part (who wouldn't; except probably someone who spends their working days doing that anyway) and I like the idea of having this automagically generated report of what I've read. Furthermore it can be fun and rewarding to enter my page progress. But I don't write reviews, I hate doing stars, I don't really add people as friends, and it's a lot less cool to log in and see what I've abandoned or stalled out on. (Is there a good way to "finish" a book in the sense of quitting it? I haven't played around with it much, but Goodread's interface seems kind of inflexible compared to my usual patterns of reading, which involve a lot of not-reading.)<br />
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However, in addition to being a place where people can apparently carry on utterly pointless feuds, Goodreads is a place where you can click on buttons to vote for Book(s) Of The Year. I saw some chatter on Twitter that <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2014/05/something-different-something-other.html" target="_blank">one book I definitely support</a> had been nominated so I dusted off my log-in and cast my vote. Then I started looking for other books to vote for. When I didn't see any other books I've read as nominees I started thinking up write-in candidates.<br />
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And that's more or less when I realized how little I read in the year it's been published. There are a few things, notably <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2014/06/at-intersection-of-oriental-buffets-and.html" target="_blank"><i>Pioneer Girl</i></a>, that I've read and liked and which qualify. One book, I really wanted to vote for it but the site wouldn't let me. Since I live in a <strike>pig sty</strike> studio apartment it was sitting in arm's reach, and I checked the publication date: 2014! Or no, wait, 2012; the US hardback came out in 2013 and the <i>paperback</i> in 2014. So fine, you win, Goodreads.<br />
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Since academics are slow, and since <i>this</i> is the centenary year, I think <i>The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914</i> still qualifies as a new book, though. It certainly qualifies as a book you should read. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you want one book to read for the centenary, this is it. That's not a very original opinion; this book has gotten a lot of praise. <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2014/05/its-beautiful-outside-lets-talk-about.html" target="_blank"><i>July 1914</i></a>
is a quicker, pacier read (and has bigger type), and is essentially narrative, whereas Clark goes broader and deeper, exploring various factors and facets of the prewar world in a more explicitly analytical way. If you are really getting
serious about the topic (reading two books qualifies), I strongly
recommend getting hold of the review essay by John Deak published in the
June 2014 <i>Journal of Modern History</i> titled "The Great War and
the Forgotten Realm: the Habsburg Monarchy and the First World War."
Most academic libraries, I dare say, have some sort of public provision if you want it,
and Deak's review of Austrian history and historiography is invaluable.<br />
<br />
Anyway, back to the book. The first chapter of <i>The Sleepwalkers</i> is an overview of Serbian politics in the nineteenth century, which is such an amazing, mindblowing, perfect choice I can, indeed, hardly even. Chapter two then deals with Austria-Hungary and its internal politics. Clark sets the conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary front and center, takes it seriously, and is never too eager to sweep it aside in favor of great-power conflicts that <i>must</i> <i>obviously</i> be the <i>real truth.</i> One of the simple but excellent insights here is the way Clark chooses to make an analogy between the Serbian nationalists of the 1910s and modern terrorist organizations. That kind of thing can be tenuous, and at any rate it's liable to become dated, but in this case it's convincing and moreover an extremely effective way to quickly get the reader into the scene. The second section, chapters three through six, treats the international political situation not simply as a matter of international relations or the interaction of policy but a messy tangle of individuals often working at cross-purposes. This is a theme that will resonate with the <i>July 1914</i> book, but Clark goes into much more detail, focusing country by country with subheadings like "Who Governed in St Petersburg?" and "Who Governed in Paris?" This section deals with a lot of different themes and theories that appear in "1914" literature, so you get wonderful little passages like "A Crisis of Masculinity?" (Side note: Christopher Clark must be superhuman, for all that he's able to cover in this book.) Finally, in the third section, we get back to the July crisis proper. This section covers familiar ground but is able to draw on all the consideration of the preceding 360 pages to really supercharge the narrative.<br />
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Guys, I'm fawning over this book, which is so uncool and gets one nowhere in one's career, but whatevs. It's amazing the level of research here and even more amazing how effortlessly it's put across. I put this in my suitcase when I went to Rome this summer, even though it takes up a significant amount of space, simply because <i>I couldn't put it down</i>. It's a long book, I know, but if you like reading history I guarantee you will love this, and however far you get into it you will get a lot out of it.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-49956176677114047642014-11-05T15:24:00.000-06:002014-11-05T15:24:00.847-06:00"Abroad isn't at all what it was."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The Towers of Trebizond</i> was a Newberry Book Sale purchase that almost wasn't. I picked it up and put it down, and picked it up, rinse, repeat. On the one hand, the camel on the cover is pretty cool-looking; on the other, <i>sigh</i>, that woman is drinking from a Union Jack teacup. Union Jack teacups make me feel a bit tired.<br />
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It turned out that my ambivalence about the cover was a premonition. The book follows Laurie, the narrator, a young woman who accompanies her Aunt Dot and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg on a mission to Turkey to convert Muslims to high-church Anglicanism and introduce the women to freedom, education, and hats. (This was published in the early 1950s, if that description makes you raise an eyebrow.) It's relentlessly comic and intensely Anglican. Let us take as our text:<br />
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A group of inhabitants stood by the road as we drove up; they were dark and sad, and they may have been Rogues, but I thought they looked more like those obscure, dejected, maladjusted, and calamity-prone characters who come into Tenebrae, such as Aleph, Teth, Beth, Calph, Jod, Ghimel, Mem, and the rest, and they sounded as if they were talking in that afflicted strain that those characters talk in, and saying things like 'he has brought me into darkness and not into light', 'he has compassed me with gall and labour', 'he has built against me round about, that I may not get out, he has upset my paths', and ' my eyes have failed with weeping, my bowels are disturbed, my liver is poured out', and so on, till all the lights go out and there is nothing but the dark.</blockquote>
Laurie speaks/is written in these long, run-on sentences that convey naivety or something and it got old for me fast. I think she's meant to be sort of "daughter of the house" age, i.e. between 17 and 21? but I don't know, it just bugged me. And then while I get that Tenebrae joke (a) I feel I deserve a gold star for getting it, and (b) it's, like, twice as long as it should be.<br />
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I could see the humor on the page but it just didn't connect. Sentences like this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Father Chantry-Pigg always spoke as if he had just parted from the Byzantines, and was apt to sigh when he mentioned them, though, as aunt Dot pointed out, he had missed them by five centuries.</blockquote>
make me feel sure that there are people out there for whom this is a cherished book, The Funniest Book On Earth, but for me every recognizable foible or outlandish personality quirk got instantly beaten to death and then ground into powder with Laurie's long sentences and slow-moving paragraphs.<br />
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You will not, at this point, be surprised if I say that I got to page 53, mostly by skimming, and then remembered with relief the concept of giving a book fifty pages to grab your interest. I'm disappointed, though, because I was planning to look super smart by making a connection between this book and <i>Scoop</i>. Maybe someday I'll be in a better mood and come back to this, but for now I am moving on.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-91464085194081054622014-11-03T09:05:00.000-06:002014-11-03T09:05:22.427-06:00This post brought to you in a cleft stickFun fact: you can be "finishing your dissertation" for a year (or more!) but at some point, you have to actually finish the dang thing -- and it's, like, work. But then, as you wait for the defense and hope hope hope there are five people not hating your work, you have some weird awkward space to attempt job applications and read things again.<br />
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When I bought this copy of <i>Scoop</i> at Open Books, having skipped out of a play with Alice like <i>delinquents</i> or possibly <i>discerning theater-goers</i>, she said something like, "you found a pretty-covered Waugh!" It is that exactly; I like these very distinctive editions, although I'm not fond of the fact that they have not even one sentence of plot description on the back. Look, I just want to be sure I haven't read this one before, but I guess I'm just supposed to be sold by the author's name. <i>It's Waugh, what more could you possibly want to know</i>, I imagine the publisher saying. Or it could be ironically appropriate since in Waugh's books actually knowing anything is generally a handicap, and those who can spin a line, go with the flow, bluff their way through, are the ones who get ahead.<br />
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<i>Scoop</i> is certainly in that vein; a socialite convinces a newspaper magnate to hire a trendy writer friend to cover a civil war in Africa, but the newspaper ends up hiring a rather Bilbo-ish country life columnist with a similar name and sending him instead. The civil war isn't real, unless maybe it is, although it doesn't really matter as long as the reports being filed at home are exciting enough. <br />
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Like <a href="http://cotlb.blogspot.com/2012/09/waugh-i-get-it-now.html" target="_blank"><i>A Handful of Dust</i></a>, this is a book with a sharp, almost contemptuous driving energy. Western ideologues and journalists have concocted the fake civil war, while capitalist-imperialist interests are behind whatever is actually happening. No one operates under any concept of truth or justice, and this is as true in the fictitious Ismaelia as in London. I was reminded of the current fluster about Ebola as I read; hundreds or thousands of people can die in Africa but it doesn't get as much reaction as one death (or one possible ill person!) in America or Western Europe. Waugh's not making quite that point, but he is talking about a similar kind of self-centeredness and callousness.<br />
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It occurs to me that I might not describe <i>Scoop</i> as "funny". It <i>is</i> funny, start to finish it's funny; but if I had a dedicated shelf for comedy, it wouldn't get shelved there. (I am tagging this <i>post </i>humor, but that's metadata. Har har.) It's not a lighthearted book, I think. Waugh's writing reads as a bit angry to me, and I'm not entirely sure that I'm right about that. Maybe I'm bringing certain preconceptions about Waugh as a literary writer to the table, or maybe media manipulation, commercially expedient crisis, etc, just don't feel like much of a laughing matter in 2014. But I got this sense from <i>A Handful of Dust</i> too, where Waugh is unsparing in dishing out disaster in the real world outside the London social round. So, consistency in the writer or consistency in the reader?Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-8295546844186420092014-08-18T21:51:00.000-05:002014-08-18T21:51:58.785-05:00"That which was supposed to happen had happened"This is a heck of a book. I suspected it might be: I mentioned to a twitter contact that I'd just taken it out from the library and he told me to get in touch when I'd finished it, because he wanted someone to talk about the ending with. And yet -- almost right up until it happened -- I was still surprised at how taken aback I was by the ending. In the best possible way.<br />
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Look, we may or may not know each other, and I certainly can't tell you how to spend your time, but I really think you want to read <i>What Happened to Sophie Wilder</i>.<br />
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The central characters, Charlie and Sophie, were intense college lovers at their exclusive liberal-arts-college writing program, and in the novel's present, Sophie comes back into Charlie's life under murky circumstances. The novel alternates between the two of them, unfolding the past both directly and indirectly. <br />
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This is a book about lives and narratives: the versions of our lives and others' lives that we construct and tell (think of the title as a question at a party: "Whatever happened to..."), and the relationship between those stories and real events, the march of time. What does it mean when it seems like someone else's story should be to fall in love with, or reconcile with, or help me, but they refuse? Can we know another person the way we know a character in a book? What does it take to change our own story; however sincere a conversion, can it really ever change our path? <i>What Happened to Sophie Wilder</i> effortlessly (!) drew me into these deep waters, as Charlie tries to piece together the plot of Sophie's life and find his own place in it. It's effective at conjuring up all these different layers of narrative and reality without getting in the way of the actual experience of reading; it's only when you get to the (puzzling, contradictory) ending, as you review the whole thing in your mind, that all of this comes to the surface. I guess it's a little like those Magic Eye posters (<i>google it, youngsters</i>): the ending knocks your eyes out of whack, so to speak, and then the thing you were looking at all along suddenly transforms into something deep and textured and surprising.<br />
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I'm trying not to give away too much (the unfolding is part of the effect), and so I'm falling into freshman lit major mumbo jumbo and possibly making the book sound weird or hard. It's not; it's an engaging novel that you can happily read on the train. Just as a story about young people figuring out what to do with their lives, it caught and held my interest. Plus the writing is notably good.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I miss that about those days---the freedom to want; the belief that our desires could never disappoint us, so long as we remained loyal to them; the sense that we could choose our fate, as though the absence of choice weren't exactly what made it fate.</blockquote>
And if you think, <i>a novel about twenty-something capital-w Writers in New York City, goodie</i>; I had a similar thought and, hilariously, on the next page it agreed with me:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Outside the world of mean-spirited media blogs no one had any idea who we were. Max secretly faulted me for this, though in truth people were simply tired of comfortable young white guys from New York. I couldn't blame them; I was tired of us, too.</blockquote>
So go get <i>What Happened to Sophie Wilder</i>. Better yet, get it and give a copy to a friend and make a pact to get together and talk about the ending when you've finished it.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-54759701838356474292014-07-28T10:01:00.002-05:002014-07-28T10:01:40.709-05:00Adventures in "giallo" literatureI believe in getting to the airport early for an international flight, but for various reasons I was outrageously early for my flight out of Fiumicino, meaning that I got to investigate all the shops at my leisure (and my wallet's peril). This included a Feltrinelli's outlet -- the Waterstones or Barnes & Noble of Italy -- which had a single, but generous, table of books <i>in Inglese</i>. This is an interesting thing, the forty or so titles in English that make up the selection in an airport bookstore; what would you choose and/or expect? In this case, there were the usual sorts of things, I guess, the supernatural romances, the pinky-purple chick lit, the conspiracy thrillers, the award short-list titles; but also, and I thought this was a nice touch, a selection of novels with Italian connections, whether written by Italians or simply set in Italy. And among these was a detective novel translated from Italian which sounded pretty interesting, but I virtuously chose not to spend my money in such a fashion (and promptly went and spent four times as much-- look, I don't have to explain myself to you). Having arrived home, I tried asking google what that book was so I could look for it at the library, and google suggested the Inspector Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri. Now, I think the Big G is wrong, I don't think Camilleri is the author I saw at the airport--<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcixw8BzPiR94a81H7RRPEae2XdIaYfoh0eejkFl3qzmLX-G2MxBEaw_tUw8MU5-_WrM_j3QJY1ht6FM2T_zYt6J0VbglA5J09DxeLTWgsz7LBy1nlAx82O_9GqUw3qOiejIiBbV9xFsDM/s1600/logo11w.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcixw8BzPiR94a81H7RRPEae2XdIaYfoh0eejkFl3qzmLX-G2MxBEaw_tUw8MU5-_WrM_j3QJY1ht6FM2T_zYt6J0VbglA5J09DxeLTWgsz7LBy1nlAx82O_9GqUw3qOiejIiBbV9xFsDM/s1600/logo11w.png" height="113" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Wish you had Glass now, eh?" - no, really no</td></tr>
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--but Camilleri was readily available at the library and so I took out <i>The Shape of Water</i>, the first of this apparently much-loved series.<br />
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<br />
A man is found dead of a heart attack in his car, parked in an area notorious for prostitution. But of course, the dead man was a political heavyweight, this is Sicily,
and it's a crime novel, so it's not so simple as all that. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Wonderful, eh?"<br />
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."<br />
"It's wonderful, that is, that someone in this fine province of ours should decide to die a natural death and thereby set a good example. Don't you think? Another two or three deaths like Luparello's and we'll start catching up with the rest of Italy."</blockquote>
I found it interesting that the tagline on my edition is <i>a novel of food, wine, and homicide in small-town Sicily</i>, which makes it sound sort of travelogue-esque; plenty of murder mysteries trade on readers'/viewers' interest in the setting, serving up atmosphere along with a puzzle.* In fact, <i>The Shape of Water</i> is a fairly sordid little story of sex, politics, scandal, and death, and while food features from time to time, I wouldn't say it's particularly prominent. The tagline may be drawing on the series as a whole rather than this particular installment.<br />
<br />
I didn't call the book "gritty" there because the writing seemed a little too spare for that particular adjective. The quotes on the back compare Camilleri to Hammett and Chandler, so I have a vague notion that this is a matter of style. It wasn't my favorite; in a couple of places it felt flat rather than taut or hard-bitten or whatever. Nevertheless, there were parts that stood out, including passages that were genuinely funny, which as we all know is not easy to do.<br />
<br />
At the end of the book I discovered endnotes which explained some of the political references and undercurrents and gave rough dollar values for the lire quoted in the text -- these notes were minimal and genuinely useful, or would have been if there were any indication in the text that they existed! Seriously, no asterisks or anything. Hopefully that was corrected in later editions; pity the translator who went to the trouble of compiling them if not.<br />
<br />
In sum, this book didn't totally win me over but then it didn't turn me off either. I have another volume in the series (not the second one, but a later one) and I'm still going to read that one too. I didn't see anything here that would make me particularly love this series the way that readers in other languages apparently do, but neither did I dislike the book. Certainly Sicily makes a unique environment for crime stories, and I thought it was handled really well; I mean, I don't know what would actually be "realistic" but this didn't feel didactic or exoticized. I suppose that's one value of reading a translated book.<br />
<br />
<br />
* Has anyone else seen <i>Endeavor</i>? The second series just aired on PBS. I never liked <i>Inspector Morse</i> much (although <i>Lewis</i> I like), but <i>Endeavor</i> is pretty gorgeous.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-15034644214598356872014-07-19T12:07:00.000-05:002014-07-19T12:07:16.460-05:00Nothing to declareI am back!<br />
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You probably didn't even know I was gone, but I was: two weeks in Rome. It was grand. (Unintentional Grand Tour pun? No one will believe it.) I had this fine book with me, letting me impress my friends with borrowed knowledge:<br />
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It's a bit heavy, being printed with colored pictures on nice paper, and the author sometimes seems to assume that just telling you the name of the architect or artist is enough, but it was a lifesaver enough times to make lugging it around worthwhile. The pages on the Vatican Museums were essential (<i>omigosh the Vatican Museums are ENORMOUS</i>) and unlike most guidebooks I looked at, this one gives plenty of time to all the zillions of churches you're obviously going to want to visit.<br />
<br />
Even better, I bought this book with the gift card from when my <i>Something Other Than God</i> post won the drawing at Conversion Diary.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It's a major award!</td></tr>
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Even if I had spent my own money though: worth it. I think I will be revisiting the Blue Guide series for future travels.<br />
<br />
Now, I must get unpacked, do the laundry, and get reading something so I can post again in a reasonable interval. Hashtag: summer.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-30105022299790042142014-06-28T10:07:00.002-05:002014-06-28T10:07:33.680-05:00"'How nasty,' I said tactfully."Margaret has agreed to marry Syl; well, not so much agreed, as remained silent when he asked and he's taken it from there. Syl is twice her age -- he's her mother's contemporary -- and it's plainly obvious that Margaret's embarrassed and repulsed by him, but she's paralyzed and desolate and meanwhile the wedding is drawing nearer and nearer. What is going on with Margaret? And who is going to put a stop to this?<br />
<br />
<i>The Summer House</i> [by Alice Thomas Ellis; there are a lot of other <i>The Summer House</i>s out there] is a "trilogy" -- three novels that describe the events leading up to Margaret's wedding day from different perspectives. It seems more correct to call it a "triptych" but that's pretentious and I defer to the publisher. Anyway, the first novel (...novella? I'll stop now) is from Margaret's perspective, the second from Syl's mother's, and the third is in the voice of Lili, a free-spirited half-Egyptian friend of Margaret's mother. I don't know how to describe it -- the books manage to unfold incomplete information in a way that you don't necessarily realize what you don't know; so that, for instance, you think you have found out what has traumatized Margaret... and then you find out a little more which colors your initial understanding... and then you find out <i>more</i> which turns the whole thing on its head. Even just finding out someone's true motivation feels like a sea change. It's dramatic and subdued all at once in a way that feels, somehow, very true to life.<br />
<br />
When I got to the last twenty pages I was completely gripped and had to bring the book with me to finish it. The pattern of the three novels is a little counterintuitive: you start with the person most closely involved in the planned wedding and move out to the wedding guest; but then, as you'll see, you are also paradoxically moving from the person who knows least about what's going on to the person who knows the most. There's some dark stuff here, definitely, but I think this makes a good summer read. Plus: <i>it has "summer" in the title</i> and it has those sweet teacups on the cover of my copy.<br />
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<br />Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-33423682704683678352014-06-20T17:50:00.000-05:002014-06-30T10:25:04.123-05:00DVDs are basically books now, right?...complete with the faint air of obsolescence that comes with physical media nowadays.<br />
<br />
<i>Ivanhoe</i>'s going... great... in the sense that I keep seeking out other things to read and forgetting that, technically, I already have a book going. And recently I've devolved to watching moving pictures in order to avoid reading it; which means I've disqualified myself for <i>At least she's reading!</i> No sympathy please; I'm <i>not even reading</i>. (Except for the sociology articles, travel guides, and various spiritual books.)<br />
<br />
First of all, you will be pleased to know that I have now seen <i>Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel</i> (or as I like to think of it, <i>Anne of Green Gables 2: The Gable-ing</i>). What a thing of glory. If I had seen that in my prime Anne years, I would have been a dead duck. The <i>dresses</i>, the <i>hats</i>,<i> </i>the <i>red hair</i>, the <i>monkeyshines</i>, the <i>GILBERT</i>. I seriously appreciated how the film ended right after Anne and Gilbert get engaged, because what else is there?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgloH2x6TRq0oAGMwqIg4gFtZEQKTQIVV_Sl47mrQjRG3h5WJCZiiLPpH4OG7WBCXCXu8wR6LI2upThtNCE4QgtgWX4HeizNHoasg1Psd9YqwsPyGsQr-j2FIfLIeEqM4-9HJQr81LYgcEV/s1600/annegilbert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgloH2x6TRq0oAGMwqIg4gFtZEQKTQIVV_Sl47mrQjRG3h5WJCZiiLPpH4OG7WBCXCXu8wR6LI2upThtNCE4QgtgWX4HeizNHoasg1Psd9YqwsPyGsQr-j2FIfLIeEqM4-9HJQr81LYgcEV/s1600/annegilbert.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nothing. There is nothing else.</td></tr>
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I watched it with some other girls (also a bottle of bourbon and a pan of brownies) (#adults) and there was spontaneous clapping and cheering at the end. Also, one of us (*ahem*) shouted "Gil, no, I've been such a fool!" during The Gazebo Scene, and there was much speculation about the poofy hairstyles. So all in all, a massively rewarding four hours and I might need to own that and watch it weekly now. <br />
<br />
Switching tracks... did you know there's a BBC version of the <i>Barchester Chronicles</i>? I probably should have known; I probably would have guessed it; but I didn't know it specifically until Super Hans brought it to my attention. Yes, I was lying around watching <i>Peep Show</i> (which is really too explicit for me and I have to skip over lot of scenes but it's still funny so I keep coming back), and the show's resident <a href="http://akas.imdb.com/character/ch0026015/quotes" target="_blank">lover of crack</a> brandished a DVD of <i>Barchester Chronicles</i> as the perfect viewing material for a hard-partying gig at a music festival. "Don't pigeonhole me, dude," quoth Super Hans. "Ecclesiastical politics when you're high. These guys really knew how to do a fucking number on each other." I laughed really hard, but I was also thinking, "oh, I want to watch that."<br />
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I should state that I was not high at any time when I watched this. The Super Hans joke did elevate my enjoyment of it though. The DVDs I got from the library had a stale B.O. smell that was as inexplicable and improbable as it was intense, so I sort of imagine a graph of people who have checked these out as looking something like this:<br />
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Yes, indeedy, there is a very young Alan Rickman in this. (The designers of the DVD cover have given him pride of place; they know where the money comes from.) The series itself is enjoyable although I don't know how hard it would be to get into without a prior appreciation of the books. This is the kind of dry-toast costume drama that gives costume drama a bad name. It's all pretty sedate and low-key, without excessive attention to things like "pacing" or "tension". There are scenes that end really abruptly and others that are weirdly drawn out; at one point a character calls over another character and we watch her walk across the lawn in real time for no particular reason. The production values are charmingly low; my favorite example is that in some of the London scenes there's a background track that sounds exactly like what you get in one of those "old timey Main Street" museum exhibits.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[clatter clatter clatter] [watermelon watermelon]</td></tr>
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But the actors are all good and do a good job bringing the characters to life. I liked seeing the apoplectic Archdeacon "in the flesh", and Alan Rickman does a great job as Mr Slope, which is important given that he carries so much of the story. He delivers a really smarmy proposal in a delightfully smarmy way and gets a good smack for it, so that alone is worth the price of admission. (Price of admission in this case = $0, support your public libraries.) Netflix could suggest this and the 1995 <i>P&P</i> (you know whereof I speak) together under the heading of<i> </i>Hilariously Awkward Clerical Proposals. The first two episodes cover the book <i>The Warden</i>, and much like that book, they give a good introduction to the characters and local politics but the real fun comes from episode three onward so don't give up on it too soon. I could endorse just starting with episode three if you feel confident in your ability to just figure out the context clues.<br />
<br />
So a win all the way around with my movie watching this week: I got to pass the time revisiting some favorite characters and not reading <i>Ivanhoe</i>, plus now I know what I'll bring with me in the tour bus if I ever become a drug-addled musician -slash- what I'll watch on Friday nights if I ever become a live-in teacher at a boarding school.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6171252542873796679.post-75486734557186410252014-06-18T11:42:00.000-05:002014-06-18T11:42:30.603-05:00At the intersection of "oriental" buffets and western homesteadsLee Lien, uncertain about her identity and future, and faced with an implosion in her Vietnamese family, goes investigating a favorite childhood author, making connections between her own immigrant background and an American cultural icon along the way.<br />
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On one level that premise seems a bit trite, but in practice <i>Pioneer Girl</i> gets it right.<br />
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I've had this title bookmarked (read: lounging on my Amazon wish list, because capitalism has thoroughly subsumed my life and ambitions as a reader) since <a href="http://simpsonsparadox.com/2014/01/pioneer-girls.html" target="_blank">Meg reviewed it as an ARC</a>. The blend of fact and fiction makes an interesting premise for a book, and it's done in a really light-handed way. Lee's life and family problems have that touch of reality to them, where things aren't always clearly defined and problems (including research problems) aren't always "solved" in any sort of final way. On the other hand, you have convincing fictional research about real women, positing a secret baby given away for adoption. You learn about the careers of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane (real), the Lien family history (fiction), and the Vietnamese/Asian experience in the Midwest (real), while Lee researches Rose's secret baby given up for adoption (fiction). It's really well blended, where a couple of times I flipped back to read the author's bio just to remind myself that Beth Nguyen is not Lee Lien and therefore it's probably not totally scandalous to be revealing Rose's baby in a novel.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCl6lOLXlyViyjVMbRh_9L4_FyHClIf7KjHWRaffSNYIzWBmWTT7aaEXkAL9LbSobk4hHMJReHebGpWaZkzAlQZrthXqvGw2RjZzLzpu3iQqOcVxNRi24OPDSOprOJMJt2-cQclKyfa0FQ/s1600/dreamsreality.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCl6lOLXlyViyjVMbRh_9L4_FyHClIf7KjHWRaffSNYIzWBmWTT7aaEXkAL9LbSobk4hHMJReHebGpWaZkzAlQZrthXqvGw2RjZzLzpu3iQqOcVxNRi24OPDSOprOJMJt2-cQclKyfa0FQ/s1600/dreamsreality.png" height="236" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Right, I'd better go study this some more.</td></tr>
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In her review, Meg writes "I had some feelings about Rose’s secret child, but I Had Feelings over the improper archival methods." It's true. Lee steals a few things during her research and I had to put the book down at one point, this was so upsetting to me.<br />
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en">
Judging from novels, literature scholars think nothing of stealing documents from archives. APPALLING. <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23posession&src=hash">#posession</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23pioneergirl&src=hash">#pioneergirl</a><br />
— Julie (@jfount) <a href="https://twitter.com/jfount/statuses/477978324506263554">June 15, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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There should be warnings on books that feature scholars doing this kind of thing. I was made happy again, however, when one of Lee's friends points out that she's going to have trouble publishing anything based on stolen materials. THANK YOU. It gets glossed over a bit (at the end, Lee's working on an article but it's not clear how she's going to get over the theft problem) but my eternal thanks to the author for acknowledging this. One thing I liked, otherwise, was how realistic Lee's research was: she's drawing plausible conclusions but you can see how thin the evidence is even as you are drawn along with agreeing with her interpretations.<br />
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I picked this book up and finished it the same day, which is a testimony to how good it is. It does a great job linking "American" and "non-American" experiences, collapsing those categories along the way: the mobility of immigrants and pioneers, the drama of success and failure along very small margins, the strain these things place on family life, and the difficult expectations created for the next generation.Jamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18076215213828545013noreply@blogger.com2