The heart wants what it wants

People never say that about things that are, like, convenient. Oh, that's completely in line with my plans! The heart wants what it wants!

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.

But man. 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.

The only illustration anyone needs for this topic

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.

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.

So in short: I hope you are also reading things you enjoy this summer.

Hewers of wood, drawers of water, and inspectors of prisons

I have a long relationship with the cover of this book (Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey).

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 obviously.

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.

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 famous 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 this guy 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.

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).

Now: a final note; an extremely mild observation. This book seems like an example of something else, the diversity problem 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 whatsoever, 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.

If there are awards for cover art though, I'm behind it all the way.

Summertime, and the reading is series

I can't help it, I like a good series. I think I hinted at this, at least, in my Anne of Green Gables post; I have that sort of gotta catch em all compulsion when it comes to book series. (See also the Dragonriders of Pern books.) (Oh, Pern.) Here in adulthood (?) however, I have learned that it's okay to just move on and not finish the series if I feel like it. One advantage of this is that you don't get caught in an obsessive-compulsive reading cycle (always a plus); another that I've discovered recently is that it's really nice to come back to a series when you've been away. So here are three series I've picked back up in the last week or so.*

So, first up: the SPQR series by John Maddox Roberts. I read a couple of these on Kindle a few years ago and enjoyed them, and recently I saw fellow classics nerd and all-around cool person Meg was reading them, so off I went to the library. After a rather frustrating hunt through the forest of Nora Roberts books (I like to get my books off the shelves myself like an honest woman, but this experience convinced me of the superiority of placing holds), I grabbed volume 6 here, the library not owning 3-5.

These are such fun books. They manage to balance the conventions of detective stories with a historical setting that doesn't have detectives or modern policing in a way that's fun and effective and not at all tedious. There are some blatantly exposition-y passages but I didn't mind them; it's all directly related to the plot and it's ancient Rome so maybe I'm just more willing to give it a pass in general. The main character (and narrator) makes me laugh, he's such a perfect grouchy, cynical Roman.

More historical mystery: the Max Liebermann series was the first thing I wrote about on this blog! I see in that post I wrote:

I liked them, and would have kept going for probably another couple of books if this were 2014 and there were another couple of books in the series.

GUYS IT'S 2014 RIGHT NOW

I remember when I got to the end of the available books that the stories were starting to feel same-y, and I'm pleased to report that taking a couple of years off helps address that problem. Death and the Maiden has a high-level-government-conspiracy thing going on as well as a cameo by Mahler (admittedly easier to achieve when you're writing a novel) and the SVU-level psychoanalysis I noted in that first post. I didn't really follow the conspiracy plot very well, and I'm not sure that the book was all that successful on the whole, but I did like being back with the characters, so this series and I can part amicably until the next time I stumble across a new volume.

And finally, which it's only THE GREATEST SERIES OF ALL TIME. You and Dr. Huang can draw your own conclusions from the fact that I, the compulsive completist, stopped reading these two from the end expressly because I didn't want to be done with them. However, as I had picked up the above series I decided it was time to finally read the last two Aubrey/Maturin books. The Hundred Days was a nice reminder of how much I love these books, even if, in itself, I didn't think was the finest installment of the series. I have to go back to the library for Blue at the Mizzen, but in the meantime I'm re-reading Desolation Island which is one of the ones I own (the first couple chapters with Jack on land just kill me).

I suppose there's also the published chapters of 21, but I don't know how I feel about those. (Basically, they published what Patrick O'Brian had written of the latest book at the time of his death, if you don't know what I'm talking about.) But a few chapters, without an actual book, and without any sort of revisions, isn't all that appealing to me. I don't get much out of fragments. But then I'm sure my completist impulse will compel me to check them out anyway.

Proud to share reading tastes with Ron Swanson

I hope you're all feeling the joy of warmer weather; I've been reading outside quite a bit this long weekend, it's madness.



* Each of these books I read in about a day. I'm telling you, I'm having this crazy-awesome reading moment.

I'm not convinced anything in this post makes sense

I'm sitting here having something of an omg moment, because there are so many things in the world and in my life that I want to (help) accomplish and yet I do so very little and, hello, exhibit A, there are two emails I've been avoiding in my inbox for two weeks now. And that's reminded me of something I could do to avoid those for a wee bit longer.

Welcome to this blog post, about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

I really liked this book. More specifically I was in awe of and delighted by it. From about halfway through I tried to put together my reaction and here's the best I came up with: say you're visiting an art museum for the first time. You're on vacation, or it's Sunday, or whatever, and it was free, so you're sort of drifting merrily through the galleries. Pictures pictures pictures: landscapes, ladies, naked ladies, landscapes, Dutch interiors, shoopdedoo. And then as you're casting your eye lazily across one wall, a picture jumps out at you. This, you think, this is the real thing. I've looked at all these other pictures that are superficially doing the same stuff: but this one works. This is the piece of art all those other paintings are trying to be.

You know you like my pretentious analogies, don't lie

I haven't read many (any?) other books about Jewish-Americans or golems or comic books or whatnot but somehow this book felt like it got something that other books I've read missed. It just clicked for me in a way I wouldn't necessarily have predicted. And it was darn entertaining too. I don't think it's changed my life or anything, and maybe I won't remember it at all in a few years, but man! It hit me the right way this time.

So lemme tell you a little story about this book. I bought it for £2 used with the express intention of getting rid of it when I was done. I actually finished it when I was staying in a hotel, and when I saw a bookshelf in the lobby with miscellaneous books on it, I got super excited about this perfect chance to pass the book on, indirectly, to someone else. So excited that I got rid of the book before I'd made any notes about favorite passages or copied out any quotes.

*~*~so genius~*~*

But, to cycle back around to the start of this post, I think one of the reasons I liked this book so much was the character of Josef Kavalier. Of all the characters, he was the one I was most interested in (and really, he's the main character, so that's good). During the Second World War, he gains a sort of notoriety among his fellow soldiers because he never opens his mail, and when someone confronts him about it he (I think, see above) responds that... he just didn't open it. He couldn't quite deal with it, so he didn't. So, uh, I don't think it says anything good about me and my psyche that I do that sometimes too, but it was a detail that I liked.

Ha --- hm!

I guess I have some things in common with Ron Swanson. Not many; I'm not quite so enthused about guns, wood working, or whiskey. But I like breakfast foods. And I like Patrick O'Brian novels.

Pretty sure my parents have that lawnchair.

So imagine my intrigued-ness (keep moving) when good ol' Alice gave me two Horatio Hornblower novels.

Beat to Quarters is the first Hornblower book of a series which we might possibly be more familiar with as a TV show. (I first became aware of Hornblower via discussions of Sharpe on a Lord of the Rings message board Way Back When.)

Three Hobbit movies is such a bald grab for ticket money but FINE.

I found Forester's writing style sort of simple, although I'm not entirely sure of what I mean by that. One odd feature is that the narrator occasionally jumps in to remind us that we're in the past, for instance when Hornblower finds Lady Barbara tending the wounded after a battle:

It was a shock to Hornblower to see her engaged thus. The day was yet to come when Florence Nightingale was to make nursing a profession in which women could engage. No man of taste could bear the thought of a woman occupied with the filthy work of a hospital.

Perhaps the best evidence I can give of the "simple" style of writing is that these kind of interventions aren't totally jarring. It's a very narrated book. O'Brian, of course, has that knack of completely impressing you with the difference between modern and historical attitudes without spelling things out.

Oh yeah, there's a LADY on board the ship. They pick her up pretty early on. She's pretty and classy and rich and so on, with the charm to make friends of everyone while putting them at their ease blah blah. Also she's unmarried and like 27 with famous brothers and a title yadda yadda. The last portion of the book is all SEXUAL TENSION between Hornblower and Lady Barbara, culminating in a little making out which Hornblower ends because he realizes it's undignified. Oh right! And also he's married. His wife is super frumpy though, but then again she did take care of their kids before they died in some sort of plague. When Hornblower decides that a quick game of Blow the Horn in her cabin (OH GOSH THAT TURNED OUT MUCH DIRTIER THAN I MEANT IT I'M SO SORRY) is unbecoming of his status as the captain* (*also, married), Lady Barbara gets all offended and huffy and leaves the ship in a very wrapped-in-her-dignity state. Meanwhile, the narrator seems to be pretty much pro-adultery, basically regretting that they didn't have more time left in the journey to work things out. Classy.

This being a book written in the 1930s about the early 1800s, there is also a fair bit of racist language and so on. The worst of this is definitely Lady Barbara, who has a black maid I almost can't tell you about. Let's say she likes men and gets some bad treatment from Lady B. What makes this especially bad is that the maid is barely mentioned -- her stereotyped-ness and bad treatment is just a footnote. Somehow the casual nature of this bit of racism is much worse than the sailors' attitudes toward Spaniards and native South Americans. It manages to come across less as "that's how people were then" and more like "that's just what stupid black women get". Ugh.

So the pro-adultery stance and racism toward maids (and we all know how bad that is) were two very unfortunate drawbacks.

The boaty portion of the book focuses on a crazy South American rebel/dictator who believes he's an Aztec god and sentences those to displease him to die of thirst. In the story, the bigger picture of political alliances and rivalries between Britain and Spain shift the picture around under Hornblower's feet so that while at first he has to help the crazy torturer, then he has to help the Spanish fight against him, and finally the Spanish send him packing as an interfering foreigner. So obviously the book is interested in moral complexity (kind of), although I don't think it's ultimately very successful. Lots of battles though.

Shall we drag this post out further and talk about Hornblower as a character? No, I think I shall save that so that I can post this now and go do Actual Work.

Beat to Quarters is an entertaining, lightweight sort of book, full of plot. Events follow on events, and there is plenty of battle and maneuvering for your reading pleasure. As a historical novel it does an adequate, although not particularly engrossing, job of setting the stage and portraying another time. Its moral compass does seem a little muddled, and perhaps because Hornblower doesn't seem to think about the Right and Wrong of situations. He might be uncomfortable with helping a deranged and brutal tyrant, but apparently more because he's concerned for his ship's safety than because he feels he's collaborating with evil. I don't ask that he necessarily do the right thing, by his lights or mine, mind you; but I didn't think the book did much to show us what his lights are, which seemed odd when dealing with the theme of how rapidly-changing political boundaries can be, and how duty to one's country can mean opposite things from one day to the next as a result. But anyhow, it was an enjoyable book -- and I'll be back to talk a little about Captain Hornblower himself at some point.

In which I ramble my way across a book

It's a major pet peeve of mine when Jane Austen gets referred to as a "Victorian" novelist. It's one of those line-in-the-sand things, like referring to Obama as a "socialist": either you know what those words mean or you don't. (Oooh, edgy!)

Jane (reporting from this rad mug) and I are unimpressed by poor periodization skills

But, y'know, I can sort of understand the inclination. Austen is not only super-famous, she sort of stands apart, time-wise. It's been ages since I've taken an English Lit class, so maybe I'm off base, but who else from the early nineteenth century do we still really read, eh? Scott, maybe. Burney's earlier and only nerds know about her. Radcliffe if you're a suicidal nerd. There are the Romantic poets, but they're poets. Mary Shelley gets treated as a genre author. For all the Austen family's novel-reading it doesn't seem like there are a whole lot of survivals from the period.

Well, here's a book to help round out that picture: Marriage, by Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, published in 1818. I downloaded this for freeeee through Manybooks.com. This is the Project Gutenberg edition, which obviously gets the job done but is slightly annoying in various ways. There's a fairly extensive Victorian introduction that has all kinds of background about Ferrier and the novel, but the lack of formatting obliterates the footnotes and block quotes and makes it sort of a headache. So I skipped it, although probably I would enjoy it if I made an effort. (Bah, effort.)

This is clearly a didactic novel, meant to illustrate good and bad approaches to girls' education and how these lead to success or misery in marriage. At the center are twin baby girls and their three mother-figures. Their birth mother, Lady Juliana, is a spoiled, air-headed London beauty who elopes with her Scottish suitor in the name of love; she keeps one of the twin girls with her when she returns to London from Scotland. The other twin girl is adopted by a saintly aunt by marriage (mother figure #2), Alicia Douglas, who is also English but thoroughly intelligent and virtuous. The third potential mother figure is Aunt Jacky, a spinster aunt who represents the other end of the bad mothering spectrum, being completely small-minded and ultimately almost as empty-headed as the birth mother despite being more useful around the house. Ferrier is pretty scathing about Miss Jacky and her brand of "sensible woman":

Miss Jacky, the senior of the trio, was what is reckoned a very sensible woman--which generally means, a very disagreeable, obstinate, illiberal director of all men, women and children--a sort of superintendent of all actions, time, and place--with unquestioned authority to arraign judge, and condemn upon the statutes of her own supposed sense... At home her supremacy in all matters of sense was perfectly established; and thence the infection, like other superstitions, had spread over the whole neighbourhood. As sensible woman she regulated the family, which she took care to let everybody see; she was conductor of her nieces' education, which she took care to let everybody hear; she was a sort of postmistress general--a detector of all abuses and impositions; and deemed it her prerogative to be consulted about all the useful and useless things which everybody else could have done as well. She was liberal of her advice to the poor, always enforcing on them the iniquity of idleness, but doing nothing for them in the way of employment--strict economy being one of the many points in which she was particularly sensible. The consequence was, while she was lecturing half the poor women in the parish for their idleness, the bread was kept out of their mouths by the incessant carding of wool and knitting of stockings, and spinning, and reeling, and winding, and pirning, that went on amongst the ladies themselves. And, by-the-bye, Miss Jacky is not the only sensible woman who thinks she is acting a meritorious part when she converts what ought to be the portion of the poor into the employment of the affluent.

I thought that economic point was rather interesting. The contrast is that Alicia pays the boys and girls of her neighborhood to take care of her garden rather than doing it herself.

Ferrier is an entertaining writer, and so even though most of her characters represent some precisely mapped combination of [good/bad] nature and [good/bad] nurture, they're still interesting personalities. Plus it's just fascinating to see what she saw as plausible "types" of her day. For instance, saintly aunt Alicia, we are told, was a poor cousin raised in a well-bred family, and when she and her titled cousin fell in love -- you know the fall out here, right? The two are separated, forbidden to marry, etc etc. But! Alicia, though heart-broken, accepts that this is totally reasonable, that her high-born aunt has every right to forbid her son to marry a poor cousin, and steels herself to get over him. When he's super-persistent, she marries the nicest of her suitors and goes to live with him in Scotland, and is very happy with this. Contrast this with her sister-in-law Lady Juliana, and you get the feeling that Ferrier has some doubts about this whole "love match" business.

Aside from historical perspectives on education and marriage, Marriage also paints a delightfully nineteenth century picture of Scotland. The contrast between the Scottish highlands and London's highlife (eh, eh? see what I did there?) provides a geographical contrast as background to the moral/intellectual contrasts in the book. Plus it offers lots of colorful scenery and characters.

"It's impossible the bagpipe could frighten anybody," said Miss Jacky, in a high key; "nobody with common sense could be frightened at a bagpipe."

On descending to the dining-parlour he found his father seated at the window, carefully perusing a pamphlet written to illustrate the principle, Let nothing be lost, and containing many sage and erudite directions for the composition and dimensions of that ornament to a gentleman's farmyard, and a cottager's front door, ycleped, in the language of the country a midden--with the signification of which we would not, for the world, shock the more refined feelings of our southern readers.

If you like historical fashions, this book is worth looking at: there are plenty of intriguingly detailed descriptions of the Scottish women's practical clothing as compared to Lady Juliana's finery. For instance, one highland lady arrives at the house with her skirt "carefully drawn through the pocket-holes" and wearing "a faded red cloth jacket, which bore evident marks of having been severed from its native skirts, [and] now acted in the capacity of a spencer."

In re education, "true religion" seems to be the magic bullet. Here is Alicia summing up the take-home lesson:

"Oh, what an awful responsibility do those parents incur," she would mentally exclaim, "who thus neglect or corrupt the noble deposit of an immortal soul! And who, alas! can tell where the mischief may end? This unfortunate will herself become a mother; yet wholly ignorant of the duties, incapable of the self-denial of that sacred office, she will bring into the world creatures to whom she can only transmit her errors and her weaknesses!"

I'm only halfway through; the twin raised by Alicia has just arrived in London to meet her sister and her mother, and that's going about as well as you could expect. I'm considering not finishing, just because I'm a little frustrated with how long I've been reading this already. It's not the book's fault; I no longer have a daily commute which means I have to figure out some other way to get reading time into my day. So I rate this: Worthwhile, if you like old books.

(There's no reason for that to be there, but I think you'll agree, it had to go somewhere.)

Historical fiction I didn't hate!

I can best describe this book as a successful version of Clara and Mr Tiffany, which longtime readers will remember I disliked.

The story is framed as a sort of pseudo-memoir, but functionally it's more just a first-person story. Sira, the main character and narrator, is a seamstress in Madrid, engaged to an ordinary guy, living with her mother in a poor neighborhood, when she's swept off her feet by a sexy typewriter salesman. A very sexy typewriter salesman, the sexy typewriter salesman of your sexiest dreams. When he leaves her destitute in Morocco, she has to start again from scratch, reinventing herself as a high-class dressmaker. This mixes her up with influential people and she eventually returns to Franco's Madrid as a haute couturier and British spy.

Maybe it's a matter of reading the book in translation, but I thought Sira's character was a little disappointing given the dramatic twists and turns her life takes and how successfully she handles them. She comes across as a little flat somehow; you'd expect her to be a little livelier and more confident or something. Despite all the changes in her circumstances I had a hard time seeing how her perspective or personality was changing. It's very possible that this is just me, though. The scene where Sira is confronted by her old fiance was genuinely gripping, even though I thought the book gave that phase of her life short shrift.

One of the main aims of this book is, of course, to tell the story of early 20th century Spain, particularly the Civil War and the Second World War, and more precisely to tell the story of Juan Luis Beigbeider and his English lover Rosalind Fox. Yes, there are some clumsy fact-dump conversations, but they have the benefit of being about things I'm unfamiliar with and therefore inclined to give a pass. On the whole I'd say the history aspect is well-balanced with the novel's plot.

Not to say that the book didn't share some of Clara and Mr Tiffany's quirks. If I hadn't been reading this on the Kindle, I would go back and calculate how many of the chapters end with something like this:

But for that we had to wait a few weeks yet, six or seven. And over that time, things happened that--yet again--transformed the course of my life forever.

My estimate is that something like 40-50% of chapters ended with "little did I know that my life was about to change yet again." But the good news, and the #1 thing that differentiates this book from Clara and Mr Tiffany, is that this only happens once:

"Coffee?"
     I hadn't yet finished my fruit but I accepted. He filled the cups, having first unscrewed the top part of a metallic receptacle. Miraculously the liquid came out hot. I had no idea what it was, this machine that could pour out the coffee that had been there for at least an hour as though it had just been prepared.
     "A thermos, a great invention," he said, noticing my curiosity.

I always assume that translated books must be good, but in honesty I have to think this one was translated largely because English people feature so prominently as Good Guys. But overall it was an enjoyable read and worth picking up if the history appeals to you.

One final detail: in this book, like Mysterious Benedict Society, the spies communicate using Morse code. Why do authors do this? It's not like they have to work out an actual code, they just have to write "I encoded the message". In this book, the rationale is presented as "the Germans keep breaking our codes, so we'll use Morse" -- i.e., since they keep figuring out our codes anyway, we'll just save them time and use one we know they know! In France, I'm pretty sure SOE used book codes, but maybe -- and I have to bow to the author on this -- in Spain they just used Morse. Anyway, I warn you now that the next book I read that features Morse code as a super-secure top secret method of communication will probably get laughed at more than it deserves.

Some light holiday reading

The best used bookstore I know of in my parents' hometown is Goodwill; one of the locations even has a little coffeeshop attached, and if you buy a book you get $1 off pastries. Not bad, not bad.

I picked this title up for a mere 79 cents the other day -- from the clearance rack at Goodwill. That bodes well, right?

"Whodunnit" is right up there with "cyber" on my list of words I hate

But! I am pleased to report that this was a good buy. The book contains a variety of short mystery stories featuring detectives in different periods of history. Many of the stories are republished from Ellery Queen but a few were written for this anthology. As the cover suggests, some of the sleuths are the stars of series, so if you like their stories this collection can be a jumping-off point. To this end, there's a little bibliography suggesting specific books according to their setting. The editor has obviously put a lot of work in and these aren't just public-domain stories collected up to make a quick buck. The bibliography and the introductions to each story make it clear that there is a real human opinion at work behind the selections, which I think makes the whole thing more enjoyable.

Unsurprisingly, given my well-known Roman history obsession, I liked the story starring Decius Metellus best, and I want to read one of the full-length books at some point, whenever I get time. I was really surprised by the number of different time periods represented though. So far I've read stories set in ancient Egypt, Golden Age Athens, republican Rome, imperial Rome, Justinian Byzantium, ancient China, and early medieval Ireland. Some are, I think, a little more "historical" than others, in that some stories seem more interested in exploring the limitations and methods of pre-modern "investigation" than others, which more or less transpose the standard format. It's interesting to see how different authors set about their stories, and the beauty of short stories is that you're never far off from something different.

I'm still plugging away at The Two Towers but this book makes for nice vacation reading. It's like that tray of cookies you can't stop nibbling at, even though you know you ought to be eating up the leftovers from your Christmas party's raw veggie tray.

Unsurprisingly, this book is not for children.

I know I ought to be getting some dissertation work done this afternoon, but I'm having trouble identifying my next steps, so I'm going to tell you about The Children's Book instead. Responsibility!

The first thing one might notice about The Children's Book is that it's huge, and this is not an illusion. My edition is 879 pages long, and the margins and the text are all normal sized. By my rough count, there are about 14 main-character children and nearly as many main-character adults. It sounds crazy to have 25-30 main characters, but that is just the kind of book this is.

"Cast of thousands," as they say

I really enjoyed the book, don't get me wrong, but I would say that anyone less than A.S. Byatt submitting this manuscript would have been told to cut it down, for goodness' sake, don't you know people don't have attention spans anymore? I laughed when I realized (through the acknowledgments) that Byatt dedicated the book to her editor. I think if someone wanted to cut this book down they could find inessential passages to cut -- I skimmed over the historical-context passages in particular -- but at the same time everything that's there makes for good reading.

The book is basically about a group of children and how they grow up; most of them are members of Fabian/aesthetic movement/Arts-and-crafts-type households, but some come from more humble or more "establishment" backgrounds. You see how the children are affected by their parents' and their parents' associates' ideas, actions, and sins. There are secrets and scandals, but they don't dominate the core of the book. The characters are really well-written, and diverse without seeming forced. The only slightly false notes were the two working-class children, Phillip and Elsie; Byatt was a little more solemn with these two, I think, and they come across as a bit more flat. Maybe a little too noble.

It seems very high school lit class to be all, "What is this book about" but I couldn't help but ask myself, what is this book about, anyway? (Don't worry, I will not attempt to discuss Symbolism.) The most immediate thing that leaps out at me is that Byatt is showing how flawed the progressive/permissive movements the characters are part of were. Whether the children embrace or reject or ignore their parents' ideologies doesn't seem to affect their lives much. The world rolls on and goes up in flames in the Great War regardless. The adults have big ideas and bold, radical new ways of seeing the world, but in the end their actions end up being narcissistic. If this were high school I'd say that they fail, on the whole, to be truly radical because they fail to really love the children and put them first.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book: it's heaven for those of us who just like to see how things turn out for people. I got some of the characters confused now and then because I can never remember names, but for the most part -- and I credit this to Byatt -- I kept them straight. "Good writing" is a very difficult thing to define or describe, but this book is full of it, and is a very worthwhile read.

A good book is like a drink of fresh water (?)

Hurgh, urgh. It's been one of those weeks, don't ask me to explain why, I really don't know. I've probably gotten as much if not more done as last week; nothing especially bad or annoying has happened; but my sleep patterns have been slightly off and a fog has settled in.

The shining light has been The Children's Book. It's huge, but I've been happily reading away, and I think I'm down to the last quarter of the book. I think I started it on Sunday? Even if it were Friday, that's ~600 pages in a week, which feels pretty darn good, and is an indicator of how good it is.

Remember Clara and Mr Tiffany which I disliked so much? The Children's Book, to my fascination (if I can use that word that way), has a lot of the same elements. Arty people with unconventional values in the 1890s-1910s. A big international exposition. Real-life famous people like Emma Goldman making cameos. But it is orders of magnitude better. This is something I noted in Possession: Byatt is so comfortable with the past, she handles it and lays it out for the reader in a gently authoritative way. She's the sort of author who doesn't seem to have done a ton of research so much as just described what was around her, which somehow happens to be a different place and time.

Even Homer nods, though, and this happens:

"We have sentimental things, too, in abundance. Schwabing has invented a word for them, a word I like. Kitsch."

But it's a lot more tolerable when it happens for the first time on page 555, and when it's as subtle as this to boot.

If I can theorize a little, I think part of the problem is that Clara tried to make Clara into an outsider through whom we, the readers, could learn about a particular place and time; that's a common enough trope (I recognize it particularly from sci-fi), but it backfires since in fact Clara the real-life woman was not an outsider. It muddied up her character, and obscured a lot of what made her interesting, namely, her expertise and experience. Byatt doesn't bother with this, and so the various characters' connections with the major currents of the day feel much more natural.

Of course there's more that could be said about why Byatt's novel is more successful, but I'm not interested in taking this particular comparison any further; I don't mean to beat up on a book I didn't like, and anyway I'll write up a proper review for The Children's Book in time. But I find these different approaches to history-through-fiction instructive.

Happy Halloween, if that's your thing, this weekend!

Clara and (her boss) Mr Tiffany

This book first caught my eye at a closing-out Borders store, where it was on a big display at the front of the store. As I stood in line (I know Alice thinks anyone who buys books at a closing-out Borders is a chump but I had good reasons both times) I thought how sad I'd be if I were the author of a book so prominently displayed in a dying store. Also I thought about how pretty the cover is:

Because we are nerds, my family did not go to Disney World etc during our recent trip to Orlando, but we did visit the Morse Museum in Winter Park. I don't really understand why the Morse Museum of American Art is called that because really its focus is an extensive collection of Tiffany stained glass (and related items) collected by a couple by the name of McKean. Anyway, naming complexities aside, it's a very nice museum and I enjoyed it a lot. I had never seen Tiffany windows up close before, and I hadn't realized that they have the most beautiful, complex textures. Many of the windows have big chunks of glass in them or multiple layers of glass bolted together. If they had allowed photos I would have taken one at an angle to show you. Anyway, I saw Clara and Mr Tiffany in the giftshop, which reminded me of it, so that when I needed a test subject for the library's Overdrive/Kindle service, this is what I downloaded.

In the afterword (or the acknowledgments or somesuch) Vreeland explains that the main character, Clara Driscoll, was a real person, and that the book was inspired by an exhibit at the pretentiously hyphenated New-York Historical Society about the women workers at Tiffany Studios. Driscoll worked for Tiffany before her marriage, and at the beginning of the book, she is returning to work after her husband's death.

I opened the beveled-glass door under the sign announcing Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in ornate bronze. A new sign with a new name. Fine. I felt new too.

It is a cliche of writing advice that you ought to have a really good first sentence. These are conspicuously good first sentences, if you ask me, and so I am calling them to your attention.

Having opened the door and felt new, Driscoll goes in and meets with Louis Comfort Tiffany, seeing his current projects and asking for her job back. And then, in their first meeting, mind you, this happens:

I was struck by a tantalizing idea. "Imagine it reduced in size and made of translucent glass instead. Once you figure how to secure the pieces in a dome, that could be the method and the shape of a lampshade. A wraparound window of say--" I looked around the room--"peacock feathers." He jerked his head up with a startled expression, the idea dawning on him as if it were his own. "Lampshades in leaded glass," he said in wonder, his blue eye sparking. "Just think where that could go," I whispered.

Yes, that's right, folks, that just happened. Argh, seriously, I thought to myself as I read this. In the afterword or acknowledgments or whatever at the end of the book, Vreeland explains that among specialists, there is a theory that Clara Driscoll was actually the inventor of the Tiffany lamp, and she (the author) chose to adopt that theory in writing the novel.

Now, let me be clear: I have no beef with the theory that Driscoll rather than Tiffany came up with the lamp idea. It gives Vreeland some very, very interesting themes to do with creativity, attribution, etc, through the rest of the book. However, I find that particular little eureka paragraph really hamfisted. At the very least, I think it's a mistake to introduce this before we've seen Clara in action. The reader doesn't know yet that she's a skilled and experienced craftswoman; she just waltzes in and drops a bomb. It's annoying.

In fact, my major beef with this book was the handling of the History. There was a lot of stuff shoehorned in, sometimes as awkward exposition, and sometimes for period flavor (I guess):

"There are a few things I know that might explain his behavior. I've been researching his family history for an article to come out during the Chicago Fair." "Please, tell me everything."

"You're not going to be here for New Year's Eve? The big celebration of the consolidation of the boroughs at City Hall Park?" He hesitated on the brink of agreeing, so I went on. "Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx all one city, the second largest in the world." 

He asked, "Do you know this poem? Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free [...] A woman named Emma Lazarus wrote that poem as a donation to an auction to help fund the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. It's not well know, but I believe someday it will be.

"Someday, when women are considered equal to men, it will become known that a woman of great importance created those lamps. This isn't the Middle Ages, Clara. You will not be lost to history like the makers of those medieval windows in Gloucester are. Someone will find you."

How prescient! This stuff, along with the name-checking of basically every super-famous person, song, work of art, etc, of the period, is on just about every page. The clippings file on my Kindle is overflowing with it.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but it's like if, instead of having a set and costumes, the actors just came and smacked you in the head and said "We're in the past, ok!" If good historical novels evoke the ambiance of an era, this one is full of old-fashioned London "pea soup" fog.

There's also a bonkers, bat-shit crazy romantic plot that I can hardly even tell you about. I just sort of decided to forget about it after it happened, but it did involve some deeply anachronistic attitudes and deeply terrible dialogue about sex. E.g:

"I'd like to work on your lower east side. Do you think we would both feel tingly? We might both find cause for applause."

YES REALLY.

All of this is a real shame, because (what ought to be) the core of the book, the story of women workers in the arts and particularly Clara Driscoll is fascinating stuff. The book encompasses both Driscoll's developing attitudes toward her own work and the emerging women's labor movement. This is a good story, and I enjoyed it even as I was highlighting some awful obvious piece of CONTEXT HELLO THIS IS SOME HISTORY on every other page.

If I'd been the editor, I would have put in a little historical introduction up front to inform the reader that Driscoll was a real person, which is, after all what makes it interesting. And secondly I would have cut this book waaaaay down. There was no need to shoehorn in the contents of the Dictionary of Turn-of-the-Century America. "Women working in the arts" is more than sufficiently interesting.

On exceptions and hypocrisy (and other, less important things)

The Radetzky March has to go back to the library, but I wanted to copy out and share this little paragraph before I hand it back:

During her brief marriage to Herr von Eichberg, his wife had made many friends, and after his death she had rejected a few ardent marriage proposals. Out of pure esteem, people ignored her adulteries. That was a stern time, as we know. But it recognized exceptions and even liked them. It was one of the rare aristocratic principles, such as that mere commoners were second-class human beings yet certain middle-class officers became personal adjutants to the Kaiser; that Jews could claim no higher distinctions yet certain Jews were knighted and became friends with archdukes; that women had to observe a traditional morality yet certain women could philander like a cavalry officer. (Those were principles that would be labeled "hypocritical" today because we are so much more relentless: relentless, honest, and humorless.)

Interesting. Maybe too thinky for Friday though. Let's see, what kind of amusing quotes are lurking in my Kindle's clippings file?

Then and now I thought about politics with the indifference a grizzled city coroner has toward the body of a murdered prostitute. (How I became a Famous Novelist, by Steve Hely. Go read it, it's fantastic.)

Things never seemed quite as grim with a tallboy in the house. (An Evening of Long Goodbyes, by Paul Murray. He's talking about furniture, not beer.)

The great Gothic spaceship known as the Albert Memorial was built just west of where the Crystal Palace had stood... (At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson.)

Talking to him you would say: he is an ass, but an agreeable ass, a humble, transparent honourable ass. He is an innocent and idiotic butterfly. (GK Chesterton quoted in the biography by Maisie Ward.)

My husband drives the whole seven hours because I don't have a driver's license. It's just one of the many ways in which I am developmentally stunted. I don't drive. I can't cook meat correctly. And I have no affinity for animals. I don't hate animals and would never hurt an animal; I just don't actively care about them. When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst. (Bossypants, by Tina Fey. I know it's cliche for girls in their twenties to identify with Tina Fey/Liz Lemon but... seriously.)

There we go.

And to think, I've never been able to keep a diary for more than two days in a row

This was an impulse check-out because when I stumble across this at the library:

I can't just leave it there, can I?

Originally published in 1933, The Provincial Lady in London is actually the second of a series. I couldn't find Diary of a Provincial Lady at the library (although the catalog says they have it), but they did have the others in the series: The Provincial Lady in America, The Provincial Lady in Russia, and The Provincial Lady in Wartime.

This is one of those books where, for me at least, the historical value easily outstrips any literary or entertainment value. It's not too much to say that nothing happens in this book. When the book opens, the Provincial Lady has published a book (it's unclear whether this is supposed to be the "diary" of the first novel) and quickly decides to rent a flat in London as a writing retreat to work on the second one. She never actually gets any writing done; mostly she muddles her way through family vacations, household problems, and awkward social occasions in and out of the city.

I was hoping this would be a book that would give a sense of the city as it was, but this was not to be. That said, it's a fantastic slice of interwar middle class life. A taste:

Vicky meets me on the stairs and says with no preliminary Please can she go to school. Am unable to say either Yes or No at this short notice, and merely look at her in silence. She adds a brief statement to the effect that Robin went to school when he was her age, and then continues on her way downstairs, singing something of which the words are inaudible, and the tune unrecognisable, but which I have inward conviction that I should think entirely unsuitable. Am much exercised regarding question of school, and feel that as convinced feminist it is my duty to take seriously into consideration argument quoted above.

Two things to note here: First, Vicky is the daughter, but you have to really use your Context Clues because characters who were introduced in the first book get zero introduction in this one. Second, yes, the entire book is written in this telegraphic style, which can be downright annoying at certain times of day.

Here's a quick cameraphone rendition of the charming-if-somewhat-random illustrations:

That's the Provincial Lady on the right, her Provincial Husband sitting on the left, with their two kids and their Holiday Tutor (!) between them.

The Provincial Lady's adventures in America, Russia, and, uh, Wartime are no doubt also very interesting, and this was a light, quick read. I sort of doubt I'll pursue the rest of this series though, unless I'm curious to read a contemporary take on those topics. Maybe if I'd read the first book I would know and love the characters but just based on this one I have to conclude, historically fascinating but otherwise boring.

Serious historical fiction

After heaps of very light material, each book selected for the very profound reason that it was the next in the series, I got a little cocky and decided to take on something more literary, at the urging of my old friend Amazon. Behold: The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth.

And let's all take a moment and the proximate excuse to listen to the Radetzky March, shall we? I came to this book by a typically circuitous route. I had been reading the Frank Tallis mysteries set in Vienna, and realizing that I was reaching the end of the series, looked them up on Amazon to see whether there were another one coming soon or if there were something similar the Big A could recommend.

I realize that every time I use Amazon for recommendations librarians and indie book store clerks around the country experience stabbing pains, but such are the lazy, degenerate times we live in.

Anyhow, A-dog suggested Roth, which rang a bell; I'm reasonably sure I've had this book recommended to me before. And then the library had it, and the back of the book described it as a "classic saga". In spite of my demonstrable love of unchallenging fiction, I, like most academics, prefer to think of myself as a reader of Important Books, so this was calling my name. "A masterpiece"! "One of the most readable, poignant, and superb novels in twentieth century German"! "A universal story for our times"! Just like me!

Plus, I have a fondness for the name "Radetzky" ever since hearing it pronounced by a Dutch professor in the resoundingly awesome way that only a Dutch professor on an impassioned tangent can.

As a book about the whimpering end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this is a Serious book and really a very sad one. Emptiness and aimlessness seem unavoidable; real human contact and love are non-existent. It's a sad, dying world, in which the exterior and interior, never terribly closely allied, are moving unavoidably apart.

It's not all doom and gloom, of course; there are some very sweet moments and although it's hard to judge the style of a book in translation the writing is excellent too. Here's a lovely little sentence that was practically made for excerpting:

Lieutenant Trotta wasn't experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.

Although there's also a bad-weather storm that kicks up as they receive the news that the Archduke has been assassinated, so.

It's a very "male" novel; the emotional trials and inhibitions (mostly inhibitions) of men are the core of the book. In a way, the book doesn't portray a culture or a society so much as a creaking mechanism, in which there is only one way to act, one direction to take, and little or no choice about anything. In this way, although it ostensibly follows various individuals' lives, the book is directly "about" the empire rather than the people.

All of this is unsurprising, I suppose, but especially unsurprising given that Roth wrote the book in the early 1930s (first published 1932). That, in itself, is fascinating.

The Radetzky March is very good (and I'm sure Harold Bloom and the New York Review of Books et al. are relieved to have my confirmation of their judgment). It does not make for the best commuter reading -- although carrying it almost certainly makes you look smart in a non-trendy way, so if that's your goal, bypass the so-last-year thick plastic frames and give Joseph Roth a try.

In all seriousness, if you have an interest in European history leading up to the First World War, this would make a good choice. Austria-Hungary tends to get overlooked in survey courses, not without good cause, but it's a fascinating and central (also literally central) part of understanding the long-19th century, and indeed the 20th.

This series may possibly be set in Vienna

There I was at Open Books, looking for Dorothy Sayers. Disappointed that all the Wimsey books in stock were ones I'd already read (I'm dangerously close to having drawn that well dry), I let my eyes wander over the Mystery section, when A Death in Vienna, shelved under T for Tallis, Frank, caught my eye. I read the back. It was set in 1902. It sounded okay. So I bought it. This is the least thought I have put into selecting a book in a very long time. And it pretty much paid off.

There are five books so far in the series: A Death in Vienna, Vienna Blood, Fatal Lies, Vienna Secrets, and Vienna Twilight, and thanks to the Chicago Public Library I have now read all of them, in order. Thank you to the good citizens of Chicago for not impeding me in this because it really messes me up when I can't read things in order. I liked them, and would have kept going for probably another couple of books if this were 2014 and there were another couple of books in the series. I like them. I feel the need to repeat that because now I might end up writing some things that might sound slightly insulting.

There are two main characters, Max Liebermann (a psychologist and devotee of Freud's new-fangled theories) and Oskar Rheinhardt (a police detective with an admirable love of cake). Tallis strikes a nice balance with these two; they work together well, each in his own sphere. It's easy to have characters who seem to do nothing but solve mysteries, and I think one of the big strengths of the books is that Tallis really succeeds in anchoring the events of the stories in the flow of the normal passage of time and normal lives. Not that I don't usually overlook the mystery-story cliche of a small village with regular, frequent violent deaths. Furthermore, there's plenty of love and family dynamics and so even though every case seems to involve a serial killer, the books as a whole are well rounded out.

Liebermann and Rheinhardt like to play music together, and also get together in cafes to drink coffee and eat pastries, both of which activities are described in loving detail. I see on Amazon that some reviewers (not the mob, I'm talking about the short professional blurbs) draw a straight line between Liebermann and Rheinhardt and Aubrey and Maturin, which I think is unwarranted. As a devoted reader of Patrick O'Brian's superlative seafaring series, I don't think it's fair to accuse Tallis of too much borrowing. The music-playing makes ample sense within the setting, as does the friendship dynamic, so I think it all stands on its merits.

Incidentally, I'm fairly sure that Tallis just sidesteps the whole "origins" problem by just asserting in the first book that they're friends and have worked together before.

I say: well done, Frank Tallis. I suppose some people would cry laziness or bad form, but I'm perfectly happy just to get on with things without some kind of awkward shoehorning-in of backstory.

The mysteries themselves are okay; lots of blood and gore and complex solutions. Tallis has two central gimmicks (not used in a pejorative sense) in his series. First, the historical setting and particularly Liebermann's Jewish heritage within that setting. This aspect is okay, but starting to get a little creaky toward the end of the series-so-far.

Second is the psychoanalysis, which is fascinating for a totally different reason than the author (must) intend. Liebermann's contribution to the investigations is his application of Freud's hot-off-the-pen theories - Freud is actually a character in the books, and Liebermann often meets with him to discuss interpretations. Tallis himself is described in his author bio as "a practicing clinical psychologist and an expert in obsessional states." And yet! None of Max/Tallis/Freud's insights seem terribly surprising to this veteran of Law and Order: SVU. I'm going to take Tallis' intelligence and authority at face value, leaving only the following possible conclusions:

1. Freud's theories have really permeated our modern consciousness, to the degree that even I am aware of them.

2. Tallis underestimates the psychoanalytical training his readers (I) have had from the eminent Doctor Huang and his colleagues at NYPD's SVU.

3. There really is only so much that can be said about murderous sexual perversion.

And on that hopeful note I shall leave you.