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.

In which my childhood is not ruined

Anne of Green Gables, y'all. Like so many other girls my age, I was obsessed with Anne of Green Gables when I was 10ish. I read all the book in the series multiple times; I don't think I ever owned them but I knew right where to find them in the library. My Victorian dollhouse Playmobil figures were always Anne and Gilbert and family, acting out incredibly dramatic scenes.

I didn't have this puppy, so I would use masking tape to make a house floorplan on my bedroom floor.

When I got to the end of the series, I would start over; at one point I remember feeling vaguely like maybe I should read something else, but ANNE was all I wanted to read, so ONE MORE TIME. That's just the kind of groove I get into now with 30 Rock on Netflix so, as they say in Quebec, plus ça change.

For all that, I discovered in conversation with some friends this winter that I had mostly forgotten what the books were about. I mean, I recognized various incidents ("oh yeaaaah...") but I couldn't have summarized anything to save my life. So when I saw this very attractive Oxford Children's Classics edition:

the book magpie strikes again

I thought I should re-read it. Not without some trepidation! You may remember that my re-reading of Nancy Drew was rather disappointing. And in general, what are the odds that a book for little girls published in 1908 wouldn't be embarrassing in 2014?

Actually, as it turns out, the book holds up pretty well! A lot of that has to do with one of Anne's key characteristics: that she is a whiz kid at school. There's no conflict about this in the book; I hate hypotheticals like this, but if it were a historical novel being written today, would the author have refrained from making "Anne is made to feel unfeminine for being smart" a major plot point? As I was reading, I both recognized that this is why I identified so intensely with Anne and also that this book, with its glorification of studying to win top marks, really shaped the way I approached my schoolwork as a kid.

And, not unrelatedly, Gilbert is still such. a. dish.*

Let's review, shall we? Gilbert Blythe (SIGH sigh sigh) is a boy who teases Anne about the color of her hair and she not only schools him good at the moment, she swears eternal hatred. Anne and Gilbert battle it out to be the top student in school on every assignment, exam, etc. Gilbert is clearly attracted to this girl who is so able and willing to fight back. Anne is mostly contemptuous, but by the end of the book they agree to be friends.

Amen amen, my fellow Ameriwomen, you can put away your tired "ooo, Disney princes gave me unrealistic expectations" meme, because that right there is kryptonite. Oh, you mean the most handsome boy in school will only love me more if I whoop him on spelling tests? I CAN DO THAT. And definitely, an antagonistic relationship like that will resolve in mutual respect and eventual love. Oh yes; Gilbert Blythe (SIGH sigh sigh) remains my one and only fictional crush.


* I've never seen the Canadian TV movie (series?), mind you. It seemed relevant to mention that at this particular moment.

I wrote this whole post about two long novels and now I have to come up with a title?! It just never ends

Once upon a time a million years ago, Alice and I were at a bookstore where I was buying a volume or two of Trollope, and she asked me something to the effect of "should I try this author." (I know, I ought to cherish every word from her mouth but it was a long time ago and I can't remember how it was phrased.)

Trollope is an author I enjoy but generally do not recommend. I can appreciate that people could very much not like him and be entirely right. I can pass over his political chapters without letting them get me down, and his ludicrous bourgeois-ness is a bit endearing to me; but I know that these things would be poison to others, and probably they're right. But I like him, so I read his books.

V. comfortable

The Small House at Allington is the exception I would make. I do think Small House at Allington is worth anyone's time. It's a very unusual plot, almost your standard Victorian-novel love story turned inside out. (Note that I will be discussing the plot and its outcomes below.)

Lily Dale is the heroine, and she gets jilted. Her engagement to Adolphus Crosbie almost starts the novel, and then Trollope tells how Crosbie's head gets turned, how he is lured away from Lily, and follows his pride and ambition into marital ruin. Lily's childhood friend John, who has always been in love with her but is something of a late-bloomer*, goes after Crosbie and avenges her. Everyone rallies around Lily and her very public humiliation.

But here's the thing that strikes me: the novel does not end with a wedding for Lily. John has stepped up and become the knight in shining armor, but he does not get the girl. I thought this was just breathtakingly unexpected.

John, rejected, counseled by a neighbor

It doesn't end there, though: in the next novel (and last of the series), John becomes even more of a hero, and Lily sees Crosbie (now widowed) and refuses his return. And yet the novel (and series) ends with Lily rejecting John yet again. Trollope tells us Lily will probably always be an old maid (nice of him to give the romantics an out). Once again: astonishing. I wouldn't be able, as an author, to resist putting John and Lily together. Lily is a really lively, likable person (she shades into being annoyingly perky, very lifelike), and John has clearly grown up so much. But Trollope shows quite masterfully the way particular circumstances can prevent a match that's perfect on paper from being possible.

I've read that Trollope wanted his novels to reflect the "unevenness" of real life, and in Lily's story I think he really knocks it out of the park. The introduction in my edition of Last Chronicle of Barset made me angry on this point:

The suggestion that Lily will not marry John because she is frightened of sex seems so obvious to us...

Dumbass! (ahem.) This is on a par with saying that if a woman won't go out with you she must be a lesbian. Although Lily can see how much John has matured, she stills remembers him as her awkward childhood friend. He's "like a brother" as she herself says many times. And in spite of Victorian novels' assertions that one kind of affection can transform into another easily enough, in this case it can't, very understandably. On top of this, John himself and every one of their relatives and mutual friends pesters Lily directly and indirectly, constantly, about what a great match it would be. Lily isn't puffed up with pride, but she isn't passive and submissive enough to go along with this when her heart isn't in it. Moreover, she's never really given a chance to change the way she feels because she's constantly having to give a decision and/or ward off well-meaning advisors. Meanwhile, while John is a good guy by this point in his life, he still is hanging around with dubious people and, as I said, being something of a pest. So to boil down Lily's fate to a fear of sex is just ridiculous. Aaaaaand it kind of says a lot about you if that's your "obvious" interpretation, Mr Introduction Writer.

Cat gif break

There's a lot else in these two hefty novels besides John and Lily, and I enjoyed all that stuff too for the most part; but this particular storyline I thought was especially noteworthy, particularly since Trollope seems, very often, to be just writing to entertain.


*the word Trollope uses is hobbledehoy. If you want to see the word hobbledehoy used over and over and over read this book.

In praise of Dr. Grantly

The weather was so nice this weekend! Which is another way of saying I didn't do too much reading.  (And I've been delinquent in answering comments; sorry!) But I did start in on Barchester Towers, the sequel to The Warden. I'm enjoying it, a lot, and I'm looking forward to being able to write about it here... aka finish it...

Anyway, much of my enjoyment of Barchester Towers thus far comes from the most excellent character of Dr Grantly, the archdeacon. He's just so filled with righteous rage! In Trollope's world, Mr Harding is the central character in more ways than one; he's described as a good-hearted older man who is concerned to do the right thing and therefore takes very seriously the criticisms raised by reformers. Then the reformers on the one side are balanced by Dr Grantly on the other.

Dr Grantly is completely convinced of the rightness of his own position. He's shocked and appalled by the slightest suggestion to the contrary. And most of all, he's offended by those who don't behave according to a gentlemanly code of conduct.

And now, had I the pen of a mighty poet, would I sing in epic verse the noble wrath of the archdeacon.

So he's not necessarily the nicest of people (although since Trollope is pretty conservative, he always seems to be on the "right" side of things; and since I tend to be more on the conservative end myself, I suppose I'm more sympathetic than others would be). But really I think he's just an entertaining character.

As I think about it, it seems like a fair amount of modern comedy involves a bewildered "straight man" surrounded by exasperating absurdities. Off the top of my head, Oscar on The Office does this, right? Or Michael Bluth in Arrested Development. You could put together a whole subset of 30 Rock plots where Liz Lemon sets out to set people straight. Maybe that's part of why I find Dr Grantly's self-righteousness so amusing.

Imagine a non-awkward ending here :)

Spinsters getting things done

Agatha Christie's The Murder in the Vicarage was free for Kindle, so of course I snapped it up. Of course it was good. Liking an Agatha Christie mystery is like, I don't know, enjoying a symphony by Beethoven or admitting that the French make some pretty decent wine. I liked that the story was told from the first-person perspective of one of the by-stander characters; that was pretty neat. Also, sunsets are profoundly beautiful.

Agatha Christie novels seem like classic old-lady reading, which, I admit, is kind of a barrier for me, although I also avoid books that are very popular currently. I will need to get over that because Miss Marple is a very enjoyable character. Of course she's a kind of soul sister to Dorothy Sayers' Miss Climpson, another spinster using her snooping powers for good. And I suspect I'm drawn to both of them through my childhood love of Nancy Drew -- another series I burned through as quickly as possible. Sure, Nancy had Bess and Ned and her father (Mr. Drew, Esq.?), but for the most part her investigating activities were powered by her own snooping.

Miss Climpson, if you're wondering, first appears in Unnatural Death; another notable spinster of the Wimsey series is Miss Murchison, who appears in Strong Poison.

Of course (setting aside Nancy Drew, Yank of the first order) both Climpson and Marple also belong to a very particular moment in the history of women, and specifically of single women. The late Victorian and Edwardian period had seen the rise of professional women asserting their right to support themselves, often through serving the professional needs of other women. Although many scholars argue that the rise of Freudian theories, which cast suspicion on single women as "repressed" (see: Gaudy Night), put an end to this flowering of independent single women, the situation between the wars was still very significant. After all, it was widely believed that the slaughter of the First World War must leave many women single who would otherwise have gotten married. And, let's don't forget, women in Britain got the vote in two stages: in 1918 women who might be qualified as "older" or more stable received the vote, and in 1928 women got the vote on the same basis as men.

All of which is to say that in the 1920s and 1930s when Christie and Sayers were writing the characters of Marple and Climpson, respectively, we have a society that was thinking about the contributions women on their own could make to society, and had been thinking about this for some time. Of course this isn't all rosy. Both Marple and Climpson are obviously "marginal"; they're almost constantly being insulted directly or indirectly. Their detective activities are an outlet of useful activity in lives that would otherwise, by implication, be pretty useless. But I still think they're interesting characters that point up a contemporary interest in spinsters, and a wider sense that women were becoming important (somehow).

Setting the historical interest aside, I've always liked characters who use their Special Expertise to solve a problem. Maybe that's why I like mysteries so much: because I'm just waiting for the situation in which my knowing what guttae are or how to format a bibliographic entry in Chicago style makes me the hero.