There she goes again...

Well. My attempt to return to blogging full-time doesn’t seem to be going so well, does it? Just as I was beginning to emerge from a month-long brain haze induced by my dissertation proposal and other graduate school deadlines, I got sidetracked and overwhelmed all over again. At least this time around some of the reasons were fun ones – I’ve been doing other things, like travelling and going to concerts – but in the end it all still comes down to having so much on my plate personally and academically and not quite knowing how to manage it all.

I know this is nothing new: many of my favourite bloggers are or were graduate students at some point, and I’ve watched them go through more or less the same over the years. But I’m used to being more in control of my life and my time, so this new situation is requiring some psychological adjustment on my part. On the bright side, at least my research project means enough to me that I don’t ever resent it keeping me away from other things I’m passionate about. And that makes a world of difference.

I certainly don’t mean to imply that those of us who blog are driven to do so by a lack of professional fulfilment, but in my case in particular the fact that blogging gave me something that was otherwise lacking in my life was always a huge motivator. This hasn’t really ceased to be the case, but I’m finding that a lot of what I value about blogging – intellectual community, exchange of ideas, the chance to speak up about or draw attention to issues that are hugely important to me – is also a part of academic research, even if in very different ways.

To make matters worse when it comes to blogging, March, April and May were my slowest reading months in the past four years. This means things are going to remain slow on the reviewing front for some time to come, but I’m dealing with it in the best way I can – which is by accepting that no matter how absent I currently am, blogging will remain a part of my life for as I want it to be one. I know my readers will remain patient with me, so all I have to do is extent that same patience to myself.

Anyway, the real goal of this post is to let you know that I’m going home next week and may therefore disappear from the blogging world yet again. For all I know I’ll be able to use that time to write a few blog posts, but amidst taking care of a few personal matters, seeing family and friends, spending time with my cats and dogs (who I haven’t seen since Christmas), and doing as much dissertation work as I possibly can, I might not be able to get around to it.

I thought I’d leave you with a picture of the books I’m considering taking with me. A lot of them are work related (or, more accurately, books I’m using my dissertation as an excuse to read. I know there’s some danger of getting sidetracked right there, but I’m trying to prevent this by limiting them to my spare time rather than my “official” work time), but I’m hoping to be able to squeeze in a fun read or two, or at least finish the two great (but very long) books I’m currently reading.

Take care of yourselves, my friends, and I’ll see you again when life allows it.

Read More......

The 10PM Question by Kate de Goldi

“But people keep silent for too long and then, next thing, silence is their bad habit. Things fester.”

Twelve-year-old Frankie Parsons is having a hard time keeping the “rodent voice” in his head under control. Every day, he has to battle a litany of worries threatening to consume his every thought. He envies his best friend, Gigs, for his ability to just live life instead of endlessly wondering about everything that could go wrong. Frankie’s persistent anxiety is only really taken seriously by his mother: every night at 10pm, Frankie asks her a question that has been consuming him, and she does her best to dispel his worries. Frankie’s entire world rests on a very precarious balance – a balance that even the slightest change might overthrow. When a new girl by the name of Sidney arrives at school, Frankie recognises a kindred spirit and immediately befriends her. But their friendship comes with both rewards and risks. As much as Frankie enjoys spending time with Sidney, he dreads the question he knows she’ll eventually ask.

The 10PM Question is a smart, subtle, touching and funny book that contains one of the most accurate portraits of recurrent anxiety I’ve even encountered. With both wit and compassion, Kate de Goldi lays bare the traps Frankie’s mind sets for itself. The book also does a remarkable job of slowly unveiling the circumstances of Frankie’s life in a way that advances both the plot and the characterisation: as we read on, we become aware of his family dynamics, the reason why his mother hasn’t left the house in years, and the things Frankie fears the most and attempts to keep from even himself.

What interested me the most, though, was de Goldi’s portrayal of Frankie and Sydney’s friendship, particularly when it comes to its examinations of the trappings of anger and entitlement in personal relationships. Sydney’s family dynamics are in their own way as unusual as Frankie’s, and her mother is the kind of woman that perhaps the majority of books would not hesitate to villainise. In The 10PM Question, Frankie gleefully does this himself. He resents her on Sydney’s behalf, but there’s enough room in the narrative for not only his anger and resentment, but also for Sydney’s own resentment of his resentment and for a more nuanced and human portrait of her mother to emerge.

In a way that doesn’t feel heavy-handed or imposed upon the narrative in the least, De Goldi contrasts the way Frankie and Sydney see their own families from the inside with the way they perceive each other’s family from the outside. This multiplicity of perspective dispels any hasty or simplistic judgements about family dysfunction from both the characters’ and the readers’ minds. De Goldi excels at a something I’ve been thinking more and more about lately: making the text question itself and challenge its own assumptions in a way that’s visible but never excessively didactic.

The 10PM Question is a story about mental illness, but though it takes its subject matter seriously it’s not ultimately a tragic or a hopeless story. Most of all, it’s a story about acceptance; about doing the best we can under the circumstances. It’s about finding happiness against all odds, not because you’re settling for less but because there’s no reason why life should have to follow a prewritten script. The ending was absolutely perfect: it provides no miracle solutions, but it’s a first step in the right direction – and first steps are very often the most difficult ones to take. Like I mentioned the other day, The 10PM Question is definitely one of my favourite reads of the year so far. Sensitive, perceptive, smart, and often laugh out funny. What else could I ask for?

Favourite bits:

Gigs never seemed to worry. His life was a steady, tidy progress from one activity to another. He would have a task (breakfast, say; or getting his watch fixed; or doing his trombone practice; or buying an ice cream; or finishing a maths project) and he would just do it. He didn’t think about the nutritional value of the breakfast or the ice cream (Gifs never worried about fat intake). He didn’t stress about his maths ability, or his chances for Boy’s College next year, or is batting average, or whether blowing a sustained forte passage on the trombone might accidentally trigger a brain haemorrhage.
There were no detours and distractions, nor interruptions by any of a catalogue of pressing problems. Gigs didn’t worry about his household, his parents, his health, his safety, his future, the probability of earthquakes, terrorism, global warming, or McDonald’s taking over the world. He was a funny guy, and a smart one – and the smartest thing about him, in Frankie’s opinion, was that he never, ever, ever worried.

Frankie raised his eyes to Robert Plant and silently spoke his treacherous thought: I’m tired of it. He looked at Morrie and said the thought aloud, “I’m tired of it.” He was tired, tired, tired, tired, so tired of all the worry, worry about himself, worry about Ma, worry about the world. The instantly he felt shabby and mean, disloyal to Ma, ashamed of himself.

Frankie also worked his way through many books at the City Library, but he did it at a leisurely pace and he mostly chose picture books. He didn’t care what anyone thought about this, but nor did he imagine anyone took the slightest notice. That was the great thing about the library. It was both teeming with people and very private. Everyone was either busy selecting books or returning them or was sprawled in a beanbag, lost in their own reading world.

They read it too:
Reading Cause I’m Addicted
Back to Books
TV and Book Addict
Killing Time Reading

(Yours?)

Read More......

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’

Mr Thomas Gradgrind’s speech, the opening paragraph to Hard Times, is probably as famous as the novel itself. Published in 1854, Hard Times tells the story of a fictional Northern industrial town by the name of Coketown, and particularly of the Gradgrind family. Thomas Gradgrind brings up his children according to the strict precepts of Fact. But when Cecelia Jupe, the daughter of a circus performer, enters their lives, the Gradgrind children come into contact with a different, warmer, far more human world than the one they had thus far inhabited.

Hard Times was my first foray into Dickens’ novels proper – before I’d only read the odd short story and A Christmas Carol. The reason why I decided to read Hard Times for the Classics Circuit Duelling Authors tour is not because I’m #teamdickens rather than #teamausten, but because next month I’m going to see a stage adaptation of this novel by the same theatre company who did the production of A Christmas Carol I raved about last December. Hard Times will be performed at an old mill and will no doubt draw on Manchester’s industrial history. As I’m sure you can imagine, to say that I’m excited is an understatement.

But moving on to the novel itself: I quite enjoyed Hard Times for what it was, though while reading it I was well aware of what someone who is not a Dickens fan (or just not a fan of this novel) could take issue with. For example, the social commentary in the novel is obvious to the point of heavy-handedness, but then again what is now obvious did once did need to be said. Dickens’ points about the dehumanisation of the working classes and the precarious conditions they live under may seem very evident, but they’re made with real passion and heart. And if you expand the geographical circle you’re considering, they’re as valid now as they were a century and a half ago.

Having said that, I did find Dickens occasionally guilty of oversimplification – his portrayals of Trade unions or Utilitarians, for example, are not exactly rich in nuance. I think some of the things that make him such a vivid, engaging writer also work against him, and one of them is his tendency to illustrate his points through ethical black and whites. The same is true of the characterisation in Hard Times: the characters are certainly memorable, but they resemble types or caricatures more than real human beings. Furthermore, his women are all very stereotypically Victorian – angelic and sacrificing. He’s certainly no Wilkie Collins in that regard. Still, I have to say that the characterisation issues bothered me a lot less in Dickens than it probably would in any other author, which is a testament to how well he does what he sets out to do.

What I enjoyed the most about Hard Times was the fact that it’s ultimately a tribute to the imagination and the role it plays in making us human. I don’t buy into the diametrical opposition between the imagination on the one hand, and reason, fact or scientific-mindedness on the other that the novel presents, but the theme really spoke to me all the same. Again, Dickens managed to annoy me considerably less than any other author who did the exact same probably would. This doesn’t sound like much of a compliment, I know, but actually it is.

Last but not least, I absolutely loved his language, his humour, and his powerful satire. For example:

There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy. Mr. Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this library: a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever got to any depth in and came up sane. It was a disheartening circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in wondering. They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and sorrows, the lives and deaths of common men and women! They sometimes, after fifteen hours' work, sat down to read mere fables about men and women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less like their own. They took De Foe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker. Mr. Gradgrind was for ever working, in print and out of print, at this eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this unaccountable product.

In that charmed apartment, the most complicated social questions were cast up, got into exact totals, and finally settled - if those concerned could only have been brought to know it. As if an astronomical observatory should be made without any windows, and the astronomer within should arrange the starry universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr Gradgrind, in his Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty little bit of sponge.

‘I am sure we are constantly hearing, ma’am, till it becomes quite nauseous, concerning their wives and families,’ said Bitzer. ‘Why look at me, ma’am! I don't want a wife and family. Why should they?’
‘Because they are improvident,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, ‘that’s where it is. If they were more provident and less perverse, ma’am, what would they do? They would say, “While my hat covers my family,” or “while my bonnet covers my family,” - as the case might be, ma’am – “I have only one to feed, and that’s the person I most like to feed.”’
‘To be sure,’ assented Mrs. Sparsit, eating muffin.

Hard Times may not have become my new favourite Victorian novel, but I think my experience with it bodes well for my future forays into Dickens. Now I only need to decide between Great Expectations and Bleak House.

What Other Readers Thought:
Book-a-rama
A Literary Odyssey

(Yours?)

Read More......

Barter Books, or: Does this Place Really Exist?

I was in Northumberland this past weekend, and one of the places I visited was Barter Books, a used bookshop in Alnwick village. Barter Books is a place quite a few of you might know at least by name, as it made the news a few years ago when its owner discovered the now famous “Keep Calm and Carry On” WW2 posters.

Barter Books is inside a disused Victorian train station and is one of the largest used bookshops in Europe. I knew this before my visit, and so I was expecting to be impressed – but let me tell you, not nearly as impressed as I was. I think Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness (which is inside an old church) and Livraria Lello in Porto might have been displaced as the coolest bookshops I’ve ever been to.

Part of me can hardly believe Barter Books is even real. Not only is the place welcoming and wonderfully decorated, but the selection is nearly overwhelming: an entire train station full of used books, with everything from modern paperbacks to classic first editions. The prices are of course very variable, but there were some real bargains to be found (including lots of green Viragoes in lovely condition for under £2).

But enough talking – I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves:











How amazing is that?

And while I’m at it, here are a few general pictures from my trip:


Steampunk mall in Newcastle

Still Newcastle

The river Tyne seen from the Castle Keep

Alnwick Castle, where the Harry Potter movies were filmed


Almouth village


The amazing Seven Stories in Newcastle



The Sage, Gateshead

I hope you all had lovely weekends yourselves. I’m afraid that this trip means I’m behind on everything blog related yet again, but I think I’m starting to learn not to feel guilty and just hope that one of these days I’ll actually catch up.

Read More......

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Stories are the wildest thing of all, the monster rumbled. Stories chase and bite and hunt.

Thirteen-year-old Connor O’Malley is not having an easy time. At school, he faces bullying and loneliness. At home, he has to deal with a recurring nightmare which torments him nearly every night. And then there are his mother’s cancer treatments, which leave her feeling exhausted and unwell and in need of the help of her own mother. Connor doesn’t particularly get on with his grandmother, and he sees her presence in the house as an uncomfortable intrusion. One night, Connor wakes up with a voice calling his name. The monster outside, a Green Man-like creature, tells Connor that he has come to tell him three tales. When he’s done, he wants Connor to tell him a fourth. He wants Connor to tell him the truth, and he won’t settle for anything less.

First of all: A Monster Calls completely shattered me. My friend Vivienne had very helpfully warned me to keep tissues at hand when I read it, but somehow I didn’t expect to go through a whole box. This is an extraordinarily moving story, and not in the easy tearjerker sort of way that a story about grief in clumsier hands has the potential to become. What makes it so affecting is exactly how unsentimental it is, how restrained, and most of all how perceptive and emotionally genuine.

You can tell from the start that A Monster Calls is going to be a story about dealing with loss. This is true enough, but just as much it’s a story about the power of stories. The monster’s three tales are complex and ambiguous and help illuminate real life’s lack of black and whites, much like the overall story is doing. The novel is very impressive at a conceptual level, in the sense that it comments on what it hopes to achieve (on what it most certainly does achieve): here’s a story communicating things that are too raw and uncomfortable and painful for straightforward conversations, and inside it you have tales that very consciously do the exact same.

Human beings tell stories for myriads of reasons, but this is certainly one of the foremost. How else do we address what we can’t quite acknowledge? How else do we communicate what we fear will unravel us if worded directly? How but with the aid of stories do you work through these complex, troubling, momentous and messy emotions, especially if you’re thirteen years old?

Because they work at multiple levels, because they respect their audience’s intelligence, stories like A Monster Calls do this without ever becoming didactic or heavy-handed. Implicit to Connor’s story is the acknowledgement that these are deadly feelings, for adults and teenagers alike. These are feelings that can destroy you if you don’t work through them. But at the same time, the story absolutely refuses to pathologize Connor in any way. He’s a human being reacting to his circumstances in a perfectly understandable way, and although this is not how he sees himself he’s never portrayed as anything but. This is perhaps its most subversive and defiant aspect, the most obvious way in which this story “makes trouble”. But it’s of course trouble of a kind we’d all do well to welcome.

A Monster Calls reminded me quite a bit of I Kill Giants, which as some of you might remember I read and adored last year. But I think I actually liked this more. I Kill Giants does what it set out to do very well indeed, but A Monster Calls (perhaps in part because it’s longer) has added depth and a far wider emotional range.

It makes me gladder than I can say to know that a book like this is out there in the world, within reach of those who might need a monster just as much as Connor did. And I mean this far more widely than saying that A Monster Calls might offer comfort to someone facing similar circumstances; might do what an entire army of Well Meaning and Concerned adults never could – though I have no doubt that it might. But the wonderful thing about stories as good as this is exactly that their emotional truths always go far beyond their concrete facts.

In addition to everything else, A Monster Calls is a thing of beauty as a physical object: it has lovely decorated endpapers, cover illustrations underneath the dust jacket, and numerous illustrations by Jim Kay intermingled with the text, which do a lot to help set its mood:


A Monster Calls was based on an idea by Siobhan Dowd, the Carnegie-winner author of Bog Child and three other novels, who passed away from cancer in 2007.

They read it too:
Serendipity
Jess Hearts Books
Fallen Star Stories
The Overflowing Library

(Yours?)

Read More......

Temeraire (aka His Majesty’s Dragon) by Naomi Novik

Set in an alternate Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, Temeraire (His Majesty’s Dragon in the US edition) tells the story of a navy officer, William Laurence, who unexpectedly finds himself in charge of a dragon egg. In the world of Temeraire, dragons play a key role in warfare, particularly between Napoleonic France and the rest of Europe. Laurence finds the dragon egg in a French warship that his own manages to capture, and he’s told that the egg is dangerously close to hatching.

As dragons are known to go feral if not presented with a human companion immediately after their hatching, the navy men on board the ship draw lots to see who will have to face what is to them a dreaded fate. But the dragon hatchling (soon to be named Temeraire) has his own ideas: he completely ignores his appointed companion and responds to Laurence instead. This means the end of his navy career, social ostracism, the death of his marriage prospects, and a forced entry into the disreputable Aerial Corps.

The most interesting thing about this novel is the relationship Laurence and Temeraire develop. It puts a spin on the whole special-bond-with-a-mythical-creature trope, and it manages to be both incredibly sweet and remarkably unsentimental. What makes it work so well is the context in which it takes place. Aviators in general develop strong bonds with their dragons, and these affections are used to control the dragons. A few weeks after Temeraire’s hatching, we’re told that:

Laurence no longer thought of him as a creature for whom he was responsible, but rather as an intimate friend, already the dearest in his life, and one to be depended upon without question.

Later in the series, this is problematised in a way that allows for no easy or convenient answers. But as I was saying, what interested me about this first book was the fact that an unguardedly intimate and vulnerable bond was allowed to develop in this particular historical and cultural context. The members of the Aerial Corps are Regency military men: they live in a culture that stresses honour, courage, keeping up appearances, saving face, and generally living up to a narrowly defined ideal of masculinity (there are female aviators in the Corps, as I’ll discuss further ahead, but this is true for them as well).

Yet their relationship with their dragons provides a safe outlet for the expression of emotions that would otherwise be confined to the sphere of their private lives – private lives which, once they enter the service, will mostly remain outside their reach. It was particularly interesting to see how the intensity of the aviator-dragon bond was something that was not only accepted but expected and encouraged inside the Corps, and yet it was marginalised by the world at large and contributed considerably to their dubious reputation. It doesn’t take much to realise what kind of affective bonds this is true of in the real world. Needless to say, this gives the series a lot of queer subtext that one can have fun exploring.

I was also very interested in Novik’s inclusion of many of the key political events and ideas of the early nineteenth century into the story: the French and American Revolutions, altering concepts of legitimate authority, duty, loyalty to a nation or to one’s ideals, changing political systems, and, as the series progresses, slavery and the Abolitionist movement, the ethics of global commerce, Colonialism and entitlement, and so on. All of these issues play out not only in the background, but also in the character’s lives.

A character like Temeraire – intelligent, intellectually curious, and with not much of a cultural baggage to steer him in one direction or another – is allowed to ask questions about all of these things that would almost inevitably sound anachronistic coming from one of the human characters. He is, as Laurence playfully calls him, a “Jacobin of a dragon”; as he wonders about the status quo, Laurence is forced to listen to his questions. Temeraire raises points he’d likely dismiss as mutinous coming from anyone else, but their relationship, with its mix of intimacy and intellectual respect, forces him to consider them.

The fact that Temeraire is allowed to ask all these questions without compromising the novel’s historical context is probably half of the appeal of telling a story like this. Because you have Temeraire, you can also have Laurence be less than happy about the presence of women in the Corps without needing to either resort to unrealistic didacticism or having to leave his attitude unexamined. And you can also have a character like Captain Riley, whose family is involved in the slave trade, who is challenged about it but never portrayed as an inhuman monster.

Let me give you an example of what Temeraire and Laurance’s exchanges are like:

‘Some of the laws which I have heard make very little sense, and I do not know that I would obey them if it were not to oblige you. It seems to me that if you wish to apply laws to us, it were only reasonable to consult us on them, and from what you have read to me about Parliament, I do not think any dragons are invited to go there.’
‘Next you will cry out against taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbour,’ Laurence said. ‘You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility.’

And (this is actually from the second book, Throne of Jade):

‘You may as well say, that if a creature will not serve people and learn their habits, it is not intelligent, and had just as well be killed,’ Temeraire said, his ruff quivering; he had lifted his head, stirred-up.
‘Not at all,’ Laurence said, trying to think of how he could give comfort; to him the lack of sentience in the creature’s eyes had been wholly obvious. ‘I am saying only that if they were intelligent, they would be able to learn to communicate, and we would have heard of it. After all, many dragons do not choose to take on a handler, and refuse to speak with men at all; it does not happen so very often, but it does, and no one thinks dragons unintelligent for it,’ he added, thinking he had chanced on a happy example.
‘But what happens to them, if they do? Temeraire said. ‘What should happen to me, if I were to refuse to obey? I do not mean a single order; what if I did not wish to fight in the Corps at all?’

And now for some questions which some fellow book bloggers very helpfully asked me about the book. Jodie asked: How great on a scale of 1 to awesome did you think this book was? And where do you put it on your mental scale of ‘books about dragons that I have read’? Likewise, Jeanne wanted to know how I think the series compares to Jo Walton’s Tooth & Claw.

First of all, I rate it awesome plus one. I’m not sure if it’s my favourite dragon book ever (it’s unlikely anything will ever beat Ursula Le Guin’s The Other Wind for me), but I feel bad comparing it to others because it uses the dragons-are-real premise in such a unique way. As for Tooth & Claw, I probably liked it better than any individual books in Novik’s series, but if I consider it as a whole, Novik probably wins. But again, they are very different, and I particularly like how they each accurately capture the mood of the time period they’re set in (Novik is Regency; Walton mock-Victorian).

More questions from Jodie:

Who was your favourite female character?

Captain Catherine Harcourt, though I also really liked Jane and Emily Roland. All three are members of the Corps, but they’re at different states of their careers, and I found Catherine’s particularly interesting. Emily is still young and passes for a boy, Jane is established enough that she shrugs off most sexist remarks. But Catherine, as a young Captain, can’t quite afford to do so. I don’t want to spoil the entire book, but I really liked how Laurence’s attitude towards her changed as he began to make sense of her position.

If dragons count, though, I’ll have to say Iskierka from later in the series. She’s adorable and hilarious and reminded me of Cera from The Land Before Time.

What did you think of the stuff about the social alienation of being part of the Dragon Corps?

I thought it was cleverly done, actually – much like Temeraire’s presence, it leaves Novik room to do things that would otherwise compromise the historical foundations of the story. The social stigma attached to the Corps means they’re slightly outside the dominant cultural norms of their time, and that makes behaviours that would otherwise shake believability permissible. But at the same time, in the first book Laurence is himself a newcomer to the Corps. He’s a navy man and the son of a Lord (Fun fact¹: Laurence’s family estate, Wollaton Hall and Park, was one of my favourite hangouts when I lived in Nottingham). When he first joints the Corps, he finds his fellow officer’s informality both shocking and offensive, but with time his perspective changes. His transition from a social context heavily based on rank to a far more relaxed one is absolutely believable. This allows Novik to slowly carve her characters a space outside Regency formality without the whole story falling apart in the process.

How did you feel about the amount of battle scenes - just right, or too many?

I’m not much of a battle scene-y person myself, so the fact that I only got bored for about half a page is probably a very good sign. I found them exciting for the most part, and most of all I enjoyed the fact that they contributed to character development. The things that happen in the height of battle tell us things about the characters and affect their relationships, and that makes them more than just action for action’s sake.

Though I’m mostly focusing on the first novel here, this post has been sitting half-finished in my drafts folder for long enough that I am now up to book six in the series, and feel absolutely dismayed that there’s a whole year to wait until the next one is out. Marg asked me if I found the last few books disappointing compared to the first, and I have to say that fortunately I didn’t. I noticed that Tongues of Serpents in particular got a considerable number of bad reviews, but I actually enjoyed it a lot. The pace was slower than in previous books, but there was still enough to keep me interested. Also, without giving anything away I’ll say that I foresee what the last few books have been building up to having an awesome payoff towards the end of the series, and that keeps me happy as a reader.

I should probably mention that I read the first book in March, and then the remaining five over the last couple of weeks. I read two of them in one sitting in two consecutive evenings last week, which should tell you something about the degree of my addiction. They have proved invaluable in keeping me sane when I was at my busiest, and I’m incredibly thankful for any book that could manage to do that at all. By now I’ve reached the point where I’m so attached to the characters that I’d gladly read anything that allows me to spend more time with them – including 400 pages of Laurence and Temeraire simply sitting around and chatting. I’m glad there’s more to come, even if there’s a long wait ahead. I’ll miss this series terribly when it’s over.

They read it too: Stella Matutina, A Book a Week, A Garden Carried in the Pocket, The Literary Omnivore, Book Gazing, Fyrefly’s Book Blog, Birdbrain(ed) Blog, Jenny’s Books, Epiphany, Eve’s Alexandria, Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf, Susan Hated Literature, Read Warbler, The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader, Honeyed Words, Giraffe Days

(Yours?)

¹ Well, fun if you’re me, anyway.

Read More......

The Sunday Salon: In Which, Hopefully With Your Help, I Return For Good

Hi! Remember me? I’m happy to report that the worst of my grad school deadlines are behind me now, and I’m determined to once again make room in my life for regular blogging. As I’m sure you can imagine, after more than a month away I have a bit of a backlog of books to write about. It’s not anywhere near what it would be if my reading hadn’t slowed down considerably for the past two months, but still, I don’t quite know where to start.

Which is where you come in: it would be really helpful if you told me which of the following books you’d like to hear about first. And it would be even more helpful if you were to ask me any specific questions about them. Even though I try to keep reading notes, I’m afraid that after all this time my memory might need some prodding before I can write a decent post about some of these. The books are:

• Temeraire by Naomi Novik (I may or may not have compulsively read the whole series over the past few weeks.)
  
  
• The 10PM Question by Kate DiGoldi (My first pick for the Kiwi YA challenge, and one of my favourite reads of the year so far. I really wish I’d written about it sooner after I finished it, because I’m worried about not being able to do it justice now.)
  
  
• Rebel Girls by Jill Liddington (Excellent social history about the suffrage movement in Northern England.)

• Tamara Drew by Posy Simmonds (I’d probably need a few questions to be able to review this one at all, as I failed to keep any decent reading notes. Which is too bad, as I really enjoyed it.)
  
  
• The Equality Illusion by Kat Banyard (As the title suggests, non-fiction about gender issues.)
  
  
• The Magicians and Mrs Quent by Galen Beckett (A Brontësque secondary world fantasy.)
  
  
• The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (A mix of memoir, biography and art history, and very deserving of all the accolades it’s been getting.)
  
  
• Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson (My first Eva Ibbotson, and every bit as charming as I was hoping it would be.)
  
  
• A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (New Patrick Ness! Enough said, right? I swear, my head hurt from crying after I finished it.)

Also, the other day I decided to celebrate handing in my research proposal with a reckless book order of the kind I hadn’t placed in a very long time. I can’t take a proper picture of my loot, because they haven’t arrive yet, so here’s a cover collage instead:


I’m so ridiculously excited to read them. Have you read any of them? And if so, are they as good as they sound?

Have a great Sunday, everyone. I can’t wait to catch up with you all.

Read More......

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

First of all, I have to say I’ve really missed this whole blogging about books thing. Technically I shouldn’t be posting before the 9th of May, the day when the last of my grad school assignments is due (dissertation aside, of course). Actually, make that the 11th, because the first thing I’ll do is try my best to sleep for 48 hours straight. Anyway, I’m too attached to The Year of Feminist Classics project to skip a month, even if I’m two days late. Plus I did manage to read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and have a lot I want to say about it.

Published in 1915, Herland is a utopian novella based on the following premise: deep in the Amazonian forest, on an isolated plateau, a group of women developed the ability to reproduce asexually. For over two thousand years, a civilisation made entirely of women has been flourishing. The story opens when a group of three friends hears rumours about Herland’s existence and decides to go on an expedition to find it. They each have their area of expertise: Terry is “strong on facts”, Jeff is a biologist, and the narrator, Van, is a sociologist interested in a little bit of everything, “so long as it connected with human life, somehow”.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman uses the points of view of these three young men in ingenious, ironic, and often very funny ways. Their expectations about how women are supposed to behave and what a female-only culture is supposed to be like are allowed to speak for themselves before being mercilessly debunked. Shortly after arriving in Herland, for example, Van says: “But they look--why, this is a CIVILIZED country!” I protested. “There must be men.”

What is also interesting about these three protagonists is that they each embody a different way of dehumanising women which was current in the early twentieth century. As Van himself puts it,

Jeff, with his gentle romantic old-fashioned notions of women as clinging vines. Terry, with his clear decided practical theories that there were two kinds of women—those he wanted and those he didn’t; Desirable and Undesirable was his demarcation. The latter as a large class, but negligible—he had never thought about them at all.

And a few pages later, about himself:

I held a middle ground, highly scientific, of course, and used to argue learnedly about the physiological limitations of the sex.

Needless to say, the “highly scientific” consensus of the time was every bit as sexist and dehumanising.

Gilman is an excellent writer, but the reasons why I couldn’t fully connect with this book were similar to the issues I had with her nonfiction book The Man-Made World. For all their differences, the two works are ideologically very consistent. They share the same points of interest and the same highly problematic aspects – namely a tendency to slip into gender essentialism even while questioning it, an emphasis on motherhood as the defining feature of femininity, and constant nods to heterosexism, racism and eugenics.

The vision behind Herland is a far cry away from my own feminist vision. There’s a lot to appreciate about it – most of all, it provides a fascinating glimpse into early twentieth-century notions of what it meant to be a woman and of science, and also into the ideological muddle that surrounded early feminism, which I find important to be aware of. But ultimately Gilman’s utopia relies on an idea that, to me, is more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. I do not believe in female utopias. I do not believe in essential gender natures. I do not think a society ruled by women would necessarily be any better than the one we have now. What I do believe in is freeing people from gender straitjackets, for everyone’s sake.

Having said that, I have to admit that the more I read on, and the more Gilman elaborated on her premise, the more I noticed that, slips and contradictions aside, this is also what she believes in most of all. If we put aside her cult of motherhood for a moment (which I find quite problematic in its own right), what emerges is a novella that is far less essentialist than it could have been. What’s interesting about Herland is not the fact that it portrays a world where everything is close to perfection because there are no men. What’s truly interesting is the fact that this is a society in which the male-female opposition disappears. The women of Herland are not defined against anything, so they’re allowed to simply be human beings. Likewise, this is how they perceive the three protagonists, much to their surprise:

Jeff continued thoughtful. “All the same, there’s something funny about it,” he urged. “It isn’t just that we don’t see any men—but we don’t see any signs of them. The—the—reaction of these women is different from any that I’ve ever met.”
“There is something in what you say, Jeff,” I agreed. “There is a different—atmosphere.”
“They don’t seem to notice our being men,” he went on. “They treat us—well—just as they do one another. It’s as if our being men was a minor incident.”
I nodded. I’d noticed it myself.

In a way, Herland is more of a philosophical treatise than a novella, and yes, there’s some excessive driving the point home at times. But don’t let that put you off by any means: like I said, Gilman can be quite funny, and for all its theoretical weight Herland reads extremely well. It’s (very consciously, I’m sure) written in a style reminiscent of adventure stories of the period, such as The Lost World or H.G. Wells’ “The Country of the Blind”. Herland is certainly not a narrative we can swallow whole, but it’s worth reading all the same. You can find it for free on Project Gutenberg.

After I finished the book, I got Gilman’s biography, To Herland and Beyond, from the library, but soon afterwards I had to admit defeat and return it unread. Has anyone read it by any chance? It looks very promising, but I haven’t been doing much reading beyond one Naomi Novik book after another. Dragons and chocolate are what’s currently keeping me sane.

As always, visit the Year of Feminist Classics blog for more takes on Herland. I’m afraid that I wasn’t able to read any of them myself this time, which makes me feel very sad and isolated and distant from the communal reading experience this project is meant to be all about. But in another week or so I’ll be able to catch up (not just with Herland reviews, but with everything).

I’ll see you then for an introduction to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (apologies in advance for being a few days late). And also for some serious catching up: I know I keep saying this, but I’ve missed you all.

Read More......