Reading Backlog #2
20 Jan 2024 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespiritI've been meaning to carry on catching up with my reading posts, so maybe one day I can do the regular ones again, or more probably, regular media-consuming ones. And then I looked and found the one catch up post I actually made was in March 2023, which is not a speedy rate at which to catch anything up. HAVE ANOTHER POST.
[ETA: I started drafting this post out on 4th Jan, so you can see I'm keeping up with the speedy part.]
(Last time, in March 2023, I had caught up as far as early 2020, when I fell into a Star Wars Prequel hole and wrote ridiculous amounts of fic and read a whole bunch of SW novels, where I mostly liked the Legends ones and resented the new canon ones, but not always.)
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, and while I am not at all athamsterwoman's level of (what is it? frustration? love to hate? affectionate and deeply invested loathing? lol), these have proved to be fine but only sometimes for me - the second one, where it was more contained, really worked for me. This one didn't really. But I gave it a star and a smile in the margin in my Book Diary, which isn't bad, either! (I think therefore the disappointment is just because I hoped they would be so much more my thing than they've turned out to be, rather than me not liking them or anything. Just, easy to read, fine, I appreciate lots of the world-building, no great feelings, alas.)
Anyway, next up I read The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells, the first in the Raksura books, and I loved it! I had to swiftly follow it up with The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths (presumably with b'day cash), oh, and The Edge of Worlds and since have read through the rest at a slow rate of waiting (im)patiently for birthdays and Christmases and continued to love the world-building and characters and the whole thing, and, although sometimes I get exhausted when she gets all fast-paced, that is merely a compliment to her skill and testament to my general lack of everything.
Murder on the Flying Scotsman, The Black Ship and Heirs of the Body by Carola Dunn, which at this date is now making me all nostalgic for lack of Daisy, Murder Magnet Supreme, and the long-suffering Alec in my life for AGES. Anyway, Daisy went on a train and there was murder, she went out for dinner in the suburbs and there was murder and, um, I forget the plot of the last one, but there was definitely murder.
(I must re-read them. I just need to pick up more of the first few, which at the time I got from the library and now the library does not have them, and I am less good at getting to the library anyway.) Anyway, these are fun and well done cosy detective stories set in the 1920s, which I enjoyed a lot, and were easy-going enough to help me back into reading when I was so unwell.
Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens, which was great fun (a children's book mash-up of boarding schools and golden age murder), although I have STILL not stumbled over any of the sequels in charity shops; a grave injustice.
I also read a few more Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire books, which generally enjoyed, and some much more than others, and occasionaly where they suddebly mid-20th C attitudes at me in the middle of the souffle of delight (inevitable, but also ALAS) but at this stage I can't remember them individually without going to look at the and read the blurb to remind me which was which, as they sort of merge in my head rapidly. Although, unlike Wodehouse, I can remember which ones I read by reading the blurb, so I can do that if people want to know.
Then, for family history reasons, I took notes from Paupers and Pigkillers: The Diary of William Holland 1799-1818. William Holland was the vicar of a tiny Quantock parish called Overstowey, close to where I grew up and where a lot of my ancestors come from. He was sometimes, inevitably, much as you would expect from an 18th/19th C Vicar, but his diary entries were fascinating and never dull. He was Welsh and took a long time to adapt to the "stupid, slow" Somerset people (worse in every way than Welsh common people). He had opinions about all his fellow vicars, and a local Non-Conformist bigwig (Thomas Poole) was his Nemesis ("Satan himself cannot be more false and hypocritical") and he gets very gleeful if he feels he is one up on the Nemesis. He also got to correspond to an Earl about face-science and was involved in some coincidences that you wouldn't have put in a novel because it would have been too unrealistic, but rl can get away with these things.
His diary was written in multiple notebooks over the period and for whatever reason, only around every other one has survived, so there are a lot of gaps, and we also do not know what made him start writing a diary, because the first one is among the lost. The first entry we do have, though, is him being very disapproving of the Coleridge party who'd arrived at Nether Stowey, invited by the Nemesis himself: "Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs Coleridge who looked so like a friskey girl or something worse that I was not surprised that a Democratic Libertine should choose her for a wife."
Before the diary began, he and his wife suffered a great tragedy prior to the start of the diary, which is mentioned a few times, e.g. (Feb 13 1800): "This is my Little Boy's Birthday and we are to have the Pooles here to tea and supper and rejoice a little on the occasion. We have reason to rejoice in particular for he was born after our great and sad calamity, the loss of four children within a fortnight, three boys and a girl. Margaret my eldest was the only one who survived out of five, she had the fever too, a malignant Scarlet Fever. After all this boy was sent to comfort us when we were quite forlorn and had no expectation of any such thing. My wife was forty seven and he was born the very same month when the others had been taken from me and on the very day when the first, Thomas, sickened."
So many things are very specific, or very much of the period, but then little bits are very expressive and eternal, like his descriptions of his little son William, being cross at breakfast, loud and noisy with his drum, his "merry feet" coming down the hall and this: "After breakfast my Little Boy tightened up in a greatcoat and handkerchief round his neck went off like a Hero to School."
On a clergyman who was also Mayor of Bridgwater: "Mr Jenkins is a clergyman. Vain, insolent and ostentatious but he has some good qualities. He makes a good Mayor but what business had he to serve the office."
On Mar 12 1803 he caught "something of the fashionable cold called Influenza."
Oct 1803, visiting North Devon, like it was another country again: "They have in this county a Funeral Sermon to every Corpse which I do not approve of much for it is bribing the Pulpit to give a good character of persons who may not deserve it. It is paying the Clergyman for suppressing the notice of the bad qualities of the deceased and speaking only of the good... Both the people buried at George Nympton recently were drankards, one was so when he fell into a pit and broke his neck, and often times he used to come home in this state and beat his wife and turn her out of doors. Now what could a Funeral Sermon say of such a man and yet he was whitewashed... The best way is to be silent."
And on the North Devon people: "how common the tendency to Madness is among the Devonshire Families... The Physiognomy is very peculiar; a square flat forehead a nose rising gradually from it to the point, rather sharp chin and the arch of the head not very regularly formed, the complexion light and the face white and not often with colour. They are a perfectly different race from the Somersetshire and I have no doubt are descended from different people."
(My Mum is from Somerset, my Dad from North Devon, so I laughed quite a lot at this. When my Mum first met Dad's Mum she couldn't understand half she said because of her North Devon dialect and accent - and they came from towns 60 miles apart. A whole different race, totally. XD)
(The Somerset people are "certainly very slow and unenergetic, very large and strong but lazy and motionless, very ignorant and yet very conceited." A Mrs Allen had "a set of Potatoe Headed Zomerzetshire servants.")
Rev. Wollen of Bridgwater, which was where lots of my ancestors were living: He "talked a good deal of his complaints and produced many boxes of Pills as good for one thing or other. He is an odd tempered man but a tolerable good Justice, a poor stick at CHurch and not a very accommodating Parish Priest."
Of his servant who had been committing bestiality, (after confiding this to a fellow minister who wanted him to send him before the magistrates): "Wretch as he was and Horrid as the Deed was I felt disinclined to hang him."
An old parishioner, talking to him of death: "My Poor Old Woman is gone, howsunderer she was a good Old Woman, I shant be long after. I say my Prayers and beg God to forgive all my sins. Sir, do you think I shall ever meet the Old Woman again?"
Shocked that one of his fellow priests made a prayer "of his own composition before the Sermon..." and that this seemed to be a growing trend. (!!)
July, notes the annual whortleberrying in the Quantocks (which continued to be a big deal into the early 20th C): "on this day the Parishioners see their friends and give them Whortleberry Pies so that they come to Church with black mouths... it keeps [the lower people] in Spirits and is a great comfort and Refreshment to them for their dayly labors."
Anyway, in short, it's great stuff if you have ancestors from the Quantocks or are interested in that sort of thing generally.
I followed that up with note-taking from another diary by another Somerset vicar who lived around the same time, although not so near the places I was interested in - John Skinner's Journal of a Somerset Rector 1803-1834. This was also interesting, but a much harder read as became increasingly mentally ill and depressed as it continued, often alienating those around him with his paranoia, and eventually committed suicide. He, too, hated Methodists, lived in his parish and visited his parisioners (and Shepton Mallet Gaol), but he and William Holland had very little in common beyond that. It's another very useful resource and interesting for local and micro-history, though.
*hamsterwoman won't mind me mentioning that!
[ETA: I started drafting this post out on 4th Jan, so you can see I'm keeping up with the speedy part.]
(Last time, in March 2023, I had caught up as far as early 2020, when I fell into a Star Wars Prequel hole and wrote ridiculous amounts of fic and read a whole bunch of SW novels, where I mostly liked the Legends ones and resented the new canon ones, but not always.)
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, and while I am not at all at
hamsterwoman's level of (what is it? frustration? love to hate? affectionate and deeply invested loathing? lol), these have proved to be fine but only sometimes for me - the second one, where it was more contained, really worked for me. This one didn't really. But I gave it a star and a smile in the margin in my Book Diary, which isn't bad, either! (I think therefore the disappointment is just because I hoped they would be so much more my thing than they've turned out to be, rather than me not liking them or anything. Just, easy to read, fine, I appreciate lots of the world-building, no great feelings, alas.) Anyway, next up I read The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells, the first in the Raksura books, and I loved it! I had to swiftly follow it up with The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths (presumably with b'day cash), oh, and The Edge of Worlds and since have read through the rest at a slow rate of waiting (im)patiently for birthdays and Christmases and continued to love the world-building and characters and the whole thing, and, although sometimes I get exhausted when she gets all fast-paced, that is merely a compliment to her skill and testament to my general lack of everything.
Murder on the Flying Scotsman, The Black Ship and Heirs of the Body by Carola Dunn, which at this date is now making me all nostalgic for lack of Daisy, Murder Magnet Supreme, and the long-suffering Alec in my life for AGES. Anyway, Daisy went on a train and there was murder, she went out for dinner in the suburbs and there was murder and, um, I forget the plot of the last one, but there was definitely murder.
(I must re-read them. I just need to pick up more of the first few, which at the time I got from the library and now the library does not have them, and I am less good at getting to the library anyway.) Anyway, these are fun and well done cosy detective stories set in the 1920s, which I enjoyed a lot, and were easy-going enough to help me back into reading when I was so unwell.
Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens, which was great fun (a children's book mash-up of boarding schools and golden age murder), although I have STILL not stumbled over any of the sequels in charity shops; a grave injustice.
I also read a few more Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire books, which generally enjoyed, and some much more than others, and occasionaly where they suddebly mid-20th C attitudes at me in the middle of the souffle of delight (inevitable, but also ALAS) but at this stage I can't remember them individually without going to look at the and read the blurb to remind me which was which, as they sort of merge in my head rapidly. Although, unlike Wodehouse, I can remember which ones I read by reading the blurb, so I can do that if people want to know.
Then, for family history reasons, I took notes from Paupers and Pigkillers: The Diary of William Holland 1799-1818. William Holland was the vicar of a tiny Quantock parish called Overstowey, close to where I grew up and where a lot of my ancestors come from. He was sometimes, inevitably, much as you would expect from an 18th/19th C Vicar, but his diary entries were fascinating and never dull. He was Welsh and took a long time to adapt to the "stupid, slow" Somerset people (worse in every way than Welsh common people). He had opinions about all his fellow vicars, and a local Non-Conformist bigwig (Thomas Poole) was his Nemesis ("Satan himself cannot be more false and hypocritical") and he gets very gleeful if he feels he is one up on the Nemesis. He also got to correspond to an Earl about face-science and was involved in some coincidences that you wouldn't have put in a novel because it would have been too unrealistic, but rl can get away with these things.
His diary was written in multiple notebooks over the period and for whatever reason, only around every other one has survived, so there are a lot of gaps, and we also do not know what made him start writing a diary, because the first one is among the lost. The first entry we do have, though, is him being very disapproving of the Coleridge party who'd arrived at Nether Stowey, invited by the Nemesis himself: "Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs Coleridge who looked so like a friskey girl or something worse that I was not surprised that a Democratic Libertine should choose her for a wife."
Before the diary began, he and his wife suffered a great tragedy prior to the start of the diary, which is mentioned a few times, e.g. (Feb 13 1800): "This is my Little Boy's Birthday and we are to have the Pooles here to tea and supper and rejoice a little on the occasion. We have reason to rejoice in particular for he was born after our great and sad calamity, the loss of four children within a fortnight, three boys and a girl. Margaret my eldest was the only one who survived out of five, she had the fever too, a malignant Scarlet Fever. After all this boy was sent to comfort us when we were quite forlorn and had no expectation of any such thing. My wife was forty seven and he was born the very same month when the others had been taken from me and on the very day when the first, Thomas, sickened."
So many things are very specific, or very much of the period, but then little bits are very expressive and eternal, like his descriptions of his little son William, being cross at breakfast, loud and noisy with his drum, his "merry feet" coming down the hall and this: "After breakfast my Little Boy tightened up in a greatcoat and handkerchief round his neck went off like a Hero to School."
On a clergyman who was also Mayor of Bridgwater: "Mr Jenkins is a clergyman. Vain, insolent and ostentatious but he has some good qualities. He makes a good Mayor but what business had he to serve the office."
On Mar 12 1803 he caught "something of the fashionable cold called Influenza."
Oct 1803, visiting North Devon, like it was another country again: "They have in this county a Funeral Sermon to every Corpse which I do not approve of much for it is bribing the Pulpit to give a good character of persons who may not deserve it. It is paying the Clergyman for suppressing the notice of the bad qualities of the deceased and speaking only of the good... Both the people buried at George Nympton recently were drankards, one was so when he fell into a pit and broke his neck, and often times he used to come home in this state and beat his wife and turn her out of doors. Now what could a Funeral Sermon say of such a man and yet he was whitewashed... The best way is to be silent."
And on the North Devon people: "how common the tendency to Madness is among the Devonshire Families... The Physiognomy is very peculiar; a square flat forehead a nose rising gradually from it to the point, rather sharp chin and the arch of the head not very regularly formed, the complexion light and the face white and not often with colour. They are a perfectly different race from the Somersetshire and I have no doubt are descended from different people."
(My Mum is from Somerset, my Dad from North Devon, so I laughed quite a lot at this. When my Mum first met Dad's Mum she couldn't understand half she said because of her North Devon dialect and accent - and they came from towns 60 miles apart. A whole different race, totally. XD)
(The Somerset people are "certainly very slow and unenergetic, very large and strong but lazy and motionless, very ignorant and yet very conceited." A Mrs Allen had "a set of Potatoe Headed Zomerzetshire servants.")
Rev. Wollen of Bridgwater, which was where lots of my ancestors were living: He "talked a good deal of his complaints and produced many boxes of Pills as good for one thing or other. He is an odd tempered man but a tolerable good Justice, a poor stick at CHurch and not a very accommodating Parish Priest."
Of his servant who had been committing bestiality, (after confiding this to a fellow minister who wanted him to send him before the magistrates): "Wretch as he was and Horrid as the Deed was I felt disinclined to hang him."
An old parishioner, talking to him of death: "My Poor Old Woman is gone, howsunderer she was a good Old Woman, I shant be long after. I say my Prayers and beg God to forgive all my sins. Sir, do you think I shall ever meet the Old Woman again?"
Shocked that one of his fellow priests made a prayer "of his own composition before the Sermon..." and that this seemed to be a growing trend. (!!)
July, notes the annual whortleberrying in the Quantocks (which continued to be a big deal into the early 20th C): "on this day the Parishioners see their friends and give them Whortleberry Pies so that they come to Church with black mouths... it keeps [the lower people] in Spirits and is a great comfort and Refreshment to them for their dayly labors."
Anyway, in short, it's great stuff if you have ancestors from the Quantocks or are interested in that sort of thing generally.
I followed that up with note-taking from another diary by another Somerset vicar who lived around the same time, although not so near the places I was interested in - John Skinner's Journal of a Somerset Rector 1803-1834. This was also interesting, but a much harder read as became increasingly mentally ill and depressed as it continued, often alienating those around him with his paranoia, and eventually committed suicide. He, too, hated Methodists, lived in his parish and visited his parisioners (and Shepton Mallet Gaol), but he and William Holland had very little in common beyond that. It's another very useful resource and interesting for local and micro-history, though.
*
hamsterwoman won't mind me mentioning that!
no subject
Date: 20 Jan 2024 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Jan 2024 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Jan 2024 09:04 pm (UTC)Scarlet fever was a major problem right up until the 1940s, when there were still separate fever hospitals where the patients I think mostly had either scarlet fever or diptheria. My mother was a fever nurse, which is how I know about it. Thankfully when vaccines were developed both diseases pretty much vanished and separate fever hospitals were no longer necessary.
no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2024 01:19 pm (UTC)Aw, that's cool!
And, yes, although it wasn't so much the vaccines as the invention of drugs that could actually handle them (vaccines as well), but those came in during the 1940s and were the biggest game changer in that respect, because you could treat a fever, rather than just nursing and waiting for the crisis. (Sulphanilomides?? first and then Penicillin, of course.)
no subject
Date: 20 Jan 2024 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2024 01:21 pm (UTC)Maybe exchange of pies would be a good tradition to revive for Pi Day.
Harder to organise over the internet though. XD
no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 20 Jan 2024 10:42 pm (UTC)I heard of him for the first time in the fall when a mostly off-DW friend was e-mailing me excerpts from his diaries in a kind of irregular newsletter fashion! I enjoyed them very much! I am delighted by your local connection. I assume you saw he was played on the radio by Ronald Pickup?
Monday October 28
A great bustle -
Wm Frost and Mr Ament carrying apples to the cart for cyder. They are taken down to Hewlett’s to be made through his hair cloths which is not the fashion of this county. Mr. Amen thinks it is impossible for the cyder to be good as it is not made after the fashion of the county. I tell him he is a blockhead and that he knows nothing of the matter. ‘Why Sir, I have made hundreds of hogsheads of cyder in my time.' ‘Silence you Ass.’”
no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2024 01:23 pm (UTC)It came up when I was looking through David Collings's radio credits on the Genome, and I snaffled a copy from IA, but I didn't really like the way they adapted it (with no offence to Ronald Pickup, who was great) and gave up on it quite quickly. Apparently I have strong feelings about William, lol!
Mr. Amen thinks it is impossible for the cyder to be good as it is not made after the fashion of the county. I tell him he is a blockhead and that he knows nothing of the matter. ‘Why Sir, I have made hundreds of hogsheads of cyder in my time.'
You don't mess with West Country people and their cider!
I am delighted by your local connection.
It's very local indeed for where I grew up, and where most of that side of the family tended to come from. One of his servants, Luke, was from Broomfield, and I had to go look up the wedding he mentions because one of my ancestors had a brother called Luke from Broomfield, who would have been the right age - it was not the same one, but the two Lukes were baptised in the same year and would have been playmates in a little village like that. He visits Stogursey regularly, where a whole bunch of my relatives (and indeed, my rl bff's relatives) were living, as well as Bridgwater, so it's quite fascinating.
no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 11:50 pm (UTC)Fair enough!
One of his servants, Luke, was from Broomfield, and I had to go look up the wedding he mentions because one of my ancestors had a brother called Luke from Broomfield, who would have been the right age - it was not the same one, but the two Lukes were baptised in the same year and would have been playmates in a little village like that.
I love that you have the information to find these connections out, as well as their existence in the first place.
no subject
Date: 23 Jan 2024 09:34 am (UTC)Yes! It was a village, so there was only one wedding on the date mentioned in the diary, so that made it easy.
no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2024 11:28 am (UTC)Handily, my local library has been good for the Murder Most Unladylike series.
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Date: 21 Jan 2024 01:27 pm (UTC)!!! I hope I do! I have most of them and my town's Charity shops are super-cheap, so that'd do me all right. But in the same way, I can't really justify the expense of ordering the missing ones online and I want to do an in-order re-read!
Handily, my local library has been good for the Murder Most Unladylike series.
Mine might actually have those, but I just have not been able to go in lately at all.
no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2024 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 21 Jan 2024 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 01:27 am (UTC)Indeed not :D
while I am not at all at [personal profile] hamsterwoman's level of (what is it? frustration? love to hate? affectionate and deeply invested loathing? lol), these have proved to be fine but only sometimes for me - the second one, where it was more contained, really worked for me. This one didn't really.
"Frustration" is probably the most correct, but those are all in the right ballpark, lol, depending on the book, I guess XD I do think Close and Common Orbit is the best book, being the most book-shaped, but I'm actually very fond of Record of a Spaceborn Few -- I think it is my favorite of the four, though objectively I don't think it's as good as the second one. It's not that I love it -- I don't love any of them, even though I think if Chambers focused on
things that cater to my interestsother elements in her writing, I could love a book she wrote, but I just found it neat what 'Record' was doing -- this mosaic storytelling dealing with things you don't often see in sci-fi, like parenting or eldercare or diaspora culture shock (or burial, though that was less interesting to me personally).And I should get back to the Raksura books at some point... I liked the first book, and some of the things I didn't like about it apparently get addressed in later books, but somehow I never continued...
no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 06:04 pm (UTC)I think I'm probably unfair to it, both because I read it when I was particularly unwell, but chiefly because it was doing all the things you mentioned, and I am particularly fond of a multi-POV approach, but I just found too many of the POVs just too similar at base and that made me stop buying it, unfortunately. They're easy-reading things with some wonderful world-building details and very good natured, and I would be happy to read the rest if I could stumble across them easily somewhere, but that's generally unlikely.
And I should get back to the Raksura books at some point... I liked the first book, and some of the things I didn't like about it apparently get addressed in later books, but somehow I never continued...
I did enjoy the rest more than the first, but I think that was only because it was a steep curve into the world-building as well as Moon-alone being of less interest than once we got to the rest of the Raksura, but idk, they're excellent and I enjoyed them a lot, but they seemed to be very much exactly what they were from start to finish, really. I suppose it depends what annoyed you!
no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 06:47 pm (UTC)I do hope more of these come across your path! (A Close and Common Orbit is actually good, I think, and the other ones are pleasant with neat worldbuilding elements, or at least have enough of that in-between the things that annoy me XD)
I did enjoy the rest more than the first, but I think that was only because it was a steep curve into the world-building as well as Moon-alone being of less interest
Nod, yes, I can see both of those helping with enjoyment -- book 1 also picked up considerably for me when Moon met Stone (but also, Stone was my favorite), and the worldbuilding curve was steep indeed!
The thing that annoyed me was the Fell being presented as just fundamentally evil. If that's what the Raksura believe, I'm totally OK with that, so long as the narrative itself does not subscribe to that view. I couldn't tell in book 1, but I think I've heard it turns out to not be that black and white by the end of the series?
no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 08:27 pm (UTC)I couldn't tell in book 1, but I think I've heard it turns out to not be that black and white by the end of the series?
Oh, yes, that definitely gets a bit more complicated as it goes on in various ways - that's related to one of the main ongoing plot arcs across the series.
no subject
Date: 22 Jan 2024 10:07 pm (UTC)oh, yes, it is! (I thought #4 was a return to more-like-#1, so it is one of my least favorites. But it still has some cute things.)
Oh, yes, that definitely gets a bit more complicated as it goes on in various ways - that's related to one of the main ongoing plot arcs across the series.
Good to have confirmation of that, thank you! :)
no subject
Date: 23 Jan 2024 07:45 pm (UTC)