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thisbluespiritI checked and I last did one of these on the 11th of June. I got all weird about reading again in all sorts of different ways and didn't want to post about it. Anyway, a catching up Reading post!
Since I last wrote, I have read:
The Sybil in her Grave by Sarah Caudwell, which I enjoyed as much as the others, and now I only wish there was more, but there isn't. Then I managed to find two more Angela Thirkell books, Pomfret Towers, which was pretty much as delightful as the first one and Wild Strawberries, which was fine, but the heroine was a bit lacking compared to the others & it tipped towards the too-inconsequential, but OTOH I liked the heroine's love interest guy a lot and it was still fun. But not quite as much as the other two.
Then I read The Time of the Hunter's Moon by Victoria Holt (a Gothic tale involving two girls' boarding schools, a dodgy lord of the manor, and possibly a plot, but I forget) and The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart (which it would be unfair to describe as Enid Blyton for grown-ups because it's much better written and doesn't have all the hang-ups, but it involves someone going on holiday to an island and finding secret coves, hiding places and foiling villains kidnapping people, and what is that but classic Enid?)
The Victoria Holt was about a girl who leaves her Swiss boarding school to go and teach at another boarding school in Devon. The school rents their gothic abbey building from an equally gothic lord of the manor called Sir Jasper. Sir Jasper immediately starts plaguing our heroine, only, rather impressively, he actually has kind of no motivation for this, it turns out, other than possibly love at first sight, but mainly because this is a gothic novel. I only kept reading because of the boarding school bits but then it paid off because not only did Victoria Holt at least call it straight out rape when Sir Jasper tried to be rapey, but THEN they all wound up back in Switzerland and he had a Swiss mountain accident that reformed his character. (I'd say Elinor would be proud, but I think she'd probably agree with me that Victoria Holt might want to have given Sir Jasper an actual character.)
I enjoyed the Mary Stewart for about thirty pages until the hero recovered from his injury and then I spent the rest of it resenting him a lot. I had thought this book was the one where I picked it up, accidentally glanced at the ending and disliked the hero instantly, but then that bit didn't seem to be there, so I realised with dismay that it must have been a different book and she has a hero Type and that me reading any more of her was not going to end well. There was a snippet of another at the end of the book, and, yep, that hero was indeed the same type too. I'M SORRY. I did enjoy the wandering around the island at the start a lot, though, and I'm glad I finally managed to read one, even if they still aren't gothic historicals. (Look, my Granny had some Mary Stewarts when I was young and they had women in nighties looking alarmed on them, so how could they not be historical gothic romances? What is the point of the world? She would have done it so much better than Victoria Holt, too. Well, admittedly, that wouldn't be difficult, but still. /ridiculous teenage grudge-holding)
Poor Sir Jasper, though. OTT gothic and bland at the same time, how does an author even manage it? He should probably go drinking with Manfred from Otranto in some metafictional realm and cry a lot.
I then read The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, which was one of those books everyone was going on about years ago, so I ignored it (assuming it to be Literary and Depressing Fiction) and it is in fact NF and a family history memoir and one of the loveliest books I've ever read and even made summer feel better for a while.
Being on a NF kick, I read Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey, which was readable and good but very weird in some ways. It was about the fall of a Yorkshire aristocratic mining dynasty who were amazingly secretive in the 20th C and burnt all their personal documents. But it does mean that it's sort of constructing stuff around this hole and is almost a collection of different stories about different secrets held by different members of the family, which was not quite what I'd expected, and it means things just get left - but that's not its fault, I just took a while to realise what the format actually was.
I picked up The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol which was an Edwardian Regency-set historical adventure, which was fun, about a young man who doesn't want to offer for an heiress to inherit from his rich uncle and sets off on the road, where he keeps getting mistaken for his wicked cousin and becomes a blacksmith (and then every so often the hero would do something like smoke from his negro-shaped pipe and I'd remember I was in the early 20th C with a rough start.) I think early Heyer in particular owes something to his style - I think it's kind of where she's coming from with the first set, not in the sense of copying, but what she was effectively in conversation with - so I found that interesting. It could have been shorter, but it was entertaining and had really short chapters, so it wasn't hard going. The heiress turns out to be someone he thought was a maid, and the wicked cousin gets his due. (I think there was stuff I didn't like so much in the second part, but I can't remember exactly what it was now, or if it was the kind of thing that needs warnings, or just me being tired. It's all months ago and hazy!)
A friend lent my Hygge and Kisses by Clara Christensen which I note merely because it was probably the single blandest book I have ever read in my life, without having anything particular wrong with it. *awardest it the Blandest Book Medal*
Then I got sucked into reading Cromwell Our Chief of Men by Antonia Fraser, which was 700 pages long. I think it could have been shorter, but there's no denying that she wrote the big events really well. I haven't studied the Civil War period enough to be able to comment on how outdated it is (or not), but it seemed pretty fair, and it was interesting. And, eventually, after a couple of months or so, I finished it! I am stupid, because doing things like this just makes me iller, but I am also Accomplished, so... \o/
I'm now reading Black and British by David Olusoga, because apparently I'm still not sensible about reading long history books right now (it's very good and only 550 pages, right). And for family history note-taking purposes, I thought it was about time I got round to reading Antonia Fraser's The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth Century England, as I picked up a copy years ago. She mentioned a lot of interesting women in passing in the Cromwell bio, and I hoped for far more of such people here. I was not disappointed. As well as some useful things for background social history, it's like a compilation of female historical characters it would be really cool to nominate for Yuletide. Stealth educator nun heroine Mary Ward! Ladies literally defending their castles! And also Cromwell's really eccentric granddaughter, a novelty in her own times, because she looked like him (and Cromwell continued to be an object of fascination to people long after he'd gone).
Since I last wrote, I have read:
The Sybil in her Grave by Sarah Caudwell, which I enjoyed as much as the others, and now I only wish there was more, but there isn't. Then I managed to find two more Angela Thirkell books, Pomfret Towers, which was pretty much as delightful as the first one and Wild Strawberries, which was fine, but the heroine was a bit lacking compared to the others & it tipped towards the too-inconsequential, but OTOH I liked the heroine's love interest guy a lot and it was still fun. But not quite as much as the other two.
Then I read The Time of the Hunter's Moon by Victoria Holt (a Gothic tale involving two girls' boarding schools, a dodgy lord of the manor, and possibly a plot, but I forget) and The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart (which it would be unfair to describe as Enid Blyton for grown-ups because it's much better written and doesn't have all the hang-ups, but it involves someone going on holiday to an island and finding secret coves, hiding places and foiling villains kidnapping people, and what is that but classic Enid?)
The Victoria Holt was about a girl who leaves her Swiss boarding school to go and teach at another boarding school in Devon. The school rents their gothic abbey building from an equally gothic lord of the manor called Sir Jasper. Sir Jasper immediately starts plaguing our heroine, only, rather impressively, he actually has kind of no motivation for this, it turns out, other than possibly love at first sight, but mainly because this is a gothic novel. I only kept reading because of the boarding school bits but then it paid off because not only did Victoria Holt at least call it straight out rape when Sir Jasper tried to be rapey, but THEN they all wound up back in Switzerland and he had a Swiss mountain accident that reformed his character. (I'd say Elinor would be proud, but I think she'd probably agree with me that Victoria Holt might want to have given Sir Jasper an actual character.)
I enjoyed the Mary Stewart for about thirty pages until the hero recovered from his injury and then I spent the rest of it resenting him a lot. I had thought this book was the one where I picked it up, accidentally glanced at the ending and disliked the hero instantly, but then that bit didn't seem to be there, so I realised with dismay that it must have been a different book and she has a hero Type and that me reading any more of her was not going to end well. There was a snippet of another at the end of the book, and, yep, that hero was indeed the same type too. I'M SORRY. I did enjoy the wandering around the island at the start a lot, though, and I'm glad I finally managed to read one, even if they still aren't gothic historicals. (Look, my Granny had some Mary Stewarts when I was young and they had women in nighties looking alarmed on them, so how could they not be historical gothic romances? What is the point of the world? She would have done it so much better than Victoria Holt, too. Well, admittedly, that wouldn't be difficult, but still. /ridiculous teenage grudge-holding)
Poor Sir Jasper, though. OTT gothic and bland at the same time, how does an author even manage it? He should probably go drinking with Manfred from Otranto in some metafictional realm and cry a lot.
I then read The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal, which was one of those books everyone was going on about years ago, so I ignored it (assuming it to be Literary and Depressing Fiction) and it is in fact NF and a family history memoir and one of the loveliest books I've ever read and even made summer feel better for a while.
Being on a NF kick, I read Black Diamonds by Catherine Bailey, which was readable and good but very weird in some ways. It was about the fall of a Yorkshire aristocratic mining dynasty who were amazingly secretive in the 20th C and burnt all their personal documents. But it does mean that it's sort of constructing stuff around this hole and is almost a collection of different stories about different secrets held by different members of the family, which was not quite what I'd expected, and it means things just get left - but that's not its fault, I just took a while to realise what the format actually was.
I picked up The Broad Highway by Jeffrey Farnol which was an Edwardian Regency-set historical adventure, which was fun, about a young man who doesn't want to offer for an heiress to inherit from his rich uncle and sets off on the road, where he keeps getting mistaken for his wicked cousin and becomes a blacksmith (and then every so often the hero would do something like smoke from his negro-shaped pipe and I'd remember I was in the early 20th C with a rough start.) I think early Heyer in particular owes something to his style - I think it's kind of where she's coming from with the first set, not in the sense of copying, but what she was effectively in conversation with - so I found that interesting. It could have been shorter, but it was entertaining and had really short chapters, so it wasn't hard going. The heiress turns out to be someone he thought was a maid, and the wicked cousin gets his due. (I think there was stuff I didn't like so much in the second part, but I can't remember exactly what it was now, or if it was the kind of thing that needs warnings, or just me being tired. It's all months ago and hazy!)
A friend lent my Hygge and Kisses by Clara Christensen which I note merely because it was probably the single blandest book I have ever read in my life, without having anything particular wrong with it. *awardest it the Blandest Book Medal*
Then I got sucked into reading Cromwell Our Chief of Men by Antonia Fraser, which was 700 pages long. I think it could have been shorter, but there's no denying that she wrote the big events really well. I haven't studied the Civil War period enough to be able to comment on how outdated it is (or not), but it seemed pretty fair, and it was interesting. And, eventually, after a couple of months or so, I finished it! I am stupid, because doing things like this just makes me iller, but I am also Accomplished, so... \o/
I'm now reading Black and British by David Olusoga, because apparently I'm still not sensible about reading long history books right now (it's very good and only 550 pages, right). And for family history note-taking purposes, I thought it was about time I got round to reading Antonia Fraser's The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth Century England, as I picked up a copy years ago. She mentioned a lot of interesting women in passing in the Cromwell bio, and I hoped for far more of such people here. I was not disappointed. As well as some useful things for background social history, it's like a compilation of female historical characters it would be really cool to nominate for Yuletide. Stealth educator nun heroine Mary Ward! Ladies literally defending their castles! And also Cromwell's really eccentric granddaughter, a novelty in her own times, because she looked like him (and Cromwell continued to be an object of fascination to people long after he'd gone).