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osprey_archer) wrote2025-05-28 08:49 am
osprey_archer) wrote2025-05-28 08:49 am
Wednesday Reading Meme
What I’ve Just Finished Reading
Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.
D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.
Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.
I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”
What I’m Reading Now
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.
What I Plan to Read Next
Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?
Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, in which Romney tracks down many of the books Jane Austen admired (often as ebooks, which I must admit takes much of the romance out of the rare book hunt) and discovers many lost gems of literary excellence. (And also Hannah More, whom she did not take to.) An engrossing read.
D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job. Like all of D. E. Stevenson’s novels, this is cozy like sitting curled up in an armchair by the fire with a cup of cocoa while a thunderstorm beats against the window in the night. It’s not that she’s writing in a world where bad things don’t happen, or even where bad things don’t happen to our heroes, but by the end of the book it will all turn out right.
Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States, edited by Mikail Iossel and Jeff Parker. An essay collection published not long after 9/11, although only a few of the essays actually touch on that event. Many of them include potshots at American political correctness (hard to embrace the concept if you come from the country where you could literally be sent to a gulag for “political incorrectness”), as well as lists of American books the authors read at a formative age.
I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t read this before Honeytrap, as the book might have been delayed indefinitely while I tried to work my way through the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, as well as some other authors I’ve never even heard of. With truth the author of this essay notes “the average Soviet person probably knew [American science fiction] better than the average American.”
What I’m Reading Now
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Sadly suspicious that none of these characters are ever going to make it to the lighthouse.
What I Plan to Read Next
Does my lightning zoom through Jane Austen’s Bookshelf mean that I will at last read an eighteenth century novel? MAYBE. The library boasts Fanny Burney’s Evelina, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Romance of the Forest, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. Any recommendations among those works?
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Are you looking exclusively at women authors and/or books discussed in Jane Austen's Bookshelf? If not, I recommend Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. (Especially as you've recently read Vanity Fair!)
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Evelina is incredibly charming and contains a devastating depiction of how social conventions endanger young women and make it difficult for them to describe or evade bad actors. The dialogue is sparkling. There are a couple of scenes of bizarrely mean humor that indicate 18th-century English empathy was ... limited. I still recommend it highly.
Belinda is a wreck because it has the wrong protagonist. After reading it, I learned that Edgworth had indeed planned the lead to be the character I found most interesting but was worried they might be too immoral. The actual lead, as you might expect, is incredibly bland. It has some historical interest in the positive depiction of a mixed-race marriage, which apparently was cut out of later editions; you will probably be unsurprised that, despite the intent, the depiction is horribly racist.
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The Radcliffe can be heavy going, as is the second half of the Lennox. Though the first half is kind of fun. Romance of the Forest is especially turgid in pacing and description, imo; Udolfo at least is (unintentionally) funny, it's so purple. If you want to understand what young teen Jane Austen was making fun of in a lot of her juvenilia, with drunken villains all over and heroines fainting constantly, give it a read.
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I did find it funny reading about 18th century criticisms of novels and comparing them to current online discourse about novels. The exact behaviors people object to have shifted but the firm belief that depiction equals endorsement has not.
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This is on my to read list!
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Eighteenth-century novels are lots of fun! I have read Evelina and The Romance of the Forest and can recommend both—the former is probably more Austen-like, the latter more full of fun OTT Gothic adventure.
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Burney and Radcliffe seem to be getting the most votes, so perhaps I will start with Evelina and move on to... well, I'll decide between the Radcliffes when the time comes.
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One thing the Soviet Union really nailed somehow was literacy. Everyone was extremely well read and everyone read a lot. My family probably more than average lol but it's something that comes up a lot in like Alexievich's Second-hand Time (a compiled oral history of the twilight years of the USSR), how much people were reading both classics and genre fiction.
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And so interesting that some American science fictions authors were bigger in the USSR than the US! I knew that there were some American rock stars who hit it big in the USSR but not the US, but I hadn't thought this might be true in other areas too.
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