Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I loved Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes. The heroine, Charlotte, has just arrived at boarding school in the 1960s… only to wake up the next morning at the same boarding school in 1918, in place of another girl. The two girls trade places back and forth, night by night, and it’s really interesting to see the way that they grapple with both the logistical difficulties of the situation (how do you keep track of your homework when you’re only there every other day?) and also the wider questions about identity that it raises. If everyone believes that you are someone - if they expect to see Claire and therefore see Claire even though in fact Claire has been replaced by Charlotte - do you become that person?

Not at all once, perhaps, but over time. Charlotte's memories of her own life start to seem strange and false to her because they're so contradicted by everything around her.

Definitely recommended if you’re fond of mid-twentieth century British children’s fantasy - perhaps just in general if you like children’s fantasy at all.

I felt less enthusiastic about Mary Stewart’s The Gabriel Hounds, mostly because I felt bad for Halide, a village girl who is trying to grasp her one chance to better her circumstances in life and ends up dying for it. I don’t think we’re meant to see the death as justified exactly, but it’s certainly not presented as tragic, and I just felt bad for her.

I also thought the plotting wasn't as good as in many other Stewart's: the authorial puppet strings started creaking when the bad guys kidnapped Christabel and brought her back to their desert lair. They'd have been much better off leaving her in Beirut where she couldn't find out much of anything.



What I’m Reading Now

I could have finished Nina Auerbach’s Communities of Women, but I decided to put it on pause while I read the three books discussed in the final chapters of the book: Henry James’ The Bostonians, George Gissing’s The Odd Women, and Muriel Sparks’ The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Therefore, I’ve also begun George Gissing The Odd Women, which so far is about a group of sisters who have been left with only meager means of support following their father’s death. So far they’ve been following the genteel employments (governess, ladies’ companion - the youngest is a shopgirl) and living in genteel poverty, but a meeting with a strong-minded old friend may put them on the track of more lucrative if less genteel employment.

I’m really curious to see where this book goes: so far it’s quite different than your run-of-the-mill Victorian novel.

What I Plan to Read Next

THREE long-awaited holds have come in for me! Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Charles Finch’s The Vanishing Man, and the twelfth book in the manga series Now Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular! Where should I even start?? The best problem to have.

Comments

[landofnowhere]

The Odd Women is great! I'll let you discover for yourself where it goes, although I will say that at some point it switches its focus from proto-feminist social commentary to a more standard Victorian novel plot. George Gissing also wrote New Grub Street, about the Victorian publishing industry, which I equally recommend.

I should read Charlotte Sometimes: your description reminds me a little bit of Elizabeth, Elizabeth by Eileen Dunlop, a (sadly out of print) gothic timeslip novel that I read as a kid and still love.

[osprey_archer]

I think there are a number of books that have a similar time-travel switcheroo thing going on: Susan Cooper's King of Shadows also does it, and there was another one that I was thinking of as I read Charlotte Sometimes, but sadly it's now slipped my mind.

Charlotte Sometimes is unique among the ones that I've read in its musings about the nature of identity, though.

[landofnowhere]

I should reread King of Shadows sometime! I really loved it when I was in middle school and haven't read since. Elizabeth, Elizabeth is interesting philosophically, but not quite in that way: it's a book about why people are fascinated by history, and about women's roles in the past and present.

I wrote a time-travel novella when I was 13 based on that type of premise (people go back in time and take over the bodies of people in the past). I mostly stopped writing fiction about a year after, but I'm still fairly proud of that one (even if it's just "good for a thirteen-year-old"). I've vaguely considered rewriting it, partly because the two "present-day" storylines are set in roughly 2000 and 2030 respectively, and I would do a much better job of writing a convincing 2030 now! (The 2030 I wrote then was pretty much indistinguishable from 2000.)

[sartorias]

Oh, I remember Charlotte, Sometimes! Penelope Farmer was a must-grab for me when young, each new book that came to the library.

[osprey_archer]

Oh! Do you remember any titles that you particularly liked? I've read the Aviary Hall trilogy, and I want to read some of her other books, but there are SO many that I don't want to just order them at random through InterLibrary Loan.

[sartorias]

I don't remember them anymore, sadly. Summer Birds was the first, and so seminal for me as a kid reader. The others zoomed over my head, or seemed sad, or didn't quite work, though I did like Charlotte Sometimes. But not nearly as much as Summer Birds. (Which was one of the few books I wrote fic for as a child--the bird boy flew away to discover a gang of abused kids and rescued them. They never looked back.)

[osprey_archer]

Clearly that's a much better plan! I hope the Powers That Be give the boy another chance to put it in action.