Wednesday Reading Meme
Aug. 21st, 2019 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Many books! I’ve reached the part in Honeytrap where I need to write Investigation and Menace and an Evil Kidnapping Congressman getting hit on the head with a frying pan, much of which will hopefully be cathartic but none of which is really my forte, so I took a couple days break to catch up on my tottering pile of library books.
First, Susanna Kearsley’s The Shadowy Horses, which was all right, but not so much that I’m planning to check out other Kearsley books. I thought the ending, in particular, was quite abrupt: suddenly evil plots!
Second, Constance Reid’s Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory, which as the title suggests is a memoir about two women working in a bomber factory in World War II - I’m a sucker for stories about women’s work in World War II and this one is particularly fun because it was written contemporaneously (published in 1944) in that breezy, wise-cracking forties style that’s so much fun. And! It’s got illustrations, courtesy of Reid’s buddy in bomber factory work, Clara Marie Allen, who taught art at the high school where Reid taught English. (That’s why they only spend the summer at the bomber factory.) (I picked up this book becausetroisoiseaux recommended it - here’s the review that won me over.)
Third, Mario Giordano’s Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna. I was on the fence about continuing the series after the first book, but now that I’ve read this second one - in which Auntie Poldi acquires a detective gang, Padre Paolo and Signora Cocuzzo (a.k.a. the sad signora, who runs a little cafe and never smiles) and her nephew, the narrator, bows to the inevitable and agrees to be her Watson, I intend to continue. A detective series is all about the recurring cast, after all!
Naturally, the third book is not out yet, so this decision is practically meaningless at this moment. But eventually it will bring me more reading material.
And finally! I am one novel short of finishing my quest to read all of Shirley Jackson’s novels, having completed The Bird’s Nest, her 1954 novel about a young woman with multiple personality disorder (which I believe has been renamed, but it’s probably best to keep in mind that the book was published 70 years ago and is presumably working off the understanding of multiple personality disorder current at that time).
Is it psychologically accurate? Hell if I know. Is it a pretty darn Shirley Jackson book? Yes, very much so. Clearly Jackson heard about multiple personality disorder somewhere and realized that this meant she could create four different characters so enmeshed that they’re actually the same person and went to the races with it.
What I’m Reading Now
Tamara Allen’s The Road to Silver Plume, which is the first of an m/m series. There’s an investigation plot: the main characters are a Treasury employee and his criminal-going-legit-maybe partner who are investigating counterfeits in 1890s America, SIDENOTE, I have long yearned to read a book in which 19th century counterfeiting plays a large role, so glad someone is finally taking it on. But the main emotional weight of the story lies with the romance, and I’m curious to see how that works over multiple books, because it seems pretty clearly that it is one romance in multiple books and not a series of connected romance books with overlapping cast but different protags (which seems to be the main format for romance series).
What I Plan to Read Next
Marie Brennan has a new novel out! Or coming out soon, I’m not sure which. It’s a spinoff of the Lady Trent series called Turning Darkness into Light and… actually I looked no further than the fact that it was a new Marie Brennan novel with dragons on the cover. Bring it to me, library!
Many books! I’ve reached the part in Honeytrap where I need to write Investigation and Menace and an Evil Kidnapping Congressman getting hit on the head with a frying pan, much of which will hopefully be cathartic but none of which is really my forte, so I took a couple days break to catch up on my tottering pile of library books.
First, Susanna Kearsley’s The Shadowy Horses, which was all right, but not so much that I’m planning to check out other Kearsley books. I thought the ending, in particular, was quite abrupt: suddenly evil plots!
Second, Constance Reid’s Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory, which as the title suggests is a memoir about two women working in a bomber factory in World War II - I’m a sucker for stories about women’s work in World War II and this one is particularly fun because it was written contemporaneously (published in 1944) in that breezy, wise-cracking forties style that’s so much fun. And! It’s got illustrations, courtesy of Reid’s buddy in bomber factory work, Clara Marie Allen, who taught art at the high school where Reid taught English. (That’s why they only spend the summer at the bomber factory.) (I picked up this book because
troisoiseaux recommended it - here’s the review that won me over.)Third, Mario Giordano’s Auntie Poldi and the Vineyards of Etna. I was on the fence about continuing the series after the first book, but now that I’ve read this second one - in which Auntie Poldi acquires a detective gang, Padre Paolo and Signora Cocuzzo (a.k.a. the sad signora, who runs a little cafe and never smiles) and her nephew, the narrator, bows to the inevitable and agrees to be her Watson, I intend to continue. A detective series is all about the recurring cast, after all!
Naturally, the third book is not out yet, so this decision is practically meaningless at this moment. But eventually it will bring me more reading material.
And finally! I am one novel short of finishing my quest to read all of Shirley Jackson’s novels, having completed The Bird’s Nest, her 1954 novel about a young woman with multiple personality disorder (which I believe has been renamed, but it’s probably best to keep in mind that the book was published 70 years ago and is presumably working off the understanding of multiple personality disorder current at that time).
Is it psychologically accurate? Hell if I know. Is it a pretty darn Shirley Jackson book? Yes, very much so. Clearly Jackson heard about multiple personality disorder somewhere and realized that this meant she could create four different characters so enmeshed that they’re actually the same person and went to the races with it.
What I’m Reading Now
Tamara Allen’s The Road to Silver Plume, which is the first of an m/m series. There’s an investigation plot: the main characters are a Treasury employee and his criminal-going-legit-maybe partner who are investigating counterfeits in 1890s America, SIDENOTE, I have long yearned to read a book in which 19th century counterfeiting plays a large role, so glad someone is finally taking it on. But the main emotional weight of the story lies with the romance, and I’m curious to see how that works over multiple books, because it seems pretty clearly that it is one romance in multiple books and not a series of connected romance books with overlapping cast but different protags (which seems to be the main format for romance series).
What I Plan to Read Next
Marie Brennan has a new novel out! Or coming out soon, I’m not sure which. It’s a spinoff of the Lady Trent series called Turning Darkness into Light and… actually I looked no further than the fact that it was a new Marie Brennan novel with dragons on the cover. Bring it to me, library!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-23 01:30 am (UTC)It was also striking to me how much the doctor liked Beth at the beginning (it really feels like he's got a bit of a crush on her) and how quickly he got tired of her once Bess started throwing her weight around and it became clear just how ineffective Beth was - intent on pleasing but totally unable to try any other strategy if she meets any kind of opposition.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-23 01:38 am (UTC)My favourite personalities scene is the one with the bath. It's so absurd, but also so domestic and homey but chilling. Pure Jackson. Or the fight scene ("Suddenly it was ridiculous to be madly clinging to Elizabeth's arm," since Elizabeth is no more than a walking headache).
The doc and Beth are like RIGHT out of pseudo-Freudian writeups of psychoanalysts and young girls, it's fucking hilarious. I love Betsy calling him Dr Wrong and tricking him, and how he and Morgen come to depend on her (I do not have a bad girl thing). I love the little glints of Betsy we get in Morgen/Victoria at the end. And how she's not sane, exactly, but she's fine. I was much more convinced in her recovery and ability to go on than Natalie's.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 01:40 am (UTC)Let's be real: within months/weeks/days of the end of Hangsaman, Natalie probably goes into a nervous collapse. She's just lost her one friend in all the world who AT BEST abandoned her in the middle of a forest, AT WORST was plotting against her all along, and (possibly even worse than that?) might have been a hallucination.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-24 02:10 am (UTC)Let's be real: within months/weeks/days of the end of Hangsaman, Natalie probably goes into a nervous collapse. She's just lost her one friend in all the world who AT BEST abandoned her in the middle of a forest, AT WORST was plotting against her all along, and (possibly even worse than that?) might have been a hallucination.
YEAH, plus she still has to go back to that awful college and her screwy family. I read an analysis in I think the recent bio? that said Jackson was following an old pattern, maybe out of Frazier -- the hero has to go down to the underworld, be severely tested, and then goes through a rebirth ritual which leaves them with a boon or new strength. Aeneas is a pretty classic (heh) example, I think. In Natalie's case, it's also tied to entering society as a mature adult ("she was alone, and grown-up, and powerful"): her paranoid, alienated adolescent self essentially dies, and she is welcomed back into society by the guardian figures of the older couple in the car, who are literally like the reverse of Charon, ferrying her back to the world.
Buuut, of course that clashes completely with the highly realistic and penetrating psychological and social realism of the rest of the book. Jackson is always at her terrifying best mixing up natural and supernatural, the mundane and otherworldly, but having Natalie's triumph be so unambiguous is not that characteristic. (All the other "victories" of heroines at the ends of her novels -- even the one in the Bird's Nest -- seem much more double-sided and dangerous.)
I will say that one story Jackson wrote with the same structure, of the nightmare journey down and a ritual rebirth back up, is ABSOLUTELY convincing and freaky -- "The Tooth," in The Lottery, about a housewife who goes into town to get a tooth pulled and winds up losing her entire identity instead. It's done step by step and is absolutely convincing and terrifying.