Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 17th, 2021 07:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Gerald Durrell’s Three Tickets to Adventure is a memoir about a collecting expedition in Guyana (then British Guyana), in which I learned, vis-a-vis a photo inset, that young Gerald Durrell was a looker. This is one of Durrell’s earliest books and perhaps less polished than his later work, but still charming. There’s a particularly delightful incident on shipboard, while Durrell is transporting his animal collection back to England, when a pipa toad’s eggs hatch and half a dozen sailors are so enthralled that they more or less act as the pipa toads’ honor guard for the rest of the voyage.
What I’m Reading Now
Onwards in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It turns out Ozias Midwinter IS the other Allan Armadale, because of course he is, and now the two Allan Armadales are STRANDED on the VERY SHIP where Ozias Midwinter’s father murdered the father of the other Allan Armadale, who remains entirely unaware of any murderous connection between them! He is therefore very confused as to why his pal Ozias Midwinter has just had a fainting fit, and determined that the only thing for it is to try to make for land on… a makeshift raft made from the mast???
I have a bad feeling about this plan. Hopefully Ozias Midwinter will revive sufficiently before Allan Armadale drowns as a result of his own recklessness?? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK to find out!
I’m also going full steam ahead in Sally Belfrage’s Living with War: A Belfast Year (U.K. title: The Crack: A Belfast Year, partly because this is another interlibrary loan with an absurdly short due date, but also because I knew so little about the Troubles before this book and I feel like I’m learning so much about daily life in Belfast during the Troubles. Less so about the political/religious/historical underpinnings of the conflict, but of course that’s not the point of the book: it’s about the lived experience of war, not the whys and wherefores underpinning it.
I’m making much slower progress in Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game, because it’s not really grabbing me. I keep reading Wein’s books in hopes that there will be another Code Name Verity, which of course is a heavy expectation to lay on any book, but it’s not just that they aren’t Code Name Verity; I’ve really struggled to get into many of her other full-length books, in fact I think all of them except her non-fiction book A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II. (I’ve also liked her short books, Firebird and White Eagles.) Possibly I should stop automatically putting her books on my MUST READ list?
What I Plan to Read Next
Can anyone recommend any books about Irish history, or novels set in Ireland that really lean into the setting? Now that I’ve got started with Living with War, I thought I might go on a bit - it seems like the perfect time with St. Patrick’s Day a month away.
It doesn’t need to be a laugh a minute but I’m looking for something more lighthearted than “And then we all died in the potato famine and/or the Troubles.” I’ll read novels steeped in historical tragedy once we stop living in a real time plague.
Gerald Durrell’s Three Tickets to Adventure is a memoir about a collecting expedition in Guyana (then British Guyana), in which I learned, vis-a-vis a photo inset, that young Gerald Durrell was a looker. This is one of Durrell’s earliest books and perhaps less polished than his later work, but still charming. There’s a particularly delightful incident on shipboard, while Durrell is transporting his animal collection back to England, when a pipa toad’s eggs hatch and half a dozen sailors are so enthralled that they more or less act as the pipa toads’ honor guard for the rest of the voyage.
What I’m Reading Now
Onwards in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale! It turns out Ozias Midwinter IS the other Allan Armadale, because of course he is, and now the two Allan Armadales are STRANDED on the VERY SHIP where Ozias Midwinter’s father murdered the father of the other Allan Armadale, who remains entirely unaware of any murderous connection between them! He is therefore very confused as to why his pal Ozias Midwinter has just had a fainting fit, and determined that the only thing for it is to try to make for land on… a makeshift raft made from the mast???
I have a bad feeling about this plan. Hopefully Ozias Midwinter will revive sufficiently before Allan Armadale drowns as a result of his own recklessness?? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK to find out!
I’m also going full steam ahead in Sally Belfrage’s Living with War: A Belfast Year (U.K. title: The Crack: A Belfast Year, partly because this is another interlibrary loan with an absurdly short due date, but also because I knew so little about the Troubles before this book and I feel like I’m learning so much about daily life in Belfast during the Troubles. Less so about the political/religious/historical underpinnings of the conflict, but of course that’s not the point of the book: it’s about the lived experience of war, not the whys and wherefores underpinning it.
I’m making much slower progress in Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game, because it’s not really grabbing me. I keep reading Wein’s books in hopes that there will be another Code Name Verity, which of course is a heavy expectation to lay on any book, but it’s not just that they aren’t Code Name Verity; I’ve really struggled to get into many of her other full-length books, in fact I think all of them except her non-fiction book A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II. (I’ve also liked her short books, Firebird and White Eagles.) Possibly I should stop automatically putting her books on my MUST READ list?
What I Plan to Read Next
Can anyone recommend any books about Irish history, or novels set in Ireland that really lean into the setting? Now that I’ve got started with Living with War, I thought I might go on a bit - it seems like the perfect time with St. Patrick’s Day a month away.
It doesn’t need to be a laugh a minute but I’m looking for something more lighthearted than “And then we all died in the potato famine and/or the Troubles.” I’ll read novels steeped in historical tragedy once we stop living in a real time plague.
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Date: 2021-02-17 01:19 pm (UTC)I probably ought to warn you that there is a genocide, but it's quite a small one.
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Date: 2021-02-17 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-17 02:24 pm (UTC)It's definitely not lighthearted, so this might be more of a "to keep in mind" than "read immediately" rec, but I cannot recommend Anna Burns' Milkman enough. (I wrote about it here.) I've also read Michelle Gallen's Big Girl, Small Town, which is not so much lighthearted as darkly funny. The audiobook was read by Nicola Coughlan of Derry Girls fame, if that's a selling point!
(Have you seen Derry Girls? Absolutely watch Derry Girls, if you haven't. That show IS a laugh a minute.)
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Date: 2021-02-17 05:00 pm (UTC)Haha, Milkman was definitely on my mental list of TOO DARK FOR NOW, but maybe someday.
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Date: 2021-02-17 08:27 pm (UTC)XD Hsve fun! (It's been too long since I've read it to remember the details other than when it gets fun, it gets really fun, and one character's activities in particular, but I don't know if you've got to them yet, since I feel you'd probably have mentioned them if you had. Even if they're not in fact called Allan Armadale (as far as anyone knows).
And it's been ages since I read them so they may or may not have dated well, but Joan Lingard wrote a lot of Northern Irish-set YA books, including a series set in Belfast during the 1980s (Kevin and Sadie series), a couple set in WWII. I remember her being good and not overly grim or anything, despite the setting, but in any case, even if I am wrong on any/all these fronts, they were definitely all pretty short!
I'm sure I read a few others, especially Northern Irish writers, but I can't remember at all right now, helpfully.
ETA: Wait, Catherine Sefton, I think? It was pinging at the back of my mind because she wrote YA mild ghost stories but was obv Irish and a lot of them were set in Ireland (N. Ireland, I think) and also because she turned out to be really someone called Martin Waddell and I was very disappointed. But the books were good! or I thought they were in the 1990s.
Then there's Pat O'Shea's The Hounds of the Morrigan, which was a children's fantasy novel set in Ireland and involving a lot of Irish mythology, and I adored it circa 10 years old. It did have some rather weird bits in the rl sections. It was very Irish, though, not just the mythology, because the rl setting was mystifyingly unfamiliar to me as a British child reading it.
(I apparently read a lot of books by Irish writers growing up and then stopped forever, which seems wrong. I got a Northern Irish friend instead, which was even better?)
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Date: 2021-02-18 01:30 am (UTC)The library has a number of picture books by Catherine Sefton/Martin Waddell! I remember Owl Babies getting a lot of play in the years of my youth - actually can't remember if I ever read it/had it read to me, but I definitely recognize the cover.
I have read The Hounds of the Morrigan! This was MANY years ago, so, like you with Armadale, I don't remember a lot of the details, but I really liked it until (SPOILERS just in case anyone is reading this) the ending, because it had the same sort of "and then the children forgot everything ending" as The Dark is Rising sequence, and I found that quite unsatisfying.
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Date: 2021-02-18 09:57 am (UTC)I have JUST today gotten to Lydia Gwilt, who I assume is the One Character, although I might of course be wrong.
You're not wrong! ♥
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Date: 2021-02-17 08:52 pm (UTC)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Lingard
The Kevin and Sadie Series (1970s/80s Belfast, which is where she grew up, so teenagers and the Troubles): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kevin_and_Sadie_series
I vaguely recognise some of her books on the list as being young readers, so you'll need to watch out for that, and not all of them are Irish-set, but the WWII Irish one, which I think might have the most appeal for you is The File on Fraulein Berg
(I'm sure she had another WWII one, because I don't think I ever found File until I was an adult, but I definitely read one by her, maybe a sequel, but nothing on the list that seems familiar is confirming that with Google.)
And I wasn't wrong about Martin Waddell/Catherine Sefton, either, although I suspect the Catherine Sefton ones are going to be hard to get - wikipedia only lists two and there were definitely more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Waddell
(Also I have just now learned that Martin Waddell aka Catherine Sefton whose books I read a lot growing up also wrote the script for Otley, which is a surprisingly still-fun and charming little 1960s spy comedy featuring James Maxwell and a random barometer. Artistic circles are small. But that does bode well for my positive memories of the books not being wrong.)
(Apologies for all the editing! I'm tired, but have book recs.)
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Date: 2021-02-18 01:35 am (UTC)Also, it's amazing how many roads seem to lead to James Maxwell. It's sort of like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but for mid-century British actors??
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Date: 2021-02-18 09:55 am (UTC)Also, it's amazing how many roads seem to lead to James Maxwell. It's sort of like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but for mid-century British actors??
Tbf, the British acting and artistic circles are tiny and you could do that kind of thing with a lot of people! He does seem particularly good for it, though! I can even tie him into my family history in 2-4 degrees personally via those make-up/hair artists cousins of my grandad's.
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Date: 2021-02-18 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-18 08:27 pm (UTC)Anyway, I also remembered a more recent good YA author - Siobhan Dowd's A Swift Pure Cry and Bog Child should also be good, although your best primer I think for NI re. Derry Girls is still the Kevin and Sadie series. But it probably isn't the kind of thing that would have made it across the ocean, really.
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Date: 2021-02-19 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-18 01:00 am (UTC)R. A. MacAvoy's The Grey Horse (1987) has late nineteenth-century Irish nationalism, horses and fairies with equal sweat and numinous, and a beautiful sense of place of Connemara. I never really got into anything else of the author's, but I love this book. It would have made a great film in the workaday otherworld style of John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish (1994).
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Date: 2021-02-18 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-19 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-19 06:08 pm (UTC)