Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Despite my quibbles last week, I enjoyed Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome so much that I instantly went on to her earlier book Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World. Despite that perhaps rather bombastic subtitle, I enjoyed it even more.

I especially appreciated the way that the book unpacks the primary sources. Southon points out that all the extant sources were written decades or centuries after Agrippina’s death (so they’re not really primary sources at all - you wouldn’t call something written today a primary source about Watergate) and also often lays the different accounts side by side so you can see how they differ, and it’s really interesting to see how divergent the different histories often are - and also it feels very telling on the few occasions they all converge on a single story, like Agrippina’s assassination of Claudius.

(This is an interesting moment because Southon doesn’t really want Agrippina to have assassinated her uncle/husband Claudius, as it seems to contradict the picture she’s built up of Agrippina, Able Administrator, Not as Murdery as She’s Painted. However, the rare moment of agreement between all the sources forces her to say, okay, Agrippina probably did it.)

Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, however, remained a struggle all the way through. Maybe it really lost something in translation? It’s disappointing because I had really looked forward to this book, but such is life.

I also zoomed through volumes one to four of Fence, which is delightful, and you will be UNSURPRISED to learn that Ice Prince Seiji has stolen my heart. But it’s also frustrating, because the first four volumes are really just the beginning of the story, the set-up, and it’s not at all clear when the next graphic novel will come out!

There are two tie-in novels by Sarah Rees Brennan, which of course I will read, but I’m not sure if these are direct continuations of the story (as in, you read the first four graphic novels, then you read the two tie-in novels, then you read the next graphic novel whenever it comes out…) or are more along the lines of optional extras.

What I’m Reading Now

I found Nancy Farmer's House of the Scorpion a grim slog, and expected to have the same reaction to A Girl Named Disaster, but actually it’s great! Strong My Side of the Mountain “child surviving in the wilderness” vibes, except instead of a boy in the Catskills it’s about a girl on the border between Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Right now she’s sort of accidentally started observing a baboon troop and I’m eating it up with a spoon.

What I Plan to Read Next

Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm. A Girl Named Disaster has made me much more hopeful about this book!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

I'm currently reading A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and super enjoying it!! One of my favorite things is, as you point out, how she unpacks/evaluates/gives context for how many grains of salt to take a given source with, but also how even if a given story (or trend of stories, a la elite Roman women poisoning their husbands) isn't true-true it does say a lot about what people thought/feared/etc.

[osprey_archer]

I suspect that this book is going to ruin me for many other books about ancient Rome, whenever they straight up accept whatever Tacitus wrote. "Emma Southon knows better than to trust Tacitus!" I will shout. "Tacitus requires his own private salt mine!"

[asakiyume]

I clearly need to reread A Girl Named Disaster! I didn't remember that part.

[osprey_archer]

There's a lot going on in that book - it's definitely not My Side of the Mountain the whole way through. I did find that section very satisfying, though!

What part did stick in your mind?

[asakiyume]

The weird part where she ends up in a sort of Plimoth Plantation-style farm where everything's done old-fashioned style? (ETA: which she has to escape from, IIRC? And it's walled...) That, and just that her general home environment had been bad and that it was good that she escaped.

... that's it. I'm beginning to think that maybe I only dipped into it. Maybe it was a book that was given to one of my kids or that they brought home at some point.

[osprey_archer]

Maybe this has melded with another book in your head? There isn't really a Plimoth Plantation-style farm. She ends up on a research station for a while, but they're doing science to figure out how to combat tsetse flies, not doing things the old-fashioned way.

[asakiyume]

She's never briefly at a walled village where people dress in traditional garb and like, collect water in clay vessels? (That last part is me just making stuff up, but the walls and the clothes...)

[asakiyume]

... it would have been before the research station

[osprey_archer]

Her own village is pretty traditional, but it doesn't have a wall, and it's not traditional in a Plimoth Plantation way - it's traditional because they don't have the opportunity to change, not because they've seen change and rejected it.

[asakiyume]

Well I'll just have to reread it. In my (obviously incorrect) memory, after she runs away from her village, she goes to a place--maybe not immediately, but at some point, and before the research station (which I recall the existence of, but I don't think I read that part)--that seems really nice at first, but she ends up feeling trapped by it and its insistence on traditional ways ... or something.

... I wonder if that's something that's in The Ear The Eye and the Arm.... I know I didn't read that one, but maybe I dipped into it. *shrugs*

It's all strange. I will report back if/when I read A Girl Named Disaster.

[osprey_archer]

In A Girl Named Disaster, she doesn't see any people for nearly a year after she runs away from home. There's a very brief stopover in a village before she stumbles on the research station, but she's there for only a few hours before the inhabitants move her along.

I know that in The House of the Scorpion, the characters spend much of the book in a giant walled compound where the leader insists on following traditional ways (at least for some things; not for his drug cultivation business). Did you ever read that one? Maybe that's what you're thinking of?

[asakiyume]

The title doesn't ring a bell, but I guess I must have, or at least that portion! Because that sounds exactly right.

[troisoiseaux]

The weird part where she ends up in a sort of Plimoth Plantation-style farm where everything's done old-fashioned style? (ETA: which she has to escape from, IIRC? And it's walled...)

Maybe you're thinking of Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix? The protagonist thinks she's living in the 1840s but it turns out it's actually the 1990s and her family lives in a historical recreation village that's secretly a tourist attraction and even more secretly a science experiment.

[asakiyume]

No, I really think it must be Nancy Farmer. I was going to go with The House of the Scorpion, but now, checking, I see that one is set in Mexico, and what I'm remembering is definitely in Africa--I recall mention of Shona people.

It seems increasingly likely that I mashed a bunch of stories together.

(The title you describe sounds cool, though!)

[troisoiseaux]

I read it in late elementary or middle school and have been lowkey haunted by it ever since, although I'd forgotten about the "secretly a science experiment" part until I re-read the Wikipedia page just now! So I guess the part that really caught wee!me's attention was the Truman Show-style historical village, which checks out.

[osprey_archer]

I reread Running out of Time over and over when it first came out. I just loved the culture shock when Jessie got out into the modern world and had to try to understand things based on her 1840s knowledge and her mother's very brief crash course on Modern Stuff. Also the nefarious science plans! And her press conference on the steps of the state capital, where she dramatically fainted, delirious with fever from diphtheria, thus proving the truth of a story that the news people had been inclined to dismiss as a child's prank. Glorious. When Margaret Peterson Haddix is on, she is ON.

[troisoiseaux]

The part that has really vividly stuck in my mind all these years is when she escaped by (?) sneaking into a group of schoolkids who were on a field trip at the village-as-tourist-attraction, and she watched them watching the video feed of her dad working as the village blacksmith...

[lucymonster]

Ooh, I might have to check out those Southon books! 👀

[osprey_archer]

They might be right up your alley! I thought Agrippina was a stronger book, but Forum might be more tailored to your interests.

[kiraly]

Oh I love the Fence books! It's been a bit since I read the graphic novels but I think the novels pick up around where volume 4 leaves off. I will say they tend to focus on the interpersonal relationships between the team members more than the graphic novels do, and the fencing is maybe less of a focus (because there aren't any competitions in the books, which take place over the span of a few weeks).

I personally love the novels even more than the graphic novels, it is really nice to get a closer look inside the characters' heads.

[osprey_archer]

I bet it's also MUCH easier to make a fencing bout interesting to possibly non-fencing readers in graphic novel form, where you can actually show what's happening, hence less focus on fencing in the novels. I loved the bouts in the graphic novels but if there had been no pictures I would have spent a certain amount of time going "What... is happening...?"

SUPER looking forward to getting more of the characters' interiority, though! Maybe I will find Aiden more appealing when we get more of his thoughts instead of him just him being all "NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE YOU" to poor Jay.

[kiraly]

Oh yes, the novels radically changed my view of Aiden - like, is he still pretty terrible a lot of the time? Yes. But he does have some redeeming qualities when he's not actively trying to be terrible.

[thisbluespirit]

I found Nancy Farmer's House of the Scorpion a grim slog

Oh, yes, me too. I had to read it when I was a children's librarian and it merely made me determined never to read anything else by her. I'm glad to hear some of her other stuff is less grim!

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, it was clearly the wrong place to start! It's not like grim things don't happen in A Girl Named Disaster, but overall it's balanced out by fun things like baboon-watching. I'm now reading The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, and currently it's somewhere in between the two. We'll see where it ends up.