Wednesday Reading Meme
Dec. 7th, 2022 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Naomi Mitchison’s first novel, The Conquered, in which Meromic the son of a Gaulish chieftain is captured and sold into slavery during Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. When Meromic is about to be killed for insubordination, the Roman centurion Titus Barrus saves his life, and after that, well, even when they go back to Gaul to help Caesar finish his mopping up operations:
“There’s half of me aching to get off, to be fighting on my own side, the side I ought to be on; and there’s the other half - oh God, Lerrys, I’ld give my life for him, I would truly; he’s all I’ve got, he’s wife and child and home and everything. I don’t care what he does to me - not really. There’s nothing I can be sure of except friendship, but that’s true, that’s a god; how can I throw it away?”
Strongly suspect that Rosemary Sutcliff read this book at some point. There are even dog metaphors! After Meromic runs away (to revenge himself upon a man who betrayed his family) and then comes back to Titus, his fellow slave Dith tells him scornfully, “when you [came back] you went jumping about and kissing his knees like a dog - oh, Meromic, don’t!”
For Meromic has started battening on Dith, as one does when someone says something that is perhaps not literally true, but figuratively too true for comfort.
But Meromic is much more conflicted about his loyalty than your average Sutcliff character, and in any case this is only one aspect of the novel. Like the other Mitchison novels I’ve read, this one is bursting at the seams, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach where Mitchison throws in all the things that she happens to be thinking about. This often means that her novels are messy, but it’s often a glorious mess, and in this case it all comes together into a coherent whole.
Here Mitchison is writing about conquest (the title may have given this away), the difficulty of forming a critique of imperialism when your position is really “Mad about being conquered because my people ought to be the ones going a-conquering,” the difficult lot of women in the ancient world, the way that personal and political loyalty intertwine and undermine each other (the various groups of Gauls can’t come together to effectively oppose Caesar because they can’t set aside old personal animosities), the power and limitations of friendship and human kindness, and also glimmers of magic here and there because why the hell not?
What I’m Reading Now
REALLY enjoying the Christmas Carol readalong. Dickens is having so much fun as he writes (“There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge storms at Marley’s ghost) and it’s just a nice pick-me-up to have a couple of pages of Christmas Carol to read in the morning. Scrooge has just met the Ghost of Christmas Past! Glad that the Muppet Christmas Carol didn't go along with the thing where the Ghost of Christmas Past fluctuated, so that it was "now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head..."
My interest in The Lightning Conductor, on the other hand, is flagging. The book has devolved into LONG sight-seeing sections, and it’s the rare author who can make unalloyed sight-seeing interesting to me.
What I Plan to Read Next
A few months ago I was CRUELLY STYMIED in my quest to read John McPhee’s The Ransom of Russian Art, which the library owns… but it's in the art museum library, which is closed except by appointment. And it’s impossible to make an appointment because no one answers emails, the phone number on the website is wrong, and the phone number on the art museum library door automatically hangs up after two rings.
WELL, it turns out that The Ransom of Russian Art is collected in The Second John McPhee Reader, which I CAN get my hot little hands on. So TAKE THAT, art museum library!
Naomi Mitchison’s first novel, The Conquered, in which Meromic the son of a Gaulish chieftain is captured and sold into slavery during Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. When Meromic is about to be killed for insubordination, the Roman centurion Titus Barrus saves his life, and after that, well, even when they go back to Gaul to help Caesar finish his mopping up operations:
“There’s half of me aching to get off, to be fighting on my own side, the side I ought to be on; and there’s the other half - oh God, Lerrys, I’ld give my life for him, I would truly; he’s all I’ve got, he’s wife and child and home and everything. I don’t care what he does to me - not really. There’s nothing I can be sure of except friendship, but that’s true, that’s a god; how can I throw it away?”
Strongly suspect that Rosemary Sutcliff read this book at some point. There are even dog metaphors! After Meromic runs away (to revenge himself upon a man who betrayed his family) and then comes back to Titus, his fellow slave Dith tells him scornfully, “when you [came back] you went jumping about and kissing his knees like a dog - oh, Meromic, don’t!”
For Meromic has started battening on Dith, as one does when someone says something that is perhaps not literally true, but figuratively too true for comfort.
But Meromic is much more conflicted about his loyalty than your average Sutcliff character, and in any case this is only one aspect of the novel. Like the other Mitchison novels I’ve read, this one is bursting at the seams, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach where Mitchison throws in all the things that she happens to be thinking about. This often means that her novels are messy, but it’s often a glorious mess, and in this case it all comes together into a coherent whole.
Here Mitchison is writing about conquest (the title may have given this away), the difficulty of forming a critique of imperialism when your position is really “Mad about being conquered because my people ought to be the ones going a-conquering,” the difficult lot of women in the ancient world, the way that personal and political loyalty intertwine and undermine each other (the various groups of Gauls can’t come together to effectively oppose Caesar because they can’t set aside old personal animosities), the power and limitations of friendship and human kindness, and also glimmers of magic here and there because why the hell not?
What I’m Reading Now
REALLY enjoying the Christmas Carol readalong. Dickens is having so much fun as he writes (“There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge storms at Marley’s ghost) and it’s just a nice pick-me-up to have a couple of pages of Christmas Carol to read in the morning. Scrooge has just met the Ghost of Christmas Past! Glad that the Muppet Christmas Carol didn't go along with the thing where the Ghost of Christmas Past fluctuated, so that it was "now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head..."
My interest in The Lightning Conductor, on the other hand, is flagging. The book has devolved into LONG sight-seeing sections, and it’s the rare author who can make unalloyed sight-seeing interesting to me.
What I Plan to Read Next
A few months ago I was CRUELLY STYMIED in my quest to read John McPhee’s The Ransom of Russian Art, which the library owns… but it's in the art museum library, which is closed except by appointment. And it’s impossible to make an appointment because no one answers emails, the phone number on the website is wrong, and the phone number on the art museum library door automatically hangs up after two rings.
WELL, it turns out that The Ransom of Russian Art is collected in The Second John McPhee Reader, which I CAN get my hot little hands on. So TAKE THAT, art museum library!
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Date: 2022-12-07 09:14 pm (UTC)To be fair, the muppet version of this would probably be less horrifying than it would in other, human-only movie adaptions...?
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Date: 2022-12-07 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-12-08 06:05 pm (UTC)GentlemanChauffeur go back to more brevity before too very long.The Christmas Carol segments, however, are a perfect length, and absolutely tremendous fun to read. Dickens is having a great time, and so am I!
I still haven't read any Mitchison, and really ought to (though there's one on my nightstand right now waiting for me); this one has just jumped high on the list, though. It sounds EXTREMELY relevant to my interests!
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Date: 2022-12-08 09:25 pm (UTC)employerlady-love!Yes, the Christmas Carol segments are the perfect length! I think "an excerpt of a certain length every day" even more than "epistolary novel where the letter might be fifty pages," although the epistolary model does mean that there is a pleasant suspense whether you'll get an update that day...
Is the one on your nightstand Travel Light? There's some thematic overlap with The Conquered (waves of conquest, a lowkey vibe of "war sucks actually"), although the fantastic elements are FAR more to the forefront in that one. And it's hard to beat the convenience of "already on your nightstand."
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Date: 2022-12-16 03:17 am (UTC)It's true, about the segments! I did really enjoy the real-time effect with Dracula, but I'm not sure it works quite as well for The Lightning Conductor where the letters are SO much longer and the timeline perhaps less deeply relevant to the story. But who knows, perhaps it may yet prove to be. I agree that for any novel without the epistolary or date-fixed conceit, though, I'm really enjoying the reasonable and consistent segment length.
It is indeed Travel Light! As of today I'm 72 pages into it (a certain horse race has just been successfully won) and enjoying it immensely. Every so often one reads a thing and is like, "this is a mode I aspire to write in, or at least to be able to write something that one could reasonably compare to this," like something clicking into an empty slot on a mental bookshelf, and the voice of Travel Light is proving to be one such for me, which is very fun. And I love Halla.
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Date: 2022-12-16 01:50 pm (UTC)Oh, I'm glad you're enjoying Travel Light so much! I must have found it specifically for the purpose of conveying it to you.
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Date: 2022-12-12 10:50 pm (UTC)I am really enjoying filling up my bookshelves with nice cloth-bound early 20th century hardcovers.
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Date: 2022-12-12 11:31 pm (UTC)They truly bound beautiful books in the early 20th century.