osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: robert louis stevenson

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sarah Vowell’s Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, an essay collection about life in America in the 1990s (with excursions into Vowell’s childhood and youth in the 1970s and 80s). I enjoyed it, but I think I’d only recommend it for a Sarah Vowell completist. It’s fine, but only fine, and there are just so many books in the world.

Also Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, a slim travelogue about a two-week walking trip that Stevenson took through the Cevennes. Some interesting information here about the Camisards, a Protestant sect that the Catholic church spent twenty years attempting to suppress in the early 1700s before flinging up their hands in despair.

What I’m Reading Now

Gerald Durrell’s The Picnic and Other Inimitable Stories. In the title story, Gerald’s brother Larry is coming back to England after an absence of ten years—

“Ten peaceful years,” corrected Leslie.

“They weren’t at all peaceful,” said Mother. “We had the war.”

“I meant peaceful without Larry,” explained Leslie.

The family attempts to have a pleasant seaside picnic. I laughed so hard I almost cried. Just what I needed after a rather stressful weekend.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have run into a minor roadblock with Project Read All the Franny Billingsley: I can’t remember if I’ve read Well Wished or not. I know that I borrowed it from the library, only to discover that the book had been bound so that after chapter 10 or so, it started over at chapter 1… but did I hunt out a properly bound copy and finish it?

Surely I must have done? Surely the lure of the Quest would have pulled me on until I found an unblemished copy and finished reading the book.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

littlerhymes and I have finished Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped! A reread for me, but the fact that I’d read the book before improved the book for me, as this time around I knew to wait patiently for the Alan Breck Stewart and David Balfour buddy act to begin. It’s some chapters before they meet, and then they’re torn apart for a few chapters more, but when the book finally reaches their flight through the heather the wait is all worth it.

My exploration of Mary Stolz’s oeuvre continues with A Dog on Barkham Street, in which young Edward yearns for a dog and also to defeat his neighbor Martin Hastings, a bully who picks on all the younger kids. Then Edward’s Uncle Josh, a hobo, appears with a beautiful collie dog in tow! One thing I admire about Stolz’s writing is her deftness at exploring mixed feelings, as here with Edward’s fascination with Josh’s wandering life and his growing realization that Josh is not at all reliable.

The bullying storyline ends on an equivocal note. I’m not convinced that it would help that much for Edward’s dad to have a man-to-man talk with Martin, but OTOH given that Martin’s parents clearly don’t give a fig about him (over the course of the story multiple adults attempt to convince the Hastings to do something about Martin, and the Hastings’ response is basically “Could not be bothered to try to correct our horrible son’s behavior, how dare you interfere”), maybe it actually would make a difference for an adult to take a kindly interest in him.

I also read James Herriot’s All Things Wise and Wonderful, a memoir a little bit about his time in the RAF (because of medical issues, he never flew against the enemy, so this is mostly nutty training hijinks) but mostly full of his wonderful veterinary stories and character sketches of the people and animals he meets. Wonderful. Every time I planned to read just one chapter I ended up reading at least five.

What I’m Reading Now

In The Yellow Poppy, the Duc of Trelan has fought a DUEL with his second in command, the comte de Brencourt. Brencourt spent weeks trying to provoke the duc into it, because he ran into the duchesse (whom the duc thinks is dead), told the duchesse that the duc is dead, and is hoping to make that lie a reality so that Brencourt can win her for himself. BRENCOURT, YOU FOOL.

Awkwardly, Brencourt merely wings the duc, and now has to stew in the fact that the duc is sure to learn from another source that his lost duchesse is in fact alive.

What I Plan to Read Next

The Bully of Barkham Street, the companion piece to A Dog on Barkham Street.

Snowflake Challenge #6: Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create.

How Do You Celebrate, a post-canon fic for Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Theo Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky (but very much in an awkward, uncertain, trying to establish a relationship but also terrible at relationships kind of way).

Excellent Theo voice - it’s told in his POV and really feels like a continuation of canon - and excellent Boris voice, too. Theo and Boris goes out to eat, and the waitress mistakes them for a couple, to Theo’s horror. Afterward Boris tells him, “I’ll go back tomorrow, yes? I’ll bring a picture of you, say, remember him? Not dating me. Very heterosexual, this man. Real lady-fucker.”

Hour of Need, Brideshead Revisited, past Charles Ryder/Sebastian Flyte. At the age of 90, Charles remembers Sebastian, and grieves Sebastian’s long-ago death. (The summary is a quote from the Iliad: "He has fallen far from home, and in his hour of need my hand was not there to help him.”)

I don’t usually read tragic fanfic - generally I get my tragedy fix from published works, like Brideshead Revisited itself - but this one is really well done, understated and cathartically tragic about things long past and long beyond repair.

Ending on a lighter note! come down and kiss me fairly is a Kidnapped! fic, Alan Breck Stuart/David Balfour, “Five times Alan kissed Davie.” Excellent Davie voice, with some lovely moments of sly humor.

This week we’re having a rare edition of Books I’ve Abandoned, because I just can’t with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona anymore. No one wants to read a hundred pages of Davie Balfour traipsing around Edinburgh talking to lawyers, Stevenson! No one!!!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Joan Weigall Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock because I was intrigued by stills from the 1975 movie and the more recent miniseries, and now that I’ve read it, I’m fascinated to know how anyone ever managed to make the darn thing into a movie. It’s so diffuse and purposefully unsatisfying! Three boarding school girls (plus one of the teachers) disappear at Hanging Rock; only one is ever seen again, and she remembers nothing, so there isn’t enough information to even guess what might have happened.

There’s also an ancillary - murder? Suicide? At any rate, death - near the end of the book, although in that case there is at least a strong implication that ( Spoilers )

Jim Murphy’s The Great Fire is a Newbery Honor book about, wait for it, the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871. A fast, informative read. I was particularly interested to learn about nineteenth century attitudes toward fires-as-entertainment - as good as a night at the theater, and cheaper, too! - and cutting edge fire-fighting techniques in 1871.

There were six holds on Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars, so I powered through to get it back before the due date. It’s renewed my long-standing intention to read more of Virginia Woolf’s work, although, alas, this year I’ve also renewed my long-standing intentions to read E. M. Forster’s Maurice, the rest of James Baldwin’s novels, and the complete works of Mary Renault, so it may be some time before I make any headway on Woolf.

I also read Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo (translated from Japanese by Allison Markin Powell), which I enjoyed despite a VERY misleading cover featuring a girl floating in a convenience store. Reader, there are no floating girls OR convenience stores in this book. Instead it’s a quiet, meditative story about a woman of almost forty who runs into her aging high school Japanese teacher by accident at a bar and the friendship that grows between them and slowly develops into a romance.

I was a little doubtful about the teacher/student aspect of this story, but actually it didn’t end up bothering me at all. The fact that they have this previous acquaintance is the reason they originally speak to each other, but the relationship that develops is very much something new; Tsukiko wasn’t one of the teacher’s favorite students back in high school or anything like that.

AND FINALLY (it’s been a surprisingly big week for reading), I finished Walter Dean Myers’ Scorpions, which is a little bit like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion, and not in a fun way. Jamal’s older brother Randy is in prison for shooting a storeowner with his gang, the Scorpions; Randy’s number two in the gang is trying to get Jamal to take over.

I expected this to end with more corpses than it did, but even though it was less death-y than I expected, the book is still a bummer.

What I’m Reading Now

On the very first page of Fillets of Plaice, Gerald Durrell casually writes, “The cicadas were zithering in the olive trees.” Wouldn’t you die to come up with a description as perfect as cicadas zithering?

What I Plan to Read Next

E. M. Forster’s Maurice! This has been a good year for knocking off books I’ve long meant to read.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Years ago someone recommended Lucy Sussex’s The Scarlet Rider to me as a read-alike to A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a juxtaposition almost guaranteed to make The Scarlet Rider disappointing. Like Possession, it’s a book about a modern-day (when the book was written, nearly twenty-five years ago) person investigating a 19th century literary mystery; unlike Possession (rather startling, that Possession is the one entitled… possession), The Scarlet Rider involves the heroine being possessed by the author of the novel she is researching, which means that helpful dreams and other spirit leadings take place of a lot of the sweet, sweet archive action I was craving. We still get a little archival work! Just not as much as I hoped.

( Spoilers )

I also read Toni Morrison’s Sula, which may be the ur-book for the plotline “book about TRAGIC BREAKUP of female best friendship which is remedied ONLY AFTER DEATH (or occasionally right before death)”? I make this assertion utterly without evidence, it’s simply the earliest example that I’ve read and famous enough as a piece of literary fiction that I could totally see other authors cribbing from its structure like that.

Because it’s Morrison, she writes it beautifully, but man, I just don’t get why this seems to be the literary fiction ur-plot for books about female friendship. But I guess really that makes sense; I feel like there’s a certain kind of literary fiction that works by basically being genre fiction but taking out the bit that creates the catharsis in genre. A romance where the lovers break up, a mystery that is never solved, a fantasy novel where the heroes can’t overcome the evil that oppresses them, etc.

I say this without judgment - clearly some people find that very lack of catharsis cathartic in itself! Indeed, there are novels like this that I myself enjoy! - but it’s frustrating in the context of female best friends books because there really is no genre equivalent, unless The Babysitters Club is a genre (or more generally children’s friendship books). And I LOVE children’s friendship books! But sometimes! I would like to read about adult friendships doing something other than crashing and burning, too!

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started reading Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion, which is off to a rousingly whumpy start. Our hero, six-year-old Matt, a clone in a world where clones are viewed as lower than animals, is being housed like a hamster in a room with a deep floor of sawdust. He keeps bits of his food in hopes of attracting bugs to serve as entertainment/playmates, as he is otherwise totally isolated without even any toys.

And I go ever onward in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona. We’ve FINALLY reconnected with Alan Breck Stewart… right after Davie Balfour went out to see Catriona’s, whose father is involved in a plot to trap Alan Breck Stewart, which Davie KNOWS about, and yet he went to see her anyway, because he is eighteen years old and in love and oh my God, Stevenson, talk about idiot plotting. But at least we’ve finally gotten away from the lawyers??

What I Plan to Read Next

I should be getting Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief any day now. ANY DAY NOW.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I had osmosed that John Knowles’ A Separate Peace is a slashy dark academia boarding school story, and I am happy to report that for once osmosis was ABSOLUTELY CORRECT: this is exactly what the book is, and it does it very well, so if that is the sort of thing you like you will like this book.

It’s certainly the sort of thing I like, so I gobbled it up like candy. The scene where Phineas cajoles Gene (our narrator, who feels toward Phineas a jealous love-hate attraction) into bicycling out to the beach with him, and Phineas buys Gene a hot dog and tells Gene he’s his best pal (Gene is appalled: in the shark tank atmosphere of Devon, this counts as goopy sentiment) and they sleep on the sand under the stars? Beautiful. A++. No wonder Gene feels the need to ward off his own goopy sentiments toward Phineas by manufacturing an intense one-sided rivalry that ends in tragedy.

As an added bonus, the book has an extremely vivid sense of time (World War II America) and place (a New Hampshire boarding school, heavily based on the author’s alma mater, Phillips Exeter). The winter scenes in particular are so vivid that I was surprised to raise my eyes from the book and see golden leaves on the trees, instead of boughs weighted with snow.

I found George MacDonald’s Phantastes less intrinsically delightful (although it was one of C. S. Lewis’s favorite novels ever, so obviously this varies by reader), but I’m glad to have read it, if only because the approach is so different from modern fantasy. MacDonald clearly doesn’t give a hoot about internal consistency, or having any kind of underlying rules to his magic; Phantastes hangs together entirely by dream or fairy-tale logic.

What I’m Reading Now

Lucy Sussex’s The Scarlet Rider has been on my TBR for four years, ever since someone mentioned it in a post about A. S. Byatt’s Possession as another book about literary research. As this has become The Year of Reading Books that I Have Long Meant to Read, I’ve been reading it; it’s a somewhat baggy book, trying to do a lot of things at once: literary research, including excerpts from a supposed 19th century novel plus various other primary source materials our heroine uncovers! Australian history! Our heroine’s complicated family history and interpersonal drama with her boyfriend and flatmate! Possibly a new love interest?? It’s interesting reading, but I’m not sure it’s all going to come together at the end.

Continuing on in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona. David Balfour has spent a remarkable amount of time visiting lawyers and a little bit of time chatting with Catriona (clearly destined to be his ladylove) and no time at all having adventures and/or hanging out with Alan Breck Stewart. Stevenson, no one is reading your action-adventure-romance for the interminable lawyer action!

I’ve also begun Toni Morrison’s Sula, which is a portrait of two girls’ best friendship (poised to go wrong as they grow into women, according to the back cover copy, but I haven’t gotten to that part yet), but even more so a portrait of the families that shaped both of the girls and the Black community in the Ohio hills to which they belong. Enjoying it so far - the language is beautiful - and it’s not as devastating as The Bluest Eye, yet, although I expect it will get there by and by.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve had Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion on my list for AGES and when I read it I will have knocked off the last of the Newbery Honor books from the 2000s, so I’ve decided to bite the bullet and get ‘er done.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

After having the book out of the library for literal months (I may have actually checked it out before lockdown), I have AT LONG LAST finished Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope against Hope. It focuses mainly on the four years between her husband Osip Mandelstam’s first arrest in 1934 and his second (and final) arrest in 1938, a grace period which she frequently refers to as “a miracle,” although it’s also clear that the hopes raised and repeatedly dashed during this reprieve were in effect a part of the state persecution designed to grind them down.

When I used to read about the French Revolution as a child, I often wondered whether it was possible to survive during a reign of terror. I now know beyond doubt that it is impossible. Anybody who breathes the air of terror is doomed, even if nominally he manages to save his life. Everybody is a victim - not only those who die, but also all the killers, ideologists, accomplices and sycophants who close their eyes or wash their hands - even if they are secretly consumed with remorse at night. Every section of the population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none has so far recovered, or become fit again for normal civic life. It is an illness that is passed on to the next generation, so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers and perhaps only the grandchildren begin to get over it - or at least it takes a different form with them.

Otherwise most of my reading this week has been proofreading for Her Magical Pet, which should be coming out… tomorrow! I’ll be sure to post a link, it’s got loads of amazing stories. (And also a link to the companion volume, His Magical Pet, but I didn’t proofread that one so the only story I have read in it is my own.)

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on Mary Renault’s The Charioteer I’M SO SORRY I meant to read this faster, I know at least five of you want this review. Life has gotten away from me this week. ( Some spoilery thoughts )

I’ve also begun reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona! So far, Davie Balfour has spent the day wandering Edinburgh running errands. No sign of Alan Breck Stewart yet, but we have met the titular Catriona, full marks to Stevenson for promptitude on that one.

...Also I’ve abandoned the possibility of actually including an excerpt from my leads’ Kidnapped fic in my book, because there is no way that I can do the Lowland Scots dialogue. Readers will have to rest content with an enthusiastic discussion about the plot point where David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart get tossed in a dungeon and the guards beat Alan for cheeking them (you know he would) and David cradles Alan’s battered head in his lap.

What I Plan to Read Next

Should I wait for the library to get Megan Whalen Turner’s Return of the Thief, or should I bow to the fact that I will inevitably want a copy and just buy it now?

What I've Just Finished Reading

I have completed the first challenge in my 2018 Reading Challenge with The Black Arrow! I'm posting this so late because I decided I wanted to steamroll through the last few chapters to get it done for this week's Wednesday Reading. Stevenson is a real hit-or-miss author for me and this one was mostly a miss, although I did enjoy John Matcham, the girl in boy's clothes (apparently this plotline never gets old for me), and her saucy best friend Alicia.

What I'm Reading Now

A Skinful of Shadows got set aside in favor of The Black Arrow, so I remain exactly where I was last week, lackaday.

What I Plan to Read Next

I went to a library for a job interview today (which went well! I think! It will be at least two weeks before I know) and it seemed like it would be good luck to check out a book while I was there... So I got Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity and the Buried Treasure, on the grounds that I have long meant vaguely to check out these books, which are about... um, I think Aunt Dimity is a ghost, and she helps her niece solve mysteries?

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: robert louis stevenson

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Snowflake Challenge #6

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June 2025

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