Reading Wedne– Thursday
Jan. 8th, 2015 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhI've been very sick yesterday and today, which is my justification for posting this so late, and not just because I was lazy and didn't feel like it. I missed a few weeks of this, which normally would mean I'd need to write up an inordinate amount of books. But luckily I was mostly reading Yuletide fic in that time, so I've only got a few. Also I need to get around to writing up my totals for 2014. Tomorrow, maybe? Someday!
What did you just finish?
Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. A novel set in pre-Revolution Boston, about Stewart Jameson (a Scottish painter who has fled to the New World in an attempt avoid his debts and old enemies) and Fanny Easton (the daughter of one of the richest men in Boston, who due to having an illegitimate child and making some bad choices ended up disowned, living on the streets, and then in a workhouse; currently disguising herself as a boy to become Jameson's apprentice). They're eventually joined by Jameson's best friend Dr. Ignatius Alexander (a black man who, despite being a university-trained professor and renowned scholar, is currently a runaway slave). Together theyfight crime solve a murder mystery! And also paint portraits, fall in love and have lots of sex (sadly, not all three of them)(though Jameson is explicitly bisexual and there seemed to be some subtext between him and Alexander?)(though maybe I was reading too much into it), and fight slavery.
The entire novel is told in epistolary style, consisting mostly of Fanny's letters to one of her childhood friends and Jameson's diary, along with a few other sources (newspaper articles and legal announcements mostly, some of which are actual historical documents). Which is awesome! I love epistolary stories, and both Fanny and Jameson have witty, interesting voices that are just so much fun to read. I'm only sad that Alexander did not get to be a source also, as he was pretty much the most interesting of the three of them. Overall it was a really well-written, well-researched, but also entertaining novel, and it's always nice to see historical fiction that deals with gender and race so explicitly.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson. A nonfiction book about, well, severed heads. From the shrunken heads that became popular museum exhibits and tourist souvenirs in the 1700s and 1800s, to guillotined heads, to skulls collected in the study of phrenology and to create racist typologies, to war trophies, to saints' relics, to heads used for medical dissection, to frozen heads for cryogenics, and more. It's an inherently interesting topic, and it would have been easy to just write a book that built on the creepy and ghoulish aspects of it, but Larson does a great job of really critiquing this history, and questioning the assumptions we might make about why people cut off and keep heads.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale. A nonfiction book about the murder of a young child in an upper-class family home in rural 1860s England. Somewhat similar to Devil in the White City, this book uses the event to do some really interesting social history, in particular about the development of the modern detective and its fictional version, the mystery genre. Summerscale also brings in lots of other issues: the growth of the 'true crime' press; ideas of family and the home, privacy and spying; the contemporary conception of insanity and its possible heredity. The case itself is never really solved (someone does confess, but there's good reason to believe they weren't the real murderer, or at least didn't act alone), but that didn't bother me, because I found the wider history more interesting than the actual case.
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. A sequel to The Curse of Chalion. Ista, a minor character in The Curse of Chalion, is here the main character. She's the widowed mother of the young queen, and believed by many people to be/have been insane, due to having seen visions from the gods. When she gets fed up with her role and its enforced propriety, she decides to go on a pilgrimage – mostly as an excuse just to go somewhere new. Of course, being a fantasy novel this does not go smoothly, and soon there are demon possessions, the undead, magic, romance, war, a siege, and various other exciting things.
I really liked this book. It was slow to get started, but once everything started coming together it was great. I loved Ista – she's grumpy, she's old (well, sort of. She thinks of herself as past her prime, at least), she's distrustful and cynical – and then she gets to be a hero anyway. I also really loved a lot of minor characters; I'd totally read a sequel about dy Cabon's (Ista's priest sidekick) adventures.
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis by Julie Kavanagh. I saw this randomly in a bookstore and was abruptly consumed with the desire to read it immediately (possibly I was already feverish at the time?). Spoiler: it wasn't worth it. Marie Duplessis was a famous courtesan in 1840s Paris; La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils is a barely fictionalized version of her life, which then went on to inspire a play, the opera La Traviata, multiple ballets, an abundance of movies (including, to some extent, Moulin Rouge and Love Story), and even Tsubaki-hime in Yami no Matsuei. This could be a fascinating topic to write a non-fiction book about, but unfortunately, Kavanagh's is not that book. The Girl Who Loved Camellias mostly reads like a mash-up between a summary of Dumas's book and a summary of an early biography of Duplessis, written by Romain Vienne, one of her friends. Which, if I wanted to read either of those books, I would have just read them, and not Kavanagh's book-report version of them. And despite excerpting significant portions of both books, Kavanagh seems to expect her reader to be already familiar with them. She'll occasionally throw out a mention to something like Duplessis's love of riding horses or her TB as though it's something the reader should already know, instead of actually introducing it.
I wanted more social history, which should be the advantage of looking back on someone with 150 years' perspective. But though Kavanagh occasionally mentions things like the July Revolution, flâneurs, or the Congress of Vienna, she certainly doesn't bother to explain how they relate to Duplessis or her world (or even to define them, so hopefully you just already know what all those things are). She doesn't even get into topics like the economics of a courtesan's life; she'll tell you how much Duplessis paid for a specific dinner, but since I am not familiar with the value of 1840s money nor how much Duplessis was earning, a random number means nothing. Even when she does try to bring in some perspective, she gets it wrong: for instance, she quotes medical views of TB from the 1890s and 1900s (after its cause was discovered and it was known to be contagious), but tells the reader nothing about medical views of TB in the 1840s, which would actually be relevant. I also wanted a wider perspective; though Duplessis crosses paths with a ton of interesting people, Kavanagh never follows them to tell us more about these other lives. I was particularly interested in some of the other courtesans who were mentioned; Kavanagh often drops their real names or origins, so she clearly must have done the research about them, but she doesn't bother to include it in this book. Finally, I would have liked a take on why Duplessis's story has been so famous and so enduring. Though Kavanagh lists the various adaptions in the introduction, she makes no effort to guess at why it is that people keep repeating this story, or what different places and times are getting out of it, or how changes that have been made reflect varying cultural norms, or anything like that. Basically, whenever there's a potential interesting approach, Kavanagh goes back to summarizing La Dame aux Camélias.
Also somehow this is a sentence in a book published in 2013: If Alphonsine inherited her promiscuous nature from her father, then her grace and natural distinction may have been the result of her mother’s aristocratic blood. I don't even know what to say about that.
What are you currently reading?
Good Man Friday by Barbara Hambly. Also getting back on track with the FFA book club!
What did you just finish?
Blindspot by Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. A novel set in pre-Revolution Boston, about Stewart Jameson (a Scottish painter who has fled to the New World in an attempt avoid his debts and old enemies) and Fanny Easton (the daughter of one of the richest men in Boston, who due to having an illegitimate child and making some bad choices ended up disowned, living on the streets, and then in a workhouse; currently disguising herself as a boy to become Jameson's apprentice). They're eventually joined by Jameson's best friend Dr. Ignatius Alexander (a black man who, despite being a university-trained professor and renowned scholar, is currently a runaway slave). Together they
The entire novel is told in epistolary style, consisting mostly of Fanny's letters to one of her childhood friends and Jameson's diary, along with a few other sources (newspaper articles and legal announcements mostly, some of which are actual historical documents). Which is awesome! I love epistolary stories, and both Fanny and Jameson have witty, interesting voices that are just so much fun to read. I'm only sad that Alexander did not get to be a source also, as he was pretty much the most interesting of the three of them. Overall it was a really well-written, well-researched, but also entertaining novel, and it's always nice to see historical fiction that deals with gender and race so explicitly.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson. A nonfiction book about, well, severed heads. From the shrunken heads that became popular museum exhibits and tourist souvenirs in the 1700s and 1800s, to guillotined heads, to skulls collected in the study of phrenology and to create racist typologies, to war trophies, to saints' relics, to heads used for medical dissection, to frozen heads for cryogenics, and more. It's an inherently interesting topic, and it would have been easy to just write a book that built on the creepy and ghoulish aspects of it, but Larson does a great job of really critiquing this history, and questioning the assumptions we might make about why people cut off and keep heads.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale. A nonfiction book about the murder of a young child in an upper-class family home in rural 1860s England. Somewhat similar to Devil in the White City, this book uses the event to do some really interesting social history, in particular about the development of the modern detective and its fictional version, the mystery genre. Summerscale also brings in lots of other issues: the growth of the 'true crime' press; ideas of family and the home, privacy and spying; the contemporary conception of insanity and its possible heredity. The case itself is never really solved (someone does confess, but there's good reason to believe they weren't the real murderer, or at least didn't act alone), but that didn't bother me, because I found the wider history more interesting than the actual case.
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. A sequel to The Curse of Chalion. Ista, a minor character in The Curse of Chalion, is here the main character. She's the widowed mother of the young queen, and believed by many people to be/have been insane, due to having seen visions from the gods. When she gets fed up with her role and its enforced propriety, she decides to go on a pilgrimage – mostly as an excuse just to go somewhere new. Of course, being a fantasy novel this does not go smoothly, and soon there are demon possessions, the undead, magic, romance, war, a siege, and various other exciting things.
I really liked this book. It was slow to get started, but once everything started coming together it was great. I loved Ista – she's grumpy, she's old (well, sort of. She thinks of herself as past her prime, at least), she's distrustful and cynical – and then she gets to be a hero anyway. I also really loved a lot of minor characters; I'd totally read a sequel about dy Cabon's (Ista's priest sidekick) adventures.
The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis by Julie Kavanagh. I saw this randomly in a bookstore and was abruptly consumed with the desire to read it immediately (possibly I was already feverish at the time?). Spoiler: it wasn't worth it. Marie Duplessis was a famous courtesan in 1840s Paris; La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils is a barely fictionalized version of her life, which then went on to inspire a play, the opera La Traviata, multiple ballets, an abundance of movies (including, to some extent, Moulin Rouge and Love Story), and even Tsubaki-hime in Yami no Matsuei. This could be a fascinating topic to write a non-fiction book about, but unfortunately, Kavanagh's is not that book. The Girl Who Loved Camellias mostly reads like a mash-up between a summary of Dumas's book and a summary of an early biography of Duplessis, written by Romain Vienne, one of her friends. Which, if I wanted to read either of those books, I would have just read them, and not Kavanagh's book-report version of them. And despite excerpting significant portions of both books, Kavanagh seems to expect her reader to be already familiar with them. She'll occasionally throw out a mention to something like Duplessis's love of riding horses or her TB as though it's something the reader should already know, instead of actually introducing it.
I wanted more social history, which should be the advantage of looking back on someone with 150 years' perspective. But though Kavanagh occasionally mentions things like the July Revolution, flâneurs, or the Congress of Vienna, she certainly doesn't bother to explain how they relate to Duplessis or her world (or even to define them, so hopefully you just already know what all those things are). She doesn't even get into topics like the economics of a courtesan's life; she'll tell you how much Duplessis paid for a specific dinner, but since I am not familiar with the value of 1840s money nor how much Duplessis was earning, a random number means nothing. Even when she does try to bring in some perspective, she gets it wrong: for instance, she quotes medical views of TB from the 1890s and 1900s (after its cause was discovered and it was known to be contagious), but tells the reader nothing about medical views of TB in the 1840s, which would actually be relevant. I also wanted a wider perspective; though Duplessis crosses paths with a ton of interesting people, Kavanagh never follows them to tell us more about these other lives. I was particularly interested in some of the other courtesans who were mentioned; Kavanagh often drops their real names or origins, so she clearly must have done the research about them, but she doesn't bother to include it in this book. Finally, I would have liked a take on why Duplessis's story has been so famous and so enduring. Though Kavanagh lists the various adaptions in the introduction, she makes no effort to guess at why it is that people keep repeating this story, or what different places and times are getting out of it, or how changes that have been made reflect varying cultural norms, or anything like that. Basically, whenever there's a potential interesting approach, Kavanagh goes back to summarizing La Dame aux Camélias.
Also somehow this is a sentence in a book published in 2013: If Alphonsine inherited her promiscuous nature from her father, then her grace and natural distinction may have been the result of her mother’s aristocratic blood. I don't even know what to say about that.
What are you currently reading?
Good Man Friday by Barbara Hambly. Also getting back on track with the FFA book club!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 02:10 am (UTC)2013! How does that even happen? (It would have been eyerolly enough seventy years ago).
The change in attitudes toward TB after it was discovered to be contagious is something I know I've seen a paper on at some point. Blindspot sounds potentially great. I love epistolary fiction if it's well done.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 10:42 pm (UTC)Yeah, I read a book about the history of TB last year, and there's a huge difference before and after the moment where people figure out it's caused by a contagious bacteria. Both in terms of how real people were treated, and (to a lesser extent) how it worked as a symbolic disease in fiction. But I'd love to read more about it, if you remember the author of the paper or anything!
Blindspot was not perfect, but I really enjoyed it! I recommend it.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 09:10 am (UTC)caz's book is closer to my heart (he's a consummate Saint Lawful Good Character of my heart, and i love him soooo), but ista is a brilliant, brilliant protagonist, and it was so good to have her story told, after all.
(i can't remember if it's true or conjecture, but iirc bujold was asking why most of ekaterin's badassery in diplomatic immunity happened offscreen, and she said that she could either do ekaterin justice there or write an ista book, and she choose ista. no complaint from me).
no subject
Date: 2015-01-09 11:15 pm (UTC)Oh, that's really interesting! I suppose Ista and Ekaterin are pretty similar, in a character archetype way.
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Date: 2015-01-09 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-01-09 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-10 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-10 08:08 pm (UTC)