Recent reading bumper edition
Apr. 1st, 2024 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeHere we go, then! I'm up to fifteen books in my reviews backlog, so I'd better post it before it gets any longer...
Worrals of the Islands by W. E. Johns (1945). Johns continues to send Worrals and Frecks into more far-flung settings; in this one they set out to find a group of missing British girls who are stranded somewhere among the Pacific islands, and their enemies include the monsoon as well as the Japanese. Very good exciting adventures as usual, and I liked the wildlife of the islands, though there is a certain amount of period attitudes to race. The Worrals books are set very contemporarily and we now seem to have reached the end of the war—this book was published in October, although VE Day isn't actually mentioned—so I'm intrigued to see what they get up to next.
HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian (1973). Oh dear. I'm sorry; I had some serious problems with the first two Aubrey-Maturin books and after this one have come to the conclusion that—despite what they sound like, and despite the impression one gets from their fandom (who all seem lovely about them!)—these books are not for me. Opaque prose, nothing anyone thinks or does makes sense or when it does it's silly, general cynicism and nastiness; O'Brian has an amazing talent for making things that should be fun and iddy totally unappealing. I will not be going any further with the series.
Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant (1866). Woe and alas, my idol has let me down at last. I am distraught! Right, to take it in order, the first two-thirds or so of this book are very good indeed. It's about Lucilla Marjoribanks, who leaves school and comes home with a plan to reorganise and make something of society in the provincial town where she lives with her father, a widowed doctor. (Her one aim in life, as she constantly says, is to be a comfort to her dear papa; her reaction to her mother's death, constructed out of what she knows from stories, reminded me very much of Jill's.) Her efforts are described by the omniscient narrator in terms of a brilliant general conducting a campaign, and she is portrayed as a great benefactor to humanity; it's all done with Oliphant's genius for precise description of emotional and social subtleties, and it is very, very funny. Unfortunately Oliphant, I think, didn't really know what sort of ending to come up with for such a brilliant and singular character as Lucilla; the last part of the book flounders about for a bit in plot points that don't really go anywhere and then settles on a silly conventional marriage ending. To be fair to her, Oliphant really tries to sell the reader on Lucilla's choice of husband and is not as bad about it as a lot of Victorian authors would have been, but it doesn't work and was a real disappointment from the author of Hester and Kirsteen. This is one of her earlier books, though; perhaps she improved (or got bolder!) over time.
Also, I think if you're going to give your main character a really unintuitively-spelt name, you should either explain the pronunciation early on so that the reader gets it right thereafter, or not explain it and just let the oblivious reader get it wrong, never mind. I got it right from having readluzula's review, but making a big deal of explaining it only right at the end of the book is a frustrating choice!
True Grit by Charles Portis (1968). Recommended by my mother, who doesn't usually read Westerns either, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I think the setting and sensibilities of the genre are not really for me; compared to the kind of eighteenth-century European historical adventure fiction I like it felt much uglier and more brutal in its violence (no strictly honourable duelling here!) and most of the characters are more or less horrible people. However the main character and narrator—Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl who sets out determinedly on a mission to avenge her father's murder and who will not be swayed from her purpose—is excellent and excellently-characterised, so I did like that.
Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (2022). I have strongly mixed feelings about the concept of autistic masking, and wasn't sure whether I would get much out of this, but actually it's very good and I did! Parts of it were annoying and/or alienating in more or less the ways I expected, but there is a lot of thoughtful and interesting discussion and a lot that resonated with me, especially things that were useful to hear just now.
Re-read The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824). I read this one years ago and had been thinking for a while that it would be interesting to return to it now that I know more about the relevant historical background, and it was! It's a religious satire/Gothic horror novel set in Scotland in the years surrounding the Act of Union, and is about the devil taking advantage of a young man's extreme Calvinism to persuade him into committing fratricide and various other horrible acts: he must be a righteous warrior for God, and absolute predestination and the antinomianism* which is its logical conclusion mean that he can literally do no wrong in God's eyes. The story is told by two narrators—the main character himself, and a fictional 'Editor' who supposedly publishes his story many years later—and both are more or less unreliable, which is interesting and used to good effect. The book is uneven—in general it's good when it tries to be chilling and Gothic and bad when it tries to be comic—and there's not actually as much Jacobitism in it as I might have liked, but the good bits are very good.
*That is, rather than salvation depending on an individual's choice to do good things or to believe in Jesus, everyone's ultimate fate, whether Heaven or Hell, is predetermined by God and cannot be changed by their actions; therefore the laws of right and wrong do not apply to God's chosen 'elect', because they are always destined for Heaven no matter what.
Re-read A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin (1968). It's a simple but thoughtful and beautifully-told fantasy story; le Guin's prose is as beautiful as I remember, measured and rhythmic and well-chosen, and the worldbuilding and setting description are just lovely. (I very much enjoyed following all the travelling around the different islands on the map at the front; I do like a good fantasy map). I think I'll go on with re-reading the trilogy. (The less said about the fourth book the better, but le Guin was not wrong to reassess this one as really sexist—not just in the 'unthinkingly excluding women from important roles in the story' way, it goes out of its way to be nasty about women at almost every opportunity. Then there's the painfully obvious best-friend's-sister love interest, who, however, is AFAICR dropped in subsequent books. Hmm.)
Re-read Peccavi by E. W. Hornung (1900). Ah, I love Hornung; after finishing my read-though it's lovely to revisit his writing again, and I must keep re-reading more of the books. This one is weird, but it's also especially good. I was reading particularly for the purpose of revisiting Gwynneth and Nurse Ella and possibly writing more femslash about them; I'd forgotten some of the complications of their relationship, which is really good, and a crossover with Jill via Sister Helena is an even more interesting possibility than I thought. Also I liked the religious and religion-in-society elements of the book, with all its ambivalent views of Anglo-Catholicism. And I remain fascinated by Molly—who could so easily have been nothing more than a rather sexist plot device, but happily Hornung is a better author than that—and I would very much like to read an AU where she survives and develops some kind of relationship with Gwynneth.
What Hetty Did by J. L. Carr (1988). My impression of this book was probably not improved by having mis-osmosed that it took place in Victorian times*; I was mildly surprised to find myself actually in a contemporary late-1980s setting—but from that onwards it just felt odd, and overall did not work for me. Well, I must praise the author for range, at least, because it's very little like A Month in the Country—the one thing I would say they have in common is a certain tone of self-aware irony in the first-person narration, which was an enjoyable mild seasoning to the mood of AMitC but which here is so strong as to get in the way of any sincere expression of serious emotion in a way I (not very emotionally subtle or good at reading between the social lines) couldn't get on with at all. The book is a comedy or a satire (of contemporary British social life and institutions, I think), but I couldn't see the point of the joke. (Also, I think the shared-universe thing where characters from one novel cameo in another is cute in small doses, Pym-style, but silly when carried to the extent it apparently is here, and an annoying self-conscious gimmick when you carefully detail all the crossovers at the front of the book.) (Speaking of Pym, I did appreciate the shout-out to my fave A Glass of Blessings.) The library have one more novel of Carr's; perhaps it will be more like this one than AMitC, but perhaps it will be something completely different again; I will read it at some point and find out.
*The 'orphan sets out to find her destiny' plot; the boarding-house setting (did those still exist this late?); a Victorian-looking portrait of the main character on the back cover which is never explained; the name, are teenagers in the 1980s really called Hetty-short-for-Ethel???
The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne (1922). I was a big fan of the Winnie-the-Pooh books as a small child, but had not known that Milne also wrote adult fiction until I saw this recced as a good slashy murder mystery. I eventually got round to reading it, and it is very much that! (In fact I think there are two obvious possible slash pairings, a cute and fluffy one between the amateur detective and his 'Watson', and a much more messed-up one between two characters whose exact roles it would be a spoiler to reveal. Er, might thus appeal to Armadale fans?) It's also great fun as a detective novel, ingeniously (if not always terribly plausibly) put together and an enjoyable 'fair play' mystery; I figured out part of the solution ahead of the ending but not all of it, which I think is probably ideal as a reading experience. And it's interesting as a fairly early example of the classic country-house murder mystery, with a lot of the familiar elements present (including strong genre-awareness from both author and characters, Sherlock Holmes references and so on) but others seemingly subverted (e.g. Milne does not use the party of guests at the house to provide a large and entertainingly varied cast of suspects; instead most of the guests have a straightforward alibi, are sent away as soon as the murder happens and are never in question as suspects, and the real puzzle lies more in working out exactly what the two people who are certainly involved did and why rather than 'whodunnit' as such).
Life and Adventures of Mrs Christian Davies by ?Daniel Defoe (1740; the edition I got from archive.org was part of a 'complete works of' collection, but apparently it was originally published anonymously and the general supposition that it was Defoe's has been contested; anyway...) Christian Davies was a Sweet Polly Oliver who became a bit of a celebrity in her own time. She was from an Irish Jacobite family; in the 1690s her husband was kidnapped into the army, and she responded by disguising herself as a man and joining up herself to go and look for him. Although they were eventually reunited, one gets the distinct impression that this motive was overshadowed later on by a strong liking for the military life in general. She fought in Marlborough's wars in Flanders; her sex was eventually discovered, after which she remained with the army as cook and sutler to her husband's regiment. I was looking for fic research sources on 18th-century female soldiers and crossdressers more generally, and this book was a bit disappointing from that perspective. Much of the book is just long and rather tedious accounts of the course of the war (Defoe claims to have taken his narrative directly from Christian's own words, but I suspect he added these bits; they're very much from a historian's perspective rather than an eyewitness's); relatively little of it deals with the time when she was a soldier, and there's not much specific detail about the experience of being a female soldier as such. However, apart from the interminable battles and sieges, the accounts of the various adventures Christian got up to are very entertaining and historically fascinating, especially during the period when she was with the army while openly a woman, as an example of the sorts of lives such women might lead (she really enjoyed looting). There is some interesting gender/sexuality stuff. As with Hannah Snell, there's little suggestion anywhere that a woman passing herself off as a man might be seen as morally wrong in itself, but Defoe does go out of his way to reassure readers that Christian is exceptional and obviously most women could never do anything like this. There is emphasis placed on Christian's 'masculine' personality and inclinations going back to her childhood, as an explanation for her later actions; but heterosexuality seems to be completely taken for granted and there's not really an impression that anyone is worried about lesbianism, even when Christian flirts with and courts women apparently for a lark.
The Dinner Lady Detectives by Hannah Hendy (2021). Random find at the library, a modern cosy mystery. It's not a good book—the ideas are poorly thought through (both at the broader whole-plot level and at the level of individual pieces of description) the humour is overly self-conscious, the SPAG is terrible and, crucially, the mystery is not very good—but a lot of poorly-thought-through, grammatically-wobbly books are dull and this was not. The author was clearly having a lot of fun with it and there was something to enjoy in that, at least. And the casually lesbian main characters were very nice!
The Diaries of Anne Lister, vol. II, edited by Helena Whitbread (written 1824-6, published 1992). I read the first volume years ago and finally decided to get round to this one! I like Lister's writing style; the diaries are an engaging read and absolutely fascinating historically, really showing how much about sexuality and other taboo subjects that wasn't generally mentioned in published writing of the period people were nevertheless thinking, talking, and when possible writing about. (Not just Lister herself, I mean; one of the most striking things about the diaries for me is how little trouble she has being understood by other people.) However, I continue to have a very low opinion of Lister as a person in general and how she conducts her relationships, and I think I can only take so much of actually reading all this in one go. I bounced off the recent TV series when it began airing a few years ago (an interesting historical source and an enjoyable character in entertainment are very different things), but had osmosed a bit about it, and in that light I was surprised to find that the published diaries don't cover Lister's relationship with Ann Walker or that period of her life at all—Whitbread concludes with a short epilogue which rather dismisses the relationship as neither very significant nor very happy, and that's that.
A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje (2020). The author, a farmer and former academic who writes a blog on related topics, sets out his views on the future of society, politics and agriculture. Basically: for all the well-known reasons the current state of the world is unsustainable, and any sustainable future society will unavoidably be a lower-energy and lower-tech one; the best option will be a world of largely autonomous local economies based on small-scale farming. It's an interesting and in many ways attractively optimistic vision; Smaje's political perspective is original (he's certainly broadly a progressive, but is critical of a lot of conventional left-wing views and has some more conservative sensibilities) and seems well-thought-through, but I thought he didn't always explain his views very well or set out a clear vision—though to be fair, some of that is deliberate in a 'we can't be sure about the details' way. Also there was almost no mention of disability or healthcare, which seem to me to be important questions about any sustainably lower-tech future society. Smaje has been engaged in a back-and-forth debate with George Monbiot, whose writing I admired very much when I read bits of it a few years ago, but who seems to have changed his views somewhat since then; I might continue with the books and articles making up the rest of this debate and see what I think.
Outrageous! by Paul Baker (2022). Recent-history book about Section 28 (a notorious piece of UK legislation, in effect from 1988 to 2003, which banned the 'promotion of homosexuality' by local authorities and in schools): the wider context and events leading up to its passage into law, the protests against it, its effects, how it was ultimately repealed and what's happened with related issues since. Very interesting and well-written as far as I can judge; Baker has a good way of lightening discussion of serious topics with a sort of amusedly mocking humour without trivialising things or coming across as really nasty. And now I am having feelings about the fact that Kidnapped not only got produced at all but is available on, and has reached a wider and longer-term audience because it's available on, a platform aimed at schools.
There we go! That is rather too many recent dates, I think; perhaps I should read something nicely Victorian (or earlier?) next.
Worrals of the Islands by W. E. Johns (1945). Johns continues to send Worrals and Frecks into more far-flung settings; in this one they set out to find a group of missing British girls who are stranded somewhere among the Pacific islands, and their enemies include the monsoon as well as the Japanese. Very good exciting adventures as usual, and I liked the wildlife of the islands, though there is a certain amount of period attitudes to race. The Worrals books are set very contemporarily and we now seem to have reached the end of the war—this book was published in October, although VE Day isn't actually mentioned—so I'm intrigued to see what they get up to next.
HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian (1973). Oh dear. I'm sorry; I had some serious problems with the first two Aubrey-Maturin books and after this one have come to the conclusion that—despite what they sound like, and despite the impression one gets from their fandom (who all seem lovely about them!)—these books are not for me. Opaque prose, nothing anyone thinks or does makes sense or when it does it's silly, general cynicism and nastiness; O'Brian has an amazing talent for making things that should be fun and iddy totally unappealing. I will not be going any further with the series.
Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant (1866). Woe and alas, my idol has let me down at last. I am distraught! Right, to take it in order, the first two-thirds or so of this book are very good indeed. It's about Lucilla Marjoribanks, who leaves school and comes home with a plan to reorganise and make something of society in the provincial town where she lives with her father, a widowed doctor. (Her one aim in life, as she constantly says, is to be a comfort to her dear papa; her reaction to her mother's death, constructed out of what she knows from stories, reminded me very much of Jill's.) Her efforts are described by the omniscient narrator in terms of a brilliant general conducting a campaign, and she is portrayed as a great benefactor to humanity; it's all done with Oliphant's genius for precise description of emotional and social subtleties, and it is very, very funny. Unfortunately Oliphant, I think, didn't really know what sort of ending to come up with for such a brilliant and singular character as Lucilla; the last part of the book flounders about for a bit in plot points that don't really go anywhere and then settles on a silly conventional marriage ending. To be fair to her, Oliphant really tries to sell the reader on Lucilla's choice of husband and is not as bad about it as a lot of Victorian authors would have been, but it doesn't work and was a real disappointment from the author of Hester and Kirsteen. This is one of her earlier books, though; perhaps she improved (or got bolder!) over time.
Also, I think if you're going to give your main character a really unintuitively-spelt name, you should either explain the pronunciation early on so that the reader gets it right thereafter, or not explain it and just let the oblivious reader get it wrong, never mind. I got it right from having read
luzula's review, but making a big deal of explaining it only right at the end of the book is a frustrating choice!True Grit by Charles Portis (1968). Recommended by my mother, who doesn't usually read Westerns either, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I think the setting and sensibilities of the genre are not really for me; compared to the kind of eighteenth-century European historical adventure fiction I like it felt much uglier and more brutal in its violence (no strictly honourable duelling here!) and most of the characters are more or less horrible people. However the main character and narrator—Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old girl who sets out determinedly on a mission to avenge her father's murder and who will not be swayed from her purpose—is excellent and excellently-characterised, so I did like that.
Unmasking Autism by Devon Price (2022). I have strongly mixed feelings about the concept of autistic masking, and wasn't sure whether I would get much out of this, but actually it's very good and I did! Parts of it were annoying and/or alienating in more or less the ways I expected, but there is a lot of thoughtful and interesting discussion and a lot that resonated with me, especially things that were useful to hear just now.
Re-read The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824). I read this one years ago and had been thinking for a while that it would be interesting to return to it now that I know more about the relevant historical background, and it was! It's a religious satire/Gothic horror novel set in Scotland in the years surrounding the Act of Union, and is about the devil taking advantage of a young man's extreme Calvinism to persuade him into committing fratricide and various other horrible acts: he must be a righteous warrior for God, and absolute predestination and the antinomianism* which is its logical conclusion mean that he can literally do no wrong in God's eyes. The story is told by two narrators—the main character himself, and a fictional 'Editor' who supposedly publishes his story many years later—and both are more or less unreliable, which is interesting and used to good effect. The book is uneven—in general it's good when it tries to be chilling and Gothic and bad when it tries to be comic—and there's not actually as much Jacobitism in it as I might have liked, but the good bits are very good.
*That is, rather than salvation depending on an individual's choice to do good things or to believe in Jesus, everyone's ultimate fate, whether Heaven or Hell, is predetermined by God and cannot be changed by their actions; therefore the laws of right and wrong do not apply to God's chosen 'elect', because they are always destined for Heaven no matter what.
Re-read A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula le Guin (1968). It's a simple but thoughtful and beautifully-told fantasy story; le Guin's prose is as beautiful as I remember, measured and rhythmic and well-chosen, and the worldbuilding and setting description are just lovely. (I very much enjoyed following all the travelling around the different islands on the map at the front; I do like a good fantasy map). I think I'll go on with re-reading the trilogy. (The less said about the fourth book the better, but le Guin was not wrong to reassess this one as really sexist—not just in the 'unthinkingly excluding women from important roles in the story' way, it goes out of its way to be nasty about women at almost every opportunity. Then there's the painfully obvious best-friend's-sister love interest, who, however, is AFAICR dropped in subsequent books. Hmm.)
Re-read Peccavi by E. W. Hornung (1900). Ah, I love Hornung; after finishing my read-though it's lovely to revisit his writing again, and I must keep re-reading more of the books. This one is weird, but it's also especially good. I was reading particularly for the purpose of revisiting Gwynneth and Nurse Ella and possibly writing more femslash about them; I'd forgotten some of the complications of their relationship, which is really good, and a crossover with Jill via Sister Helena is an even more interesting possibility than I thought. Also I liked the religious and religion-in-society elements of the book, with all its ambivalent views of Anglo-Catholicism. And I remain fascinated by Molly—who could so easily have been nothing more than a rather sexist plot device, but happily Hornung is a better author than that—and I would very much like to read an AU where she survives and develops some kind of relationship with Gwynneth.
What Hetty Did by J. L. Carr (1988). My impression of this book was probably not improved by having mis-osmosed that it took place in Victorian times*; I was mildly surprised to find myself actually in a contemporary late-1980s setting—but from that onwards it just felt odd, and overall did not work for me. Well, I must praise the author for range, at least, because it's very little like A Month in the Country—the one thing I would say they have in common is a certain tone of self-aware irony in the first-person narration, which was an enjoyable mild seasoning to the mood of AMitC but which here is so strong as to get in the way of any sincere expression of serious emotion in a way I (not very emotionally subtle or good at reading between the social lines) couldn't get on with at all. The book is a comedy or a satire (of contemporary British social life and institutions, I think), but I couldn't see the point of the joke. (Also, I think the shared-universe thing where characters from one novel cameo in another is cute in small doses, Pym-style, but silly when carried to the extent it apparently is here, and an annoying self-conscious gimmick when you carefully detail all the crossovers at the front of the book.) (Speaking of Pym, I did appreciate the shout-out to my fave A Glass of Blessings.) The library have one more novel of Carr's; perhaps it will be more like this one than AMitC, but perhaps it will be something completely different again; I will read it at some point and find out.
*The 'orphan sets out to find her destiny' plot; the boarding-house setting (did those still exist this late?); a Victorian-looking portrait of the main character on the back cover which is never explained; the name, are teenagers in the 1980s really called Hetty-short-for-Ethel???
The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne (1922). I was a big fan of the Winnie-the-Pooh books as a small child, but had not known that Milne also wrote adult fiction until I saw this recced as a good slashy murder mystery. I eventually got round to reading it, and it is very much that! (In fact I think there are two obvious possible slash pairings, a cute and fluffy one between the amateur detective and his 'Watson', and a much more messed-up one between two characters whose exact roles it would be a spoiler to reveal. Er, might thus appeal to Armadale fans?) It's also great fun as a detective novel, ingeniously (if not always terribly plausibly) put together and an enjoyable 'fair play' mystery; I figured out part of the solution ahead of the ending but not all of it, which I think is probably ideal as a reading experience. And it's interesting as a fairly early example of the classic country-house murder mystery, with a lot of the familiar elements present (including strong genre-awareness from both author and characters, Sherlock Holmes references and so on) but others seemingly subverted (e.g. Milne does not use the party of guests at the house to provide a large and entertainingly varied cast of suspects; instead most of the guests have a straightforward alibi, are sent away as soon as the murder happens and are never in question as suspects, and the real puzzle lies more in working out exactly what the two people who are certainly involved did and why rather than 'whodunnit' as such).
Life and Adventures of Mrs Christian Davies by ?Daniel Defoe (1740; the edition I got from archive.org was part of a 'complete works of' collection, but apparently it was originally published anonymously and the general supposition that it was Defoe's has been contested; anyway...) Christian Davies was a Sweet Polly Oliver who became a bit of a celebrity in her own time. She was from an Irish Jacobite family; in the 1690s her husband was kidnapped into the army, and she responded by disguising herself as a man and joining up herself to go and look for him. Although they were eventually reunited, one gets the distinct impression that this motive was overshadowed later on by a strong liking for the military life in general. She fought in Marlborough's wars in Flanders; her sex was eventually discovered, after which she remained with the army as cook and sutler to her husband's regiment. I was looking for fic research sources on 18th-century female soldiers and crossdressers more generally, and this book was a bit disappointing from that perspective. Much of the book is just long and rather tedious accounts of the course of the war (Defoe claims to have taken his narrative directly from Christian's own words, but I suspect he added these bits; they're very much from a historian's perspective rather than an eyewitness's); relatively little of it deals with the time when she was a soldier, and there's not much specific detail about the experience of being a female soldier as such. However, apart from the interminable battles and sieges, the accounts of the various adventures Christian got up to are very entertaining and historically fascinating, especially during the period when she was with the army while openly a woman, as an example of the sorts of lives such women might lead (she really enjoyed looting). There is some interesting gender/sexuality stuff. As with Hannah Snell, there's little suggestion anywhere that a woman passing herself off as a man might be seen as morally wrong in itself, but Defoe does go out of his way to reassure readers that Christian is exceptional and obviously most women could never do anything like this. There is emphasis placed on Christian's 'masculine' personality and inclinations going back to her childhood, as an explanation for her later actions; but heterosexuality seems to be completely taken for granted and there's not really an impression that anyone is worried about lesbianism, even when Christian flirts with and courts women apparently for a lark.
The Dinner Lady Detectives by Hannah Hendy (2021). Random find at the library, a modern cosy mystery. It's not a good book—the ideas are poorly thought through (both at the broader whole-plot level and at the level of individual pieces of description) the humour is overly self-conscious, the SPAG is terrible and, crucially, the mystery is not very good—but a lot of poorly-thought-through, grammatically-wobbly books are dull and this was not. The author was clearly having a lot of fun with it and there was something to enjoy in that, at least. And the casually lesbian main characters were very nice!
The Diaries of Anne Lister, vol. II, edited by Helena Whitbread (written 1824-6, published 1992). I read the first volume years ago and finally decided to get round to this one! I like Lister's writing style; the diaries are an engaging read and absolutely fascinating historically, really showing how much about sexuality and other taboo subjects that wasn't generally mentioned in published writing of the period people were nevertheless thinking, talking, and when possible writing about. (Not just Lister herself, I mean; one of the most striking things about the diaries for me is how little trouble she has being understood by other people.) However, I continue to have a very low opinion of Lister as a person in general and how she conducts her relationships, and I think I can only take so much of actually reading all this in one go. I bounced off the recent TV series when it began airing a few years ago (an interesting historical source and an enjoyable character in entertainment are very different things), but had osmosed a bit about it, and in that light I was surprised to find that the published diaries don't cover Lister's relationship with Ann Walker or that period of her life at all—Whitbread concludes with a short epilogue which rather dismisses the relationship as neither very significant nor very happy, and that's that.
A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje (2020). The author, a farmer and former academic who writes a blog on related topics, sets out his views on the future of society, politics and agriculture. Basically: for all the well-known reasons the current state of the world is unsustainable, and any sustainable future society will unavoidably be a lower-energy and lower-tech one; the best option will be a world of largely autonomous local economies based on small-scale farming. It's an interesting and in many ways attractively optimistic vision; Smaje's political perspective is original (he's certainly broadly a progressive, but is critical of a lot of conventional left-wing views and has some more conservative sensibilities) and seems well-thought-through, but I thought he didn't always explain his views very well or set out a clear vision—though to be fair, some of that is deliberate in a 'we can't be sure about the details' way. Also there was almost no mention of disability or healthcare, which seem to me to be important questions about any sustainably lower-tech future society. Smaje has been engaged in a back-and-forth debate with George Monbiot, whose writing I admired very much when I read bits of it a few years ago, but who seems to have changed his views somewhat since then; I might continue with the books and articles making up the rest of this debate and see what I think.
Outrageous! by Paul Baker (2022). Recent-history book about Section 28 (a notorious piece of UK legislation, in effect from 1988 to 2003, which banned the 'promotion of homosexuality' by local authorities and in schools): the wider context and events leading up to its passage into law, the protests against it, its effects, how it was ultimately repealed and what's happened with related issues since. Very interesting and well-written as far as I can judge; Baker has a good way of lightening discussion of serious topics with a sort of amusedly mocking humour without trivialising things or coming across as really nasty. And now I am having feelings about the fact that Kidnapped not only got produced at all but is available on, and has reached a wider and longer-term audience because it's available on, a platform aimed at schools.
There we go! That is rather too many recent dates, I think; perhaps I should read something nicely Victorian (or earlier?) next.
