Recent reading
Jun. 3rd, 2021 05:03 pmIt's baby bird season! Goslings on the river, starlings in the streets, blue tits getting very near fledging in the garden nestbox... lots of interesting birdwatching to do, and accompanied by some good reading.
Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story by Max Beerbohm (1911). This is a satirical novel set at Oxford in the Edwardian period, about Zuleika Dobson, granddaughter of the Warden of the fictional Judas College. Zuleika is so incredibly beautiful that when she arrives in Oxford on a visit to her grandfather all the undergraduates immediately fall in love with her (i.e. exactly like Julian Fleming,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
naraht, you were right...!). We see the unfolding of her stormy (?) love affair with the undergraduate Duke of Dorset, as both of them rapidly fall in and out of love with each other over the course of a few days, and he swears dramatically that he will die for love of her (by flinging himself into the river at the end of the boat races). All this takes place in a colourful Oxford setting, with digressions on the history of the colleges, intricacies of undergraduate customs, exclusive student clubs, the vital importance of who will bump whom on the river, etc. etc. It's a very silly book: the absurdities of both Oxford life and sentimental love stories are taken to ridiculous extremes and satirised endlessly, assisted by Beerbohm's fearsome vocabulary (this book made me very grateful for my e-reader's built-in dictionary, although even that was stumped more than once). It's a bit much at times, but overall good fun. (I loved the bit where Beerbohm, justifying his ability to narrate from an omniscient perspective, goes on a long tangent about the Muses of History and Literature and how Zeus gave him the magical ability to become a ghost and see into the minds of his ostensibly-real characters).
Beck and Call by Annick Trent (2021). Yes, 2021!luzula, who beta-read this book, recommended it and, thinking the historical setting sounded interesting, I decided I would make an exciting foray into the world of modern romance novels and give it a try. Set in 1790s England, it's the story of the romance between two valets: William, with a sometimes politically dangerous interest in literature and bored in his life serving an irritable provincial gentleman, and Edwin, who's being blackmailed for his (untrue) scandalous history of theft. They meet at a country-house gathering attended by their respective masters and quickly take a liking to each other; unfortunately, Edwin's blackmailer happens to be William's brother... I did very much enjoy the historical stuff! The setting is fascinating and Trent has clearly done their research: the atmosphere of political paranoia and repression in a Britain reeling from the shock of the French Revolution; the mundane lives of servants (I loved the sense of how busy the servant characters' lives are, and how little time and space they have to themselves—scenes are constantly getting interrupted by random housemaids walking past, summons from the gentlemen and so on—and the sense of precarity in working lives governed by the whims of upper-class masters); literature, literacy and the intellectual world amongst the lower strata of society; the place of women in all these things; etc. etc. There's also an entertaining cast of side characters, including other valets and members of William's family. The romance was a bit less to my taste, however. I did like both William and Edwin, enjoyed their relationship and was certainly rooting for the happy ending, but I think on the whole I prefer shipping characters from originally non-romance stories to stories where the romance is the canon—and I prefer the characters not to begin a sexual relationship until the emotional situation between them is resolved (...or at least as resolved as it's ever going to be, in the case of some of my OTPs).
Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School: Life, Diary and Letters by George R. Parkin, volume 2 (1898). Something of a slog at times, but even more fascinating history than the first volume! This one chronicles the migration of the entire school to west Wales for a year to escape an outbreak of typhoid fever caused by Uppingham's terrible sewers (contemporary relevance there—both in the upheaval caused by epidemics and in the exacerbation of the epidemic by political indifference and malice); and Thring's later years back at Uppingham, exploring such subjects as his views on schooling in general, his literary tastes, his handling of issues of ~morality~ and ~impurity~ at the school, his thoughts on women's education (surprisingly progressive) and his wider political opinions (tediously wrongheaded in exactly the way you'd expect). Lots of good stuff, and definitely makes me want to write Raffles fic about the views of Raffles's school headmaster on his later life...!
Zuleika Dobson; or, An Oxford Love Story by Max Beerbohm (1911). This is a satirical novel set at Oxford in the Edwardian period, about Zuleika Dobson, granddaughter of the Warden of the fictional Judas College. Zuleika is so incredibly beautiful that when she arrives in Oxford on a visit to her grandfather all the undergraduates immediately fall in love with her (i.e. exactly like Julian Fleming,
naraht, you were right...!). We see the unfolding of her stormy (?) love affair with the undergraduate Duke of Dorset, as both of them rapidly fall in and out of love with each other over the course of a few days, and he swears dramatically that he will die for love of her (by flinging himself into the river at the end of the boat races). All this takes place in a colourful Oxford setting, with digressions on the history of the colleges, intricacies of undergraduate customs, exclusive student clubs, the vital importance of who will bump whom on the river, etc. etc. It's a very silly book: the absurdities of both Oxford life and sentimental love stories are taken to ridiculous extremes and satirised endlessly, assisted by Beerbohm's fearsome vocabulary (this book made me very grateful for my e-reader's built-in dictionary, although even that was stumped more than once). It's a bit much at times, but overall good fun. (I loved the bit where Beerbohm, justifying his ability to narrate from an omniscient perspective, goes on a long tangent about the Muses of History and Literature and how Zeus gave him the magical ability to become a ghost and see into the minds of his ostensibly-real characters).Beck and Call by Annick Trent (2021). Yes, 2021!
luzula, who beta-read this book, recommended it and, thinking the historical setting sounded interesting, I decided I would make an exciting foray into the world of modern romance novels and give it a try. Set in 1790s England, it's the story of the romance between two valets: William, with a sometimes politically dangerous interest in literature and bored in his life serving an irritable provincial gentleman, and Edwin, who's being blackmailed for his (untrue) scandalous history of theft. They meet at a country-house gathering attended by their respective masters and quickly take a liking to each other; unfortunately, Edwin's blackmailer happens to be William's brother... I did very much enjoy the historical stuff! The setting is fascinating and Trent has clearly done their research: the atmosphere of political paranoia and repression in a Britain reeling from the shock of the French Revolution; the mundane lives of servants (I loved the sense of how busy the servant characters' lives are, and how little time and space they have to themselves—scenes are constantly getting interrupted by random housemaids walking past, summons from the gentlemen and so on—and the sense of precarity in working lives governed by the whims of upper-class masters); literature, literacy and the intellectual world amongst the lower strata of society; the place of women in all these things; etc. etc. There's also an entertaining cast of side characters, including other valets and members of William's family. The romance was a bit less to my taste, however. I did like both William and Edwin, enjoyed their relationship and was certainly rooting for the happy ending, but I think on the whole I prefer shipping characters from originally non-romance stories to stories where the romance is the canon—and I prefer the characters not to begin a sexual relationship until the emotional situation between them is resolved (...or at least as resolved as it's ever going to be, in the case of some of my OTPs).Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School: Life, Diary and Letters by George R. Parkin, volume 2 (1898). Something of a slog at times, but even more fascinating history than the first volume! This one chronicles the migration of the entire school to west Wales for a year to escape an outbreak of typhoid fever caused by Uppingham's terrible sewers (contemporary relevance there—both in the upheaval caused by epidemics and in the exacerbation of the epidemic by political indifference and malice); and Thring's later years back at Uppingham, exploring such subjects as his views on schooling in general, his literary tastes, his handling of issues of ~morality~ and ~impurity~ at the school, his thoughts on women's education (surprisingly progressive) and his wider political opinions (tediously wrongheaded in exactly the way you'd expect). Lots of good stuff, and definitely makes me want to write Raffles fic about the views of Raffles's school headmaster on his later life...!
