Recent reading

Walking with Murder: On the Kidnapped Trail by Ian Nimmo (2005). Ian Nimmo is a serious Kidnapped fan who has traced out the entire route of David's wanderings across Scotland, walked it himself twice—once in 1960 and once forty years later—and done a lot of research besides into the history and geography of the novel; this book is the result. There's a lot of fascinating material in here, including much that brought parts of Kidnapped to life in new ways for me and some original investigations into the Appin murder, and it's highly recommended for all fans. I did think the book could have done with making clearer and more decisive choices about its subject matter: as it is it's a book about the geography of Kidnapped which turns in the middle into a book about the history of the Appin murder before turning back again, while making occasional digressions into general Scottish geography and changes to the country over time, and while all the material was interesting it could perhaps have been better organised. Also there are parts where Nimmo should have chosen between quoting verbatim from Kidnapped or broadly paraphrasing, because doing something that's not quite one or the other really doesn't work. Also I dislike his decision—having explained that RLS's one-L spelling of Alan Breck Stewart's name distinguishes the fictional character from the historical Allan—to continue using the two-L spelling throughout, even when clearly referring only to the fictional character. But I nitpick like this because the book was so interesting! I do recommend it. I was especially impressed by Nimmo's identification, independently corroborated by two other people, of a plausible specific spot on the hillside in Leitir Mhòr wood from where the murderer of Colin Campbell might have fired the shot.

Jane's Island by Marjorie Hill Allee (1931). This was one of osprey_archer's recommended Newbery Prize winners, which means it's a very good classic American children's book. I enjoyed it a lot! Zoological research and the power of cooperation and friendship across cultural and national boundaries are an excellent set of subjects for a children's book, and I loved all the scientific and natural-historical detail as well as the characters. Some observations:
1) The main character—Jane, the twelve-year-old daughter of a zoologist and keen naturalist herself—is the typical 'same age as or a little older than the target audience', but the story is told mostly from the point of view of a slightly older character, seventeen-year-old Elsie, who's looking after Jane for the summer (not quite a nanny or a governess; I would have described her role as 'au pair, but not foreign'; was that a thing?), and I thought that was an interesting choice.
2) A fairly important plot point involves rival researchers' teams of field workers gathering wild planarians (flatworms) from the seashore for their experiments; the characters worry that one team will gather too many and there won't be enough for the other, but no one ever appears to consider the planarian population itself a potential issue. The nature conservation movement definitely existed by 1931, but apparently it and scientific zoology hadn't met yet!
3) Yes, this book is both generally pro-tomboy and not quite entirely comfortable with gender non-conformity in girls and women in an also interesting way. It's admirable to encourage scientific careers like this, but all the same there are a couple of bits I'm glad I didn't read when I was Jane's age.
4) Why do all the American books I read from around this period go on about people from Boston spending their summers in the countryside/on the coast? Why is that such an important thing to keep coming up??

The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell (1989). After reading this book (the third of four) I like the series enough to have nominated it for Yuletide—and specifically Julia and Selena, because a) if Julia is going to keep getting mistaken for a lesbian the least she deserves is actually to get to be a lesbian and b) I'm sure Selena would treat her better than any of these men do—so I'll have to read book four by sign-up time and I hope there's no very major continuity for those two in there. This one is a murder mystery about tax dodging, and gets a lot of humour out of its subject matter but also some genuinely cool and evocative settings (second most notable book set in the Channel Islands, I reckon, after Sir Isumbras at the Ford). As with previous books it's partly narrated in first person by Hilary and partly epistolary—this time in the form of messages sent by telex, which was a new word for me, which just goes to show how technology progresses. I did think it was pretty badly let down by the (rather Arthurian) rape-by-deception played for comedy; the comedic treatment of sex in these books is a bit of a thing—sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it goes too far. I have bought book four and it's due to arrive tomorrow, so we shall see.