Recent reading
May. 29th, 2020 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeUpper Fourth At Malory Towers, In the Fifth At Malory Towers and Last Term At Malory Towers by Enid Blyton (1949, 1950 and 1951). Finished the Malory Towers re-read, which has continued great fun! I really enjoy the structure and organised setting of boarding-school stories, and Blyton is undoubtedly very good at telling interesting stories within those constraints. Some of the ideas are a little dated (there's a streak of cruelty in Blyton's writing which got a bit strong for me at one point in In the Fifth, although to be fair the girls do eventually realise that they've gone too far)—but the overall portrayal of Malory Towers as a place that grows the character of its pupils, through the various challenges and adventures they face as part of the plot, the social dramas and small-scale power struggles and moral dilemmas and practical jokes and midnight feasts and so on, is really lovely. Last Term has a quietly poignant feeling of a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia about it, that felt very deserved.
And the characters are great, of course! My fave Mary-Lou doesn't have a big role in the later books, but it's clear that she has grown up a lot and is going to do great things in the world. Bill and Clarissa... what can I say, I love them both :D Such great characters, and so good for each other—I love how they find that they have things in common and just instantly click, then they're always together, they appear in the plot as a unit, they're planning to set up a riding school together after they leave school, and everyone just accepts the whole thing and takes it for granted that they'll still be together years later. Darrell and Sally's relationship is lovely, too—a more quietly steady thing that's very good for them both.
...I may or may not already have about a thousand words of Bill/Clarissa fanfic in my drafts, but I'm finding my lack of horse knowledge a bit of an obstacle. If anyone here happens to know about horses and riding and would be willing to give me some help with this, it'd be much appreciated!
And this morning I added another small entry to the D. K. Broster read-through with the short story The Questionable Parentage of Basil Grant (1905)—many thanks totheseatheseatheopensea for bringing it to my attention! It's a weird but very funny parody of the detective stories of the period, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories. I kind of felt like I was missing some of the background I needed to really get the joke (despite knowing the Holmes stories pretty well—it's the context, I suppose), but it was very enjoyable all the same. And surprisingly many things to remind me of FotH—there are multiple Scottish characters, including a family named Grant, and several light-hearted references to Scottish history, ballads and Jacobites!
And the characters are great, of course! My fave Mary-Lou doesn't have a big role in the later books, but it's clear that she has grown up a lot and is going to do great things in the world. Bill and Clarissa... what can I say, I love them both :D Such great characters, and so good for each other—I love how they find that they have things in common and just instantly click, then they're always together, they appear in the plot as a unit, they're planning to set up a riding school together after they leave school, and everyone just accepts the whole thing and takes it for granted that they'll still be together years later. Darrell and Sally's relationship is lovely, too—a more quietly steady thing that's very good for them both.
...I may or may not already have about a thousand words of Bill/Clarissa fanfic in my drafts, but I'm finding my lack of horse knowledge a bit of an obstacle. If anyone here happens to know about horses and riding and would be willing to give me some help with this, it'd be much appreciated!
And this morning I added another small entry to the D. K. Broster read-through with the short story The Questionable Parentage of Basil Grant (1905)—many thanks to
theseatheseatheopensea for bringing it to my attention! It's a weird but very funny parody of the detective stories of the period, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories. I kind of felt like I was missing some of the background I needed to really get the joke (despite knowing the Holmes stories pretty well—it's the context, I suppose), but it was very enjoyable all the same. And surprisingly many things to remind me of FotH—there are multiple Scottish characters, including a family named Grant, and several light-hearted references to Scottish history, ballads and Jacobites!
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Date: May. 29th, 2020 06:21 pm (UTC)And yay for post-canon fanfic, that's always very nice! :D
As for the Broster story, I don't know who she is trolling the most: the reader (because of all these references we are supposed to get!) or any of the authors she's poking fun at! :D The feeling I got is that Basil Grant ended up being related to Holmes via an unexpected "last minute" suprise ending of the kind Chesterton probably wouldn't have appreciated that much, haha... and the family tree makes me think of all the influence Stevenson and Doyle had on Chesterton? In any case, it's just fun to see all these detective tropes together! :D
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Date: May. 29th, 2020 07:24 pm (UTC)Hehe, yes, the story definitely came across like it was trolling a lot of people! And making fun of overly-convenient coincidental endings in detective stories, which was good fun.
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Date: May. 29th, 2020 07:40 pm (UTC)Now I'm even more curious to read Broster's short story collections. It really is interesting to see how versatile she seemed to be as a writer. I won't read them at night, though, just in case they are too spooky, hehe!
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Date: May. 29th, 2020 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 29th, 2020 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May. 30th, 2020 04:55 am (UTC)