End of year reading
Dec. 31st, 2020 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeFirst of all—since I believe there are a few people reading my journal who are mostly on Discord and/or Tumblr—if anyone would like to try out Dreamwidth/get to know the site better, starterpack has just got going and looks like being an excellent resource!
I've spent the last few days going, OK, I need to read a short book next to make sure I can fit it in before the end of the year, and have managed to do this three times before actually running out of year, so that worked. :D Here they are...
Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson (1901). I wanted some nice light non-fiction to complement my Yuletide reading, so went browsing the 'Birds' category on Gutenberg.org, as you do. I'm very happy to have found this! It's beautiful nature writing—both in Hudson's eye for detail and for imaginative and well-observed description, and in his ideas and arguments. The book is structured as a series of essays covering such topics as the beauty of the wood-warbler, the nesting habits of jackdaws, the tragic decline of the raven in lowland England, the folklore surrounding owls and, especially interestingly, Hudson's views on contemporary conservation questions, particularly hunting and egg-collecting. Hudson lived in England in later life and wrote this book there, but he grew up in Argentina, and his descriptions of the countryside and birds of the West Country are interspersed with anecdotes and wildlife from the South American pampas, which I really enjoyed (the upland goose sounds like a lovely bird). The angles taken on everything are always original and interesting, and the whole thing is a delight to read.
White Cockades: An Incident of the Forty-Five by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1887). A Jacobite adventure from the author of Imre: A Memorandum, oh yes :D This book is set in the summer of 1746, when our plucky young hero Andrew Boyd, the son of a Highland landowner, stumbles across a Jacobite fugitive hiding amongst the heather. Andrew and his father take in the man, who introduces himself as Lord Geoffry Armitage, and Andrew more or less textually falls in love with him. Then the Hanoverian soldiers arrive... It's all a very gripping adventure—a much less ambitious book than Flight of the Heron, of course, not so historically detailed and IMO much less geographically convincing. It's also sentimental and a bit overly sensational (I guessed the big plot twist in the first chapter)—but nonetheless a very fun read for all that. I liked the relationship between Andrew and Geoffry, all the more for knowing the author probably did mean it like that, and I enjoyed the drama of the soldiers—I thought Captain Jermain was a good portrayal of how much damage the carelessly powerful can cause without necessarily being malicious. (Keith Windham wouldn't like him at all!). And, you know—I'd have to check the dates, but I don't think it would be terribly difficult to cross it over with Flight of the Heron...
The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (1910). This is a boarding school story, which I always like, and it's a turn-of-the-century Australian novel that isn't by E. W. Hornung, which made for an interesting comparison!—this is a side of Australian life Hornung presumably didn't see much of. The story opens with twelve-year-old Laura Rambotham being sent off to school in Melbourne, and follows her subsequent adventures and misadventures there. My overall feeling is that it's a good book but not necessarily a very enjoyable one. For one thing it's a painfully accurate depiction of the experience of being twelve years old, not knowing how to say or do the right thing and suffering terrible embarrassment as a result. Laura is a very interesting character, deeply flawed and painfully sympathetic, but the other characters all seemed more or less unlikeable, and there's very little warmth to the book's relationships. It is pretty subtextually queer, which was interesting—Laura is continually uninterested in boys, and repeatedly clashes against social expectations about it in ways that again were both very true to life and kind of excruciating to read. At one point she falls in love with an older girl in that sort of desperate, jealous way of a crush when you're an insecure teenager with no way of understanding your own feelings. The ending seemed to be trying to introduce more hope, but did very little to justify it, and felt oddly incomplete as a result—I felt there was a whole extra novel in those hints about Laura's future in the last chapter.
starterpack has just got going and looks like being an excellent resource!I've spent the last few days going, OK, I need to read a short book next to make sure I can fit it in before the end of the year, and have managed to do this three times before actually running out of year, so that worked. :D Here they are...
Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson (1901). I wanted some nice light non-fiction to complement my Yuletide reading, so went browsing the 'Birds' category on Gutenberg.org, as you do. I'm very happy to have found this! It's beautiful nature writing—both in Hudson's eye for detail and for imaginative and well-observed description, and in his ideas and arguments. The book is structured as a series of essays covering such topics as the beauty of the wood-warbler, the nesting habits of jackdaws, the tragic decline of the raven in lowland England, the folklore surrounding owls and, especially interestingly, Hudson's views on contemporary conservation questions, particularly hunting and egg-collecting. Hudson lived in England in later life and wrote this book there, but he grew up in Argentina, and his descriptions of the countryside and birds of the West Country are interspersed with anecdotes and wildlife from the South American pampas, which I really enjoyed (the upland goose sounds like a lovely bird). The angles taken on everything are always original and interesting, and the whole thing is a delight to read.
White Cockades: An Incident of the Forty-Five by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1887). A Jacobite adventure from the author of Imre: A Memorandum, oh yes :D This book is set in the summer of 1746, when our plucky young hero Andrew Boyd, the son of a Highland landowner, stumbles across a Jacobite fugitive hiding amongst the heather. Andrew and his father take in the man, who introduces himself as Lord Geoffry Armitage, and Andrew more or less textually falls in love with him. Then the Hanoverian soldiers arrive... It's all a very gripping adventure—a much less ambitious book than Flight of the Heron, of course, not so historically detailed and IMO much less geographically convincing. It's also sentimental and a bit overly sensational (I guessed the big plot twist in the first chapter)—but nonetheless a very fun read for all that. I liked the relationship between Andrew and Geoffry, all the more for knowing the author probably did mean it like that, and I enjoyed the drama of the soldiers—I thought Captain Jermain was a good portrayal of how much damage the carelessly powerful can cause without necessarily being malicious. (Keith Windham wouldn't like him at all!). And, you know—I'd have to check the dates, but I don't think it would be terribly difficult to cross it over with Flight of the Heron...
The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (1910). This is a boarding school story, which I always like, and it's a turn-of-the-century Australian novel that isn't by E. W. Hornung, which made for an interesting comparison!—this is a side of Australian life Hornung presumably didn't see much of. The story opens with twelve-year-old Laura Rambotham being sent off to school in Melbourne, and follows her subsequent adventures and misadventures there. My overall feeling is that it's a good book but not necessarily a very enjoyable one. For one thing it's a painfully accurate depiction of the experience of being twelve years old, not knowing how to say or do the right thing and suffering terrible embarrassment as a result. Laura is a very interesting character, deeply flawed and painfully sympathetic, but the other characters all seemed more or less unlikeable, and there's very little warmth to the book's relationships. It is pretty subtextually queer, which was interesting—Laura is continually uninterested in boys, and repeatedly clashes against social expectations about it in ways that again were both very true to life and kind of excruciating to read. At one point she falls in love with an older girl in that sort of desperate, jealous way of a crush when you're an insecure teenager with no way of understanding your own feelings. The ending seemed to be trying to introduce more hope, but did very little to justify it, and felt oddly incomplete as a result—I felt there was a whole extra novel in those hints about Laura's future in the last chapter.
no subject
Date: Feb. 9th, 2021 05:57 pm (UTC)LOL, of course EPS recced his own books anonymously in a 700-page defence of homosexuality, that's exactly the sort of thing he would do. (I'm picturing him in fandom, going on anon and reccing his own fic...!) And of course, while the book was obvious enough, it's nice to have it actually confirmed. I love it :D (I like Andrew being described as 'a rustic youth', too—I wonder if he'd call Ewen 'rustic'???) What other books does he rec besides his own?
no subject
Date: Feb. 9th, 2021 09:36 pm (UTC)Hahaha, and the idea of EPS in fandom, reccing his own fic anonymously is amusing me to no end! ;D It's very fitting! And "White cockades" is pretty much Jacobite RPF, right?, so it makes perfect sense! (And ohh, I don't know if he would use "rustic" to describe Ewen, or simply borrow "my own young Achiles", or "my warrior", or "magnificent specimen" from Broster, and go from there, because he'd agree that the queer vibe is already Right There... and he'd definitely have some fun with the kilt scene, I think!)
In his treatise, he does something like in "Imre", where he mentions a bunch of notable historical people he thought were queer, but here he goes way deeper and mentions some of their life and work, so he goes from the ancient greeks to his time, covering music, art, literature, religion, science, and both male and (some) female queer people, it's all pretty interesting...
...but you asked for the book recs, so I'll stick to those, instead of getting carried away ;) He mentions "classics" like Wilde and Whitman and Shakespeare, and things like Saint Augustin's "Confessions", Omar Khayam's poetry, "Hyperion" by Hölderlin, "South-Sea Idylls" by Charles Warren Stoddard, and also that Vachell novel I think you mentioned a while ago, hehe. And of course, he mentions the Bible, and how it doesn't ever condemn homosexuality! (While I kind of side-eye the idea that "the treason of Judas was the madness of a jealous homosexual passion", EP-S does suggest Jesus was "the highest type of Uranian that the world could see", so I forgive him, because imagining the haters' reaction to that makes me sooo happy, haha! And he also says that "the thought of Christ as an Uranian, as understanding the gamut of the homosexual's joys and sorrows" can be a source of comfort for queer people, which seems like a very modern idea, at least I know I've seen it expressed in communities of LGBT+ people of faith. And he does mention the future possibility of same-sex marriage somewhere else in the treaty, so his open mind doesn't surprise me! <3)
Anyway, I got sidetracked, as much as I tried to avoid it, hehe... but there are many more "recs", and I don't want this comment to get even longer, so I recommend poking at the whole chapter whenever you have some time, especially the part named "The Uranian in Belles-lettres", and the one named "Homosexualism in English Literature, and in English Literary Circles", which might interest you!
But if you want a quicker list, complete with self-recs and even quoting a bit from one that is apparently lost/nonexistent (or just him trolling the reader?... I wouldn't be too surprised), one of his short stories has just that! (the story itself is Very Tragic, but the relevant bit is here, and continued here)!
Oops, this got long... but who am I kidding, sorry not sorry! ;)
no subject
Date: Feb. 11th, 2021 05:25 pm (UTC)(and he shipped Jesus/Judas too, wow, I wonder what he'd have made of Jesus Christ Superstar...!)
Thank you very much for all this info, especially those links—the length of The Intersexes is a bit daunting, but it looks like at least parts of it are worth the read, and I shall have to have a look through that chapter at some point. EPS's ideas are so imaginative and admirably wide-ranging, as well as so much ahead of his time, even if some of them are a bit weird—I like those religious points, and I really admire him going through of all that classic and contemporary literature and art and so on to build up a sort of cultural foundation—the 'literary sympathies of his type' that story talks about. And the short stories sound good too!
no subject
Date: Feb. 11th, 2021 09:45 pm (UTC)And he definitely seemed to be ahead of his time in many ways, right? While I side-eye some of his opinions about women and "effeminate men", and it sounds like he was a bit of a snob, mostly he seems to have been one of the good ones! :) And definitely, it's great that he preserved this excellent queer "cultural foundation", in a 700+ page book that expresses that queer people are awesome and natural and have always been around... so even if it drags on a bit, what he wrote was definitely important, and I find it very validating! (Many times, when I want to cheer myself up, I think of the ending of "Imre", and it always makes me happy! <3)
no subject
Date: Feb. 12th, 2021 05:20 pm (UTC)Oh, thanks for that link! The stories sound great. Aww, and the ending of Imre is always a good thing to remember. :)