Recent reading
Jun. 15th, 2021 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeA nice mixture—although I think I've now switched over to a mood of wanting to read absolutely nothing but Victorians for the rest of the year. I have plenty of Victorian books on my 'ooh, I should get round to reading that someday' list, so we'll see how that goes. :D
A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym by Hazel Holt (1990). I thought it was about time to have a look at this—I'd already picked up bits and pieces about Pym's life from various places, and really enjoyed reading more about it and her. It's interesting both as an individual life and as a piece of history. Pym seems to have had the sort of attitude that Terry Pratchett describes as how a witch's mind works, in IIRC one of the Tiffany Aching books—an incredible ability to see herself, her feelings and actions from an objective point of view, even while experiencing them in the moment, and to reflect on the randomness, joy and heartbreak of everyday life and turn them into stories. I think my favourite thing about this book was how clearly it shows that ability developing into the books I love. (heh, this makes me imagine a story about a Pymian excellent woman becoming a Lolly Willowes-style witch—that'd be fun...) Then, on the other hand, 1913-1980 is a very historically interesting lifespan to have had, and I enjoyed seeing Pym's life as an individual experience of twentieth-century history—from the family backstory that could have come straight from a late-Victorian social novel, to her experiences during the Second World War and then of post-war London office work. Hazel Holt wrote this book to go along with A Very Private Eye, the collection of Pym's diaries and letters which she edited—I've not read that one yet, so will certainly get to it soon.
The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte M. Yonge (1853). A Lot to Ask talks in several places about Barbara Pym's favourite books and the literary influences on her own writing. One of her favourite authors was Charlotte M. Yonge, and since I'd had this one sitting around on my e-reader for a while I decided it'd be an appropriate time to try it. I'm glad I did, because it is a proper Victorian novel. It's about Guy Morville, who at eighteen years old inherits the grand, crumbling Gothic estate of Redclyffe; under the terms of his grandfather's will Guy can't actually control his property until he's twenty-five, so we meet him going to live with his new guardian, Mr Edmonstone, and his family. The rest of the plot is about the developing relationships between the Edmonstones, Guy and his arrogant and conceited cousin Philip Morville; the style is fairly dialogue-heavy and pretty engaging as brick-length Victorian novels go, and I found the characters and their interactions brilliantly lively. (Charles was my favourite, and I loved the relationship between him and Guy, especially during the gambling accusation bit). In mood it's a bit of an odd one. The set-up of Guy's backstory and position as a character is very dramatic (the book's Wikipedia page calls him Byronic, which I think is hardly fair; but he gets the Curse of Bad Ancestry coming and going, with evil depraved aristocrats on one side and morally dubious lower-class people on the other), but the development and resolution are far more sedate and morally edifying. It is a very religious book, although largely in expression of conventional Victorian piety—after the Pym recommendation I was hoping for a bit more Oxford Movement-type stuff, and the sort of religion-in-fiction books I like tend to be more about the place of religion in society and how that interacts with characters' personal faith (actually, the sort of religion-in-fiction book I like is A Glass of Blessings... I think it's Pillars of the House that Pym got the name Wilmet from, so I might read that one next).
Life as a Unicorn by Amrou Al-Kadhi (2019). Read for book club—this is Al-Kadhi's memoir describing their life growing up in Dubai, Bahrain and the UK, and the development of their queer identity and the very various interactions between that and the Muslim faith in which they were raised. A lot of interesting stuff—there are some (vivid, sometimes harrowing) descriptions of very specific experiences, some of which were quite familiar to me and others completely unfamiliar, and I feel like I learnt something from it. I admired the 'narrative' style in parts (that 'creating a story out of the complications of real life' thing again, in fact), although some of the ideas could have done with a bit more development and perhaps a bit more space, both on the page and in life (Al-Kadhi was only born in 1990, and one of the things that came up in book club discussion was that that's a bit young to be writing a memoir, perhaps especially one about such personal and traumatic subjects).
A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym by Hazel Holt (1990). I thought it was about time to have a look at this—I'd already picked up bits and pieces about Pym's life from various places, and really enjoyed reading more about it and her. It's interesting both as an individual life and as a piece of history. Pym seems to have had the sort of attitude that Terry Pratchett describes as how a witch's mind works, in IIRC one of the Tiffany Aching books—an incredible ability to see herself, her feelings and actions from an objective point of view, even while experiencing them in the moment, and to reflect on the randomness, joy and heartbreak of everyday life and turn them into stories. I think my favourite thing about this book was how clearly it shows that ability developing into the books I love. (heh, this makes me imagine a story about a Pymian excellent woman becoming a Lolly Willowes-style witch—that'd be fun...) Then, on the other hand, 1913-1980 is a very historically interesting lifespan to have had, and I enjoyed seeing Pym's life as an individual experience of twentieth-century history—from the family backstory that could have come straight from a late-Victorian social novel, to her experiences during the Second World War and then of post-war London office work. Hazel Holt wrote this book to go along with A Very Private Eye, the collection of Pym's diaries and letters which she edited—I've not read that one yet, so will certainly get to it soon.
The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte M. Yonge (1853). A Lot to Ask talks in several places about Barbara Pym's favourite books and the literary influences on her own writing. One of her favourite authors was Charlotte M. Yonge, and since I'd had this one sitting around on my e-reader for a while I decided it'd be an appropriate time to try it. I'm glad I did, because it is a proper Victorian novel. It's about Guy Morville, who at eighteen years old inherits the grand, crumbling Gothic estate of Redclyffe; under the terms of his grandfather's will Guy can't actually control his property until he's twenty-five, so we meet him going to live with his new guardian, Mr Edmonstone, and his family. The rest of the plot is about the developing relationships between the Edmonstones, Guy and his arrogant and conceited cousin Philip Morville; the style is fairly dialogue-heavy and pretty engaging as brick-length Victorian novels go, and I found the characters and their interactions brilliantly lively. (Charles was my favourite, and I loved the relationship between him and Guy, especially during the gambling accusation bit). In mood it's a bit of an odd one. The set-up of Guy's backstory and position as a character is very dramatic (the book's Wikipedia page calls him Byronic, which I think is hardly fair; but he gets the Curse of Bad Ancestry coming and going, with evil depraved aristocrats on one side and morally dubious lower-class people on the other), but the development and resolution are far more sedate and morally edifying. It is a very religious book, although largely in expression of conventional Victorian piety—after the Pym recommendation I was hoping for a bit more Oxford Movement-type stuff, and the sort of religion-in-fiction books I like tend to be more about the place of religion in society and how that interacts with characters' personal faith (actually, the sort of religion-in-fiction book I like is A Glass of Blessings... I think it's Pillars of the House that Pym got the name Wilmet from, so I might read that one next).
Life as a Unicorn by Amrou Al-Kadhi (2019). Read for book club—this is Al-Kadhi's memoir describing their life growing up in Dubai, Bahrain and the UK, and the development of their queer identity and the very various interactions between that and the Muslim faith in which they were raised. A lot of interesting stuff—there are some (vivid, sometimes harrowing) descriptions of very specific experiences, some of which were quite familiar to me and others completely unfamiliar, and I feel like I learnt something from it. I admired the 'narrative' style in parts (that 'creating a story out of the complications of real life' thing again, in fact), although some of the ideas could have done with a bit more development and perhaps a bit more space, both on the page and in life (Al-Kadhi was only born in 1990, and one of the things that came up in book club discussion was that that's a bit young to be writing a memoir, perhaps especially one about such personal and traumatic subjects).
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Date: Jun. 15th, 2021 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Jun. 16th, 2021 03:38 pm (UTC)