Recent reading
Jul. 8th, 2021 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeFramley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope (1861). The annual Barsetshire novel, and great fun as ever. This one introduces the rich and despotic widow Lady Lufton (she reminded me a little of Elizabeth Gaskell's Lady Ludlow), one of the grand figures of conservative Barsetshire. The plot follows the financial troubles of Mark Robarts, a young clergyman who has benefited perhaps a little too much from Lady Lufton's patronage and who gets into difficulties after trying to help an unreliable friend with money; and the love story between Lucy Robarts, Mark's sister who comes to live with him and his wife, and Lord Lufton, Lady Lufton's son and Mark's childhood friend. Trollope's characters are always brilliant, and I loved Lucy in particular—there's a sort of defensive self-deprecating seriously-joking tone to her emotional moments that's a rare thing to see in a Victorian heroine and which felt very human. There's also an amount of church politics and of social commentary—Trollope's characterisation of rival political factions as 'the gods' and 'the giants', complete with multiple-page-long mythological commentaries on their wrangling and dramas, was very entertaining. Besides this, the series has by now built up quite a crowd of side characters from previous novels who all make their reappearances, and I was especially happy to see Miss Dunstable again, who is as lively and entertaining as ever and who ends up finding a surprising but somehow appropriate happy marriage.
Invisible Differences by Julie Dachez and Mademoiselle Caroline (2016; translated by Edward Gauvin, 2020). I think this is the first proper graphic novel I've ever read! For book club, which is certainly broadening my reading nicely. It's Dachez's fictionalised autobiographical story (I'm not sure how fictionalised; there is a fun device where Caroline is also a character in the story, and their decision to write and draw the book together forms part of the plot) about her life with Asperger's syndrome (the term she uses): the confusion of life before diagnosis, how she got a diagnosis in her late twenties, learnt to embrace her 'differences' and found her place in the world as an autistic adult. I enjoyed it a lot! A lot of the descriptions were very recognisable, and I liked the use of art and colour: sensory overload is illustrated by the pictures going red and the space filling up with written-out sounds; the first part of the comic is in mostly black and white, with more colour introduced as Dachez's fictional counterpart becomes happier and more comfortable with herself. It's a fairly simple story with a straightforward Message to convey and not a great deal else to do (none of the messy fictional complexities of Convenience Store Woman, with which it makes an interesting comparison), but I think it does what it set out to do very well. I was taken aback at the positive mention of ABA therapy in the notes section, but it sounds like it's not much of a thing in France (which is apparently unusually bad at paying attention to autistic people at all), so I suppose the authors didn't know very much about it?
I've also finished the Raffles Discord read-along of A Thief in the Night, which was even more interesting and illuminating than the first two. There's always more in these stories the closer you look at them... Throughout,wolfiesulkingintheirtent has been developing a theory that in-universe narrator Bunny was actually deliberately using this book in particular to tell the world all about how amazing, kind, generous and overall a good person Raffles was, and I like this theory very much. Raffles, and the Raffles/Bunny relationship, certainly come across at their best in some of the stories here. <3
Invisible Differences by Julie Dachez and Mademoiselle Caroline (2016; translated by Edward Gauvin, 2020). I think this is the first proper graphic novel I've ever read! For book club, which is certainly broadening my reading nicely. It's Dachez's fictionalised autobiographical story (I'm not sure how fictionalised; there is a fun device where Caroline is also a character in the story, and their decision to write and draw the book together forms part of the plot) about her life with Asperger's syndrome (the term she uses): the confusion of life before diagnosis, how she got a diagnosis in her late twenties, learnt to embrace her 'differences' and found her place in the world as an autistic adult. I enjoyed it a lot! A lot of the descriptions were very recognisable, and I liked the use of art and colour: sensory overload is illustrated by the pictures going red and the space filling up with written-out sounds; the first part of the comic is in mostly black and white, with more colour introduced as Dachez's fictional counterpart becomes happier and more comfortable with herself. It's a fairly simple story with a straightforward Message to convey and not a great deal else to do (none of the messy fictional complexities of Convenience Store Woman, with which it makes an interesting comparison), but I think it does what it set out to do very well. I was taken aback at the positive mention of ABA therapy in the notes section, but it sounds like it's not much of a thing in France (which is apparently unusually bad at paying attention to autistic people at all), so I suppose the authors didn't know very much about it?
I've also finished the Raffles Discord read-along of A Thief in the Night, which was even more interesting and illuminating than the first two. There's always more in these stories the closer you look at them... Throughout,
wolfiesulkingintheirtent has been developing a theory that in-universe narrator Bunny was actually deliberately using this book in particular to tell the world all about how amazing, kind, generous and overall a good person Raffles was, and I like this theory very much. Raffles, and the Raffles/Bunny relationship, certainly come across at their best in some of the stories here. <3
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Date: Jul. 8th, 2021 07:31 pm (UTC)I've got to start reading Trollope! He's my mother's favourite author so I've heard about him a lot, but I've never actually read him.
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Date: Jul. 9th, 2021 04:39 pm (UTC)I took a while to get into Trollope's books—I started with The Warden and felt it was a bit too anti-reform (it's about what's basically the 1850s version of a Twitter storm), but have really enjoyed the series from Barchester Towers onward. Then there are the (many) other books he wrote, which I haven't read yet—lots more to get to...