![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Recent reading
The Diaries of Anne Lister, volume 1, edited by Helena Whitbread (written 1816-24, published 1988). I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and decided now was the time to get round to it. It is absolutely fascinating! Anne Lister writes about all sorts of things in her journal, and it's full of terribly interesting and useful historical detail on e.g. the practicalities of travel, details of food, the unstable political situation of the period, the social life of early-nineteenth-century Halifax and York, etc. etc. A lot of the detail she includes is not the sort of thing that often made it into fiction at this time, so that even the non-coded sections of the journal feel very immediate and down-to-earth in a way period writing written for publication doesn't tend to. And then there are the coded sections, of course! Really, really fascinating stuff—both the personal details of the relationships described and the generalities of how Lister managed to live in the world as a lesbian in a way that made sense to her and which she made legible to the women she was interested in, and also her thoughts on the subject as a whole. I was surprised in a few places by how 'modern' some of her ideas and reasoning seemed, and yet they are very much of their time, and the journal really is an invaluable source on how people in the past thought and talked about these things even when they didn't normally write about them. Sometimes Lister is annoyingly vague about exactly what happened or what was said, at other times she's startlingly detailed. Occasionally the editing annoyed me—it's not really clear just how much selecting and cutting Whitbread has done, but it's obviously quite a lot, and at times she steps in to summarise things that I'd quite like to have read in detail in the original—but mostly I'm just impressed by her achievement. On the other hand, reading this has confirmed me in my opinion that Anne Lister was really not a very admirable person, either generally or in how she conducted her relationships—the volume opens with her seducing her girlfriend's sister while they're both accompanying the girlfriend on her honeymoon, which is more or less representative; she's frequently dishonest and duplicitous, a pretty massive snob and, despite her own socially unconventional life, extremely conservative politically (I think her particular outlook/set of ideas is a very interesting one, but it's not a good one). Nevertheless I enjoyed reading about her life, her thoughts on it and her emotional experiences, aside from the historical aspects of the journal. I look forward to the second volume!
The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers (1951). Another one I'd had on the to-read list for ages, and finally managed to find at the library recently. The Ballad of the Sad Café is a strange little novella about an eccentric, reclusive woman who opens a 'café' (it seemed more like a pub to me, with the evening opening hours and the alcohol—are American bars not normally like that?—but never mind) in her tiny Southern US town with the help of the hunchbacked cousin who turns up mysteriously one day, and how ruin and tragedy eventually overtake them. The whole story is written in a fairytale-ish style, and told with very much a fairytale logic, and I loved it—McCullers makes that fairytale logic make perfect sense in a fairly modern American setting, and does so with a constant compelling strangeness which is really rather beautiful despite the equally strange tragedy of the story itself. And Miss Amelia herself is a highly memorable character who I liked a lot. Collected together with it are various shorter stories, which I didn't like so much—they're very good, but tend to focus on unpleasant and depressing aspects of life in a style that reminded me of some of the other mid-twentieth-century American stuff I've read and generally react to by just thinking I'm not interested in reading stories like that, and they're not at all in the same style or mood as the title story.
Far Away and Long Ago: A History of my Early Life by W. H. Hudson (1918). Something a bit different! I'd previously enjoyed some of Hudson's nature writing about the wildlife and countryside of England, where he lived in later life; this is his account of his childhood on the pampas of Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century, and the various human and animal sights and dramas surrounding him. He spends a lot of time describing the wildlife of the pampas, especially the birds, and I enjoyed these sections the best—Hudson has such a talent for vivid, imaginative description of the natural world and for finding the significance and beauty in descriptions of wildlife. But the historical stuff was also interesting—he describes the general state of life and society in nineteenth-century Argentina, both the remote countryside of his home and Buenos Aires as experienced on visits, and how some major historical events like the ongoing civil wars and the overthrow of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852 appeared to him as they happened. I knew nothing about any of this, and it was interesting to read about a new historical setting, brutal as some of the details were. I could have done without the racism, and the book is rather amusingly poorly paced (at one point Hudson says, whoops, I should have included this in an earlier chapter but I forgot, it'll have to go here instead; apparently editing just wasn't an option for him?), but on the whole a very enjoyable read.
The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers (1951). Another one I'd had on the to-read list for ages, and finally managed to find at the library recently. The Ballad of the Sad Café is a strange little novella about an eccentric, reclusive woman who opens a 'café' (it seemed more like a pub to me, with the evening opening hours and the alcohol—are American bars not normally like that?—but never mind) in her tiny Southern US town with the help of the hunchbacked cousin who turns up mysteriously one day, and how ruin and tragedy eventually overtake them. The whole story is written in a fairytale-ish style, and told with very much a fairytale logic, and I loved it—McCullers makes that fairytale logic make perfect sense in a fairly modern American setting, and does so with a constant compelling strangeness which is really rather beautiful despite the equally strange tragedy of the story itself. And Miss Amelia herself is a highly memorable character who I liked a lot. Collected together with it are various shorter stories, which I didn't like so much—they're very good, but tend to focus on unpleasant and depressing aspects of life in a style that reminded me of some of the other mid-twentieth-century American stuff I've read and generally react to by just thinking I'm not interested in reading stories like that, and they're not at all in the same style or mood as the title story.
Far Away and Long Ago: A History of my Early Life by W. H. Hudson (1918). Something a bit different! I'd previously enjoyed some of Hudson's nature writing about the wildlife and countryside of England, where he lived in later life; this is his account of his childhood on the pampas of Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century, and the various human and animal sights and dramas surrounding him. He spends a lot of time describing the wildlife of the pampas, especially the birds, and I enjoyed these sections the best—Hudson has such a talent for vivid, imaginative description of the natural world and for finding the significance and beauty in descriptions of wildlife. But the historical stuff was also interesting—he describes the general state of life and society in nineteenth-century Argentina, both the remote countryside of his home and Buenos Aires as experienced on visits, and how some major historical events like the ongoing civil wars and the overthrow of the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852 appeared to him as they happened. I knew nothing about any of this, and it was interesting to read about a new historical setting, brutal as some of the details were. I could have done without the racism, and the book is rather amusingly poorly paced (at one point Hudson says, whoops, I should have included this in an earlier chapter but I forgot, it'll have to go here instead; apparently editing just wasn't an option for him?), but on the whole a very enjoyable read.
no subject
That all sounds fun!... I shall have to try some more examples :D
no subject
I'd suggest some Flannery O'Connor, but oh my she IS bleak. :)
no subject
Hehe, I'll keep Flannery O'Connor in mind if I'm ever in the mood for something a bit gloomy :D