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Recent (-ish) reading
May. 22nd, 2023 06:57 pmRight then, catching up on those reading posts... :)
Re-read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson in preparation for seeing the play! Of course it was also useful to refresh the canon details in my mind for writing my longfic. And all in all I love it better than ever. It's funny how these fannish obsessions go; my initial review from two years ago is really rather lukewarm, but subsequent re-reading (along with fic-reading, discussion, etc.) increased my appreciation for it—in stark contrast to Flight of the Heron, with which I fell head over heels in love at first read and which I instantly knew would be an all-time fave. So it goes!
After that, tired by travelling, I wanted some good familiar comfort reading, so I re-read Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. Aww, Discworld. :) I can't really ever read these books with my present-day adult reading brain; it's too much bound up in the perceptions and feelings of the first wondrous discovery of these books, aged about twelve, with only a little genre or cultural context and definitely not getting many of the jokes and references. But I love Granny Weatherwax as much as ever, Granny Weatherwax&Nanny Ogg is my all-time platonic OTP, and the subverted-fairytales plot and setting of this book are very enjoyable.
The Lairds of Dun by Violet Jacob (1931). Violet Jacob (née Kennedy-Erskine) was a member of the family of Erskine of Dun, who had occupied their Angus estate since the fourteenth century (her brother was the nineteenth laird); as well as being an author of poetry and prose fiction she was an amateur historian, and this book is the result of her researches into the history of her family. There's a lot of really fascinating stuff in there! We learn about the Erskine ancestor who was a major figure in the Scottish Reformation, negotiating between Mary, Queen of Scots and more radical reformers like John Knox, his close friend; the laird who tried to poison the young heirs who were his nephews, Princes in the Tower style, and who along with his sisters was found guilty of murder (happily, one of the boys survived and later inherited); the 'masterful spinster' who inherited the estate upon the failure of the male Erskine line in the nineteenth century and who was extremely socially proud and a fanatical hunter. But most interesting of all, at least to Flemington fans, is chapter XII, on the eighteenth century and the Jacobite risings. Read this if you want to know exactly where David Balnillo and James Logie come from!
New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson (1882). A collection of stories which I picked up in a very nice edition in a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh. It's a bit of a various collection! There are a couple of sets of linked short stories set in contemporary London, which are both adventure-mystery stories having to do with crime and immoral dealings, and which really reminded me of the sort of thing E. W. Hornung writes. (They were contemporaries, just about; I would guess that Hornung read Stevenson's books). There's a novella set by the Firth of Forth, which is another exciting adventure story and also rather Hornungish; it features a romance which was in theory pretty interesting but in practice very dull and underdeveloped, and which—in comparison to the central not-textually-a-romance in Kidnapped—I think serves to illustrate how convention and assumed expectations can hamper real feeling and relationship development in writing. And there are some stories, two historical and one contemporary, set in France, which explore various interesting ideas of history, morality and art. The title is odd—in the first set of stories there are 'author's notes' referring to an apparent framing device of these being translations of old Arabian tales, similar to the original Thousand and One Nights, but it's never really explained fully and is dropped for the later stories. Altogether they made for a good read—the ideas are frequently intriguing, the adventure stories are good fun and the prose, if it isn't Hornung's, has a very nice late-Victorian construction—but the charm and warmth of Kidnapped are not here, and so far I've failed to find them in any of Stevenson's other books. At some point I will read the sequel to this one, The Dynamiter, which Louis co-wrote with Fanny—I look forward to that.
Re-read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson in preparation for seeing the play! Of course it was also useful to refresh the canon details in my mind for writing my longfic. And all in all I love it better than ever. It's funny how these fannish obsessions go; my initial review from two years ago is really rather lukewarm, but subsequent re-reading (along with fic-reading, discussion, etc.) increased my appreciation for it—in stark contrast to Flight of the Heron, with which I fell head over heels in love at first read and which I instantly knew would be an all-time fave. So it goes!
After that, tired by travelling, I wanted some good familiar comfort reading, so I re-read Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. Aww, Discworld. :) I can't really ever read these books with my present-day adult reading brain; it's too much bound up in the perceptions and feelings of the first wondrous discovery of these books, aged about twelve, with only a little genre or cultural context and definitely not getting many of the jokes and references. But I love Granny Weatherwax as much as ever, Granny Weatherwax&Nanny Ogg is my all-time platonic OTP, and the subverted-fairytales plot and setting of this book are very enjoyable.
The Lairds of Dun by Violet Jacob (1931). Violet Jacob (née Kennedy-Erskine) was a member of the family of Erskine of Dun, who had occupied their Angus estate since the fourteenth century (her brother was the nineteenth laird); as well as being an author of poetry and prose fiction she was an amateur historian, and this book is the result of her researches into the history of her family. There's a lot of really fascinating stuff in there! We learn about the Erskine ancestor who was a major figure in the Scottish Reformation, negotiating between Mary, Queen of Scots and more radical reformers like John Knox, his close friend; the laird who tried to poison the young heirs who were his nephews, Princes in the Tower style, and who along with his sisters was found guilty of murder (happily, one of the boys survived and later inherited); the 'masterful spinster' who inherited the estate upon the failure of the male Erskine line in the nineteenth century and who was extremely socially proud and a fanatical hunter. But most interesting of all, at least to Flemington fans, is chapter XII, on the eighteenth century and the Jacobite risings. Read this if you want to know exactly where David Balnillo and James Logie come from!
New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson (1882). A collection of stories which I picked up in a very nice edition in a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh. It's a bit of a various collection! There are a couple of sets of linked short stories set in contemporary London, which are both adventure-mystery stories having to do with crime and immoral dealings, and which really reminded me of the sort of thing E. W. Hornung writes. (They were contemporaries, just about; I would guess that Hornung read Stevenson's books). There's a novella set by the Firth of Forth, which is another exciting adventure story and also rather Hornungish; it features a romance which was in theory pretty interesting but in practice very dull and underdeveloped, and which—in comparison to the central not-textually-a-romance in Kidnapped—I think serves to illustrate how convention and assumed expectations can hamper real feeling and relationship development in writing. And there are some stories, two historical and one contemporary, set in France, which explore various interesting ideas of history, morality and art. The title is odd—in the first set of stories there are 'author's notes' referring to an apparent framing device of these being translations of old Arabian tales, similar to the original Thousand and One Nights, but it's never really explained fully and is dropped for the later stories. Altogether they made for a good read—the ideas are frequently intriguing, the adventure stories are good fun and the prose, if it isn't Hornung's, has a very nice late-Victorian construction—but the charm and warmth of Kidnapped are not here, and so far I've failed to find them in any of Stevenson's other books. At some point I will read the sequel to this one, The Dynamiter, which Louis co-wrote with Fanny—I look forward to that.
