regshoe

The last reading post of 2025—I'll discuss the traditional new year's Sutcliff shortly. :)

Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell (1851-61; collection edited and published 2000). A collection of Gaskell's shorter fiction, the actual degree of Gothicness varying considerably: some of the stories are proper supernatural horror ('The Old Nurse's Story' is especially memorably chilling); others are still horror but more mundane, and 'The Crooked Branch' in particular is just a sad story that wouldn't have been out of place alongside Gaskell's other domestic fiction in the 'Cousin Phyllis' collection that I read a while ago. I enjoyed them all, however—she's an author with range! Besides 'The Old Nurse's Story', ones especially worth mentioning are 'Lois the Witch', Gaskell's take on the notorious witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts; and 'The Grey Woman', which is an enjoyably femslashy adventure story.

The Cuckoo's Lea: The Forgotten History of Birds and Place by Michael J. Warren (2025). About birds and place, primarily through discussion of how and why birds appear in English place names and what that might tell us about how the medieval people who came up with those names thought about places and birds. This is also obviously relevant to modern conservation, as sadly many of the birds are no longer found in the places named after them ('crane' is apparently one of the birds most commonly appearing in place names; there are only a handful of them in Britain now). The title refers to Yaxley in Cambridgeshire, by the way, geac pronounced 'yak' being Anglo-Saxon for cuckoo. It's a very interesting subject and an interesting book, though I thought Warren was a little bit too poetic for my tastes, and especially too quick to go into poeticising 'what does this mean?' rather than solid intellectual curiosity about mysterious facts like mismatches between the distribution of birds in place names and the (likely historical) distribution of real birds. I enjoyed all the Anglo-Saxon bird poetry. Warren then lost all my sympathy and admiration in the epilogue, where he tries to talk about the deep personal meaning to him of having moved with his family from one place to another over a long distance with no acknowledgement of the fairly non-poetic reasons why that's something parents should not do to their children. Worth reading for the historical linguistics, but if you want a book by someone who understands why and how places matter, read Howards End.

A Murder of Quality by John le Carré (1962). The second Smiley novel is a murder mystery rather than a spy story—the spy thing is only directly relevant because Smiley is dragged into the murder mystery by a former spy colleague—and I like murder mysteries better than spy novels on the whole, so I liked this. It's set at a public school and is very interesting as a portrayal of that setting in the post-war period, though it's not at all a school story, the major characters being mostly teachers and their wives. It's also very much About Class: the murder victim is the wife of a teacher from an unusually lowly background, and much of the dramatic backstory revealed as the murder is investigated involves the tension around the husband having done his best to forget his origins and integrate into the public-schoolmaster class while the wife did not (religion is part of this: they were both originally Nonconformists, but he converted to the CoE while she continued to attend the local chapel until her death). I was annoyed by how everyone, including characters from the Midlands, kept referring to the Midlands as the North, and disappointed by the lack of Mendel (does he reappear in any later books?), and also what's with saying at the start that the action takes place 'as the Lent Half (as the Easter term was called) drew to its close' and then it later becomes clear from various seasonal references that it's actually not only (the equivalent of) Lent term but fairly early on in Lent term, what term/half system is this place using?, but otherwise enjoyed this one very much as a well-constructed twisty mystery with interesting setting and themes.

The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless by Eliza Haywood (1751). A solid eighteenth-century brick following the adventures in London society and courtship of the young protagonist, who is kind, generous, good-hearted and not at all vicious but who is nevertheless rather—you'll never guess what Betsy's central character flaw is. (There is a lot of extremely unsubtle character naming in this book.) It's one of those books that I found interesting rather than liking exactly. Much of it is an illustration of a contemporary sexual morality which can accurately be described as victim-blaming and double standards and not much else; the early part of the book seems to shy away from portraying controversial subjects (one character attempts abortion but fails; another sets in motion legal proceedings to divorce his wife, but dies before the divorce can be completed), and later on there's a sequence which is kind of a shockingly bold repudiation of conventional morality and also kind of really isn't, which was a bit frustrating. Betsy is really a very likeable character, though, and there's a lot of enjoyable overwrought drama and fun eighteenth-century language. (Haywood consistently spells the possessive 'its' with an apostrophe, among other things.)

The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys by Forrest Reid (1906). A strange, dreamy, virtually-textually queer book that isn't a school story at all despite being about the relationship between two boys at school and very little else. (We see almost nothing of other boys, teachers, lessons, painstakingly-detailed cricket matches or school affairs in general; the one time the book acknowledges the wider world it's to comment 'democracy, how ghastly' and then move straight on.) The writing style is strikingly modern. I enjoyed it, although neither the style nor the relationship development is the sort of thing I really get attached to. Also, a gay relationship beginning with one character confessing to the other that they've already met them in a dream as a child is a weird thing for a book like this to have in common with Carmilla.

Amateur City by Katherine V. Forrest (1984). I had to know what this lesbian detective genre was all about, but this book—in which lesbian police detective Kate Delafield solves the mystery of who murdered the world's worst boss in a big corporate office building, and also isn't the main witness in the case cute?—was a bit of a disappointment. I don't get on with Forrest's writing, I think; then police procedurals are not the kind of detective story I like, and the characters and relationships in this one were not appealing to me. (I can't say I was contrary enough to like Ellen's horrible girlfriend, who does treat her pretty badly, but I was annoyed on her behalf because Forrest was so clearly writing her as a cardboard villain and Ellen just blithely cheats on her and still hasn't come clean and/or broken up with her by the end of the book. That's not a happy ending!)

I am not going to read another one of the historicals next, said I; I'm going to read this one, even if it's absolutely terrible. Well, it's not absolutely terrible; I don't know that I'd call it good, exactly, or bad, exactly, but it's certainly an experience of a book. Was I expecting anything else at this point? No, not really. Have some thoughts.

( Come all ye fair and tender ladies... )

I think it was the introduction to my copy of Kidnapped that pointed out that one of RLS's favourite themes, and the reason why Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are not quite as unalike as contemporary reviewers thought they were, is duality: two people who seem in some ways completely different and significantly opposed, but who actually have a lot in common, depend on each other, and ultimately form two sides of the same coin (as the slash dragon from BBC Merlin might have put it). Kidnapped is the relatively happy and fluffy (though not without depth) version of this, Jekyll and Hyde the seriously dark and twisted version. The Master of Ballantrae (1889), besides being RLS's other Jacobite novel, is another and an intriguing development of this theme.

( They said he's gone to America )

I also have book reviews to catch up on!

Lord Dismiss Us (1967) is a funny book in several ways. It is a novel about the Problem of Homosexuality in Boarding Schools, and in some ways a reappraisal of the boarding school novel tradition from the perspective of the later, more adult fiction which can deal more openly with homosexuality than those older books did. It takes place over a single term at a fictional public school whose new headmaster goes on a crusade against entrenched 'immorality', with various consequences.

( Love is a burning thing... )

Alison's Easter Adventure by Sheila Stuart (1950). Picked up at the second-hand bookshop thanks to the lovely cover illustration, which shows two teenagers—main characters Alison Campbell and her brother Niall—in kilts running across a Highland hillside and promises much Adventure. I didn't realise at first that it's one entry in a long series which apparently has quite a lot of continuity, because the Adventure involves tracking down the final member of a criminal gang the rest of whom were dealt with in a previous book, and the whole thing is coordinated by the Campbells' uncle who works for the Secret Service. I couldn't help feeling that it was all a bit too well-organised for a proper children's adventure book, but there is a lot of excitement and enjoyable scenery on the way.


By Marsh and by Moor by Annick Trent (2025). Oh, dear.

So, to start with the things I did like: I've said before in some of my Hornblower reviews that I could wish for a story about some ordinary seaman who was pressed into the navy and experiences its cruelty and injustice and hates it and eventually escapes and gets a happy ending, and this is that story, or at least the last part of that story! The book opens with one half of the main couple, Jed Trevithick, washing up on the shore of the Bristol Channel having deserted from what I think is actually one of Hornblower's own ships shortly before Hornblower takes charge of it. Here he meets Solomon Dyer, the other half of the couple, and they go on the run from the still very much active press gang together. I appreciated this setting and the general sort of historical detail and background that Trent is always good at.

The rest of it:

And, to be fair, one of the problems was my own fault for misunderstanding the promotional blurbs: I was expecting smugglers and there were no smugglers, and that was disappointing! In general I felt the book didn't really have the excitement of a proper adventure novel, but of course it isn't an adventure novel, it's a romance novel, so it's an unfair standard.

Anyway: so I was getting into the middle of the book, enjoying it on the whole but feeling mildly annoyed by some things the way I often am when trying to read modern romance novels: the relationship is insecure and untrusting and yet the whole thing is also really nice in a grating way, it's like turning my id inside out; the sex scenes are annoying; there are occasional lapses in historical-feeling language. The rather tediously moustache-twirling abusive ex—who also shares Christopher Drawlight's job leading young gentlemen into financial ruin and, just in case we didn't realise he's bad, also embezzles charitable funds; he probably kicks puppies too—didn't help matters. But what really didn't help matters was—look, I knew the author had compared this book to Jamaica Inn, but I don't think I really believed it because I do quite like Trent's previous books; and then going on through the book I realised there were actually several deliberate references being made and went, ugh, why are you making references to that piece of trash, and was more annoyed. And then we got to the ending, and... To be maximally fair to Trent, the ending of this book is not nearly as bad as the ending of Jamaica Inn and I would not have reacted so strongly against it if it hadn't been so obviously a deliberate homage. But the ending of Jamaica Inn is so bad that the only possible 'homage' is a complete repudiation; you can't do 'the same thing happens, but in a slightly different way so it's good now'. As it was the whole thing was just a nice reminder that the things that repel me in het romance can, done well enough, repel me in m/m too. No, Jed, cried I! Life has changed, but the things that mattered to you before can and should still matter, despite the specific and convenient contrivance about your sister; I believe they did, and you should not throw them all over for a completely different life wrapped up in your new love interest! Do NOT commend all the rest, though fair and wise, to cold oblivion even if you are gay!! I don't know; I see what Trent was trying to do, I think; but relationships between characters and places mean a lot to me, and I can't look at this one being held out as supposedly important all through the story and then crushed so cruelly in favour of a romance which already has the upper hand and accept it as a happy ending.

(Look, if you had to then the least you could have done was also include a creepy-looking disabled character who's just a person and isn't evil.)

(There's also the bit where Solomon betrays Jed—actually betrays him in a way so brazen I read it and went, ha, there's no way you actually had him do that, there'll be a twist and a clever plan, right? and then there... wasn't? He hoped he'd be able to manage something to help Jed escape but that was it, and events prove he was in fact wrong to hope so, and the twist/clever plan by which they actually end up escaping is unrelated. And, no, I don't think that's the sort of thing you forgive your love interest for after one conversation or ideally ever, actually!)

Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham (1930). This is a fascinating bit of outsider POV writing, and also of writing about writing. It's narrated in first person by the author Willie Ashenden (who shares his name with, and may actually be (?), the protagonist of some spy stories Somerset Maugham also wrote; Wikipedia tells me the spy character is also a novelist and that WSM himself worked for the Secret Service during WWI)—anyway, whether or not he's a spy, Ashenden is contacted by a writer acquaintance, Alroy Kear, who is preparing to write a biography of a third, recently deceased writer, Edward Driffield, at the request of Driffield's widow. Ashenden knew Driffield earlier in life and Kear hopes that he can provide some material. But his recollections of Driffield, and especially of Driffield's first wife Rosie—which he proceeds to set before the reader at some length—are not quite the suitable biographical material for which Kear and the second Mrs Driffield were hoping. I enjoyed WSM's prose—he has that early twentieth-century precision and fluency of vocabulary and sentence structure without the density and sometimes difficult intricacy of earlier writers—and the practical and social (sometimes downright gossipy) details about the lives and careers of writers at this period. (I enjoyed the dig at Aspects of the Novel, agreeing as I do that the best, if not quite the only, way to write novels is indeed like Mr E. M. Forster.) But the book is also a more serious examination of the relationship between life and writing, and the final chapter is an excellent twist/payoff of what you didn't realise at the time was foreshadowing/reframing of things referred to apparently casually earlier on, which makes it an even more interesting one.

Right, let's get this reading post done before the excitement of raremaleslashex assignments takes over :D

Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans (2010). I read this as background/research for potential Étoile fic writing, and it has been very informative. It covers the history of ballet from its emergence in the court dances of seventeenth-century France, through its development in various places through time, trends and arguments, the influence of other dance styles, its success and declines, etc. etc. Lots of interesting and useful little titbits, both generally and fannishly (I especially like the influential eighteenth-century French ballerina Marie Sallé, who—in a period when female dancers were more or less expected also to be courtesans and mistresses—developed a reputation for universally rejecting male attentions, and on her retirement 'lived quietly with an Englishwoman, Rebecca Wick, to whom she left her modest worldly belongings'; on the fannish side of things, I think I see why Maya Plisetskaya is Cheyenne's fave); I also enjoyed the discussion of how ballet has developed and been reinterpreted in widely diverse cultural and political contexts (the court of Louis XIV; post-Revolutionary Paris; the Romantic nineteenth century; the twentieth-century US and USSR). Homans, a former ballet dancer turned historian, is ideally placed to write a book like this; she writes very much from a perspective informed by direct practical experience of dance, and doesn't hesitate to express her artistic and professional opinions, especially in the final chapters on the flourishing of ballet in twentieth-century America. At the end she argues that ballet, having fallen from those heights, has entered a decline which is probably terminal, perhaps due to its incompatibility with modern culture. I don't know what to make of that; at least I'm sure the characters and presumably the creators of Étoile would not agree! I have seen very little actual ballet in my life—I must go and remedy that soon—and I'm sure someone more familiar with it would have got more out of this book than I did, but still a very worthwhile read.

Re-read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020), gradually over the last eight weeks with the JSMN fandom read-along Discord that pretty_plant kindly invited me to. I love this book as much as ever and, as ever, what I love most about it is how kind and gentle it is in the face of incomprehensibly horrible things happening, and the understanding that both the narrator and Sarah Raphael ultimately reach of their experiences and the world they live in. I was less caught by the academic backstory this time; perhaps I wasn't in the right mood. I do think this book benefits from being read quickly all in one go and getting properly mentally absorbed in it; reading only one part a week with other obsessions going on at the same time made less of it.

Dr Wortle's School by Anthony Trollope (1881). Having finished the Barsetshire series last year, I wanted to keep up my tradition of reading a Trollope each summer but was dithering over where to go next; I didn't want to launch into the Palliser books, his other famous series, because from the sound of it they have less of the elements I enjoyed most about Barsetshire (church politics and rural society) and more of the elements I was less interested in (London and the nobility). In the end I picked a title from his bibliography on Wikipedia on the basis of, that sounds interesting, I'd like to see what he does with a school setting. Well, it is about a school setting in a sense, though it's not what you'd call a school story; Dr Wortle is a very Barsetshire-ish country clergyman who also runs a small preparatory school, so I managed to pick well for myself there. But if this book is half Barsetshire, the other half turns out to be a Wilkie Collins novel: the main plot turns on a reveal entertainingly similar to the inciting reveal in No Name (but made in hilariously non-sensation novel fashion: early on in the book Trollope spends several paragraphs telling the reader 'now, authors usually draw this sort of thing out for the drama and suspense, but I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to tell you the big twist now; perhaps some readers will find this boring and fun-ruining, in which case I suggest they put the book down'). It is an interesting example of how different authors with different priorities tackle a similar scenario: besides Trollope not being a sensation novelist, this story kind of returns to the themes of The Warden in being very much about the social consequences of scandal and the practical importance they have, whereas No Name is all about the legal consequences and the social effects that follow as a result. I liked it! I especially liked the character of Dr Wortle, who is principled and determined on following his conscience in the face of social pressure and serious threatened consequences, but who is also dictatorial, prone to poor judgement and not always actuated by purely charitable motives; I think Trollope is too sympathetic to his failings, but I nevertheless liked how he portrays his protagonist's complexity. The book is let down by a particularly annoying Victorian love subplot which increasingly eclipses the main story towards the end, but aside from that it was worth reading.

Before going to see Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of) I re-read the book, and wow, it really is an absolute delight of a book, isn't it? I've read it several times, but I feel like I noticed the details much more than I have before this time through and appreciated the structure and character arcs better. I also appreciated just how funny it is—oh, that bit near the end when Elizabeth is fully aware that she's in love with Darcy and is agonising over how he will surely never propose a second time—and then later, when he has proposed and they're all happy but her family are still being embarrassing... It does seem to me, though, that for all I love Austen's writing I just can't quite feel fannish about it. I don't know; I love some of her characters very much (Mr Darcy being probably my second or third fave, after Fanny Price and maybe Anne Elliot), but somehow none of them quite come across as the right kind of weird or messed-up for me to find truly compelling and blorbo-able. It's funny how that sort of thing works. I was also struck by Austen's sentence structure—she uses commas in a way that's definitely not standard or 'correct' now and seems much more typical of grammatically looser-feeling eighteenth-century writing, which is interesting.


And while reading I also took the opportunity to try another adaptation that I'd never seen before, the 1980 TV series (which is on Youtube, albeit in a somewhat unwieldy scene-by-scene format). I really like this one! It's basically faithful to the book; where it adds and changes things the choices are always interesting and feel like they were made from a place of love for and joy in the original—often expanding on something from the book, showing in specific detail things that Austen gives in summary—even if some of them are a bit strange. It feels quieter and more subtle than the more famous adaptations, which I like. Elizabeth Garvie is just perfect as Elizabeth: she gets 'there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody' completely, and (er, according to my taste) her looks also get 'the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow'. David Rintoul's Darcy is very stiff and formal in his manner in a way that's easy to read as autistic, which I approve of on general principles and as an interpretation of Darcy. The adaptation also has an absolutely lovely Jane; a Lydia who is completely her mother's daughter; a Georgiana who suits the character perfectly in her brief appearance; a Mr Bennet whose sharp edges of cruelty are completely not softened. The opening title sequence of each episode pans over a period-style cartoon summary of the episode's events, which is charming. I really liked the house they used for Pemberley, also!

Right, let's see if I can tear my brain away from the Raven King for long enough to contemplate the other books I've been reading in the last few weeks...

The Wind Boy by Ethel Cook Eliot (1923). Difficult to summarise or explain; the sort of weird children's fantasy novel which is completely committed to and confident in its own weird priorities, sensibilities and worldbuilding, and really enjoyable as such. (I'm not sure about Cook Eliot's views on art: only bad artists actually create things, true artists unconsciously reproduce things that already exist in the Platonic realm of ideal forms??)

The Adventures of David Simple by Sarah Fielding (1744). I was in the mood for something eighteenth-century and found this one on archive.org, though I ended up having to read the text ebook from Wikisource because I couldn't get the pdfs to work on my e-reader. I missed the ſ and other eighteenth-century formatting; I'm really getting quite fond of it. Anyway: this book opens with our hero, the good and true-hearted David Simple, being cheated out of his inheritance by his wicked brother, and I was chuckling at the similarity in fate to another David you wot of and wondering if the rest of the book was going to be about him winning it back, but no, that plot gets resolved quite quickly; the rest of the book consists of the now justly-enriched David wondering what to do with his wealth, deciding—since he's so good—that there's no happiness to be got from money but in using it to help one's friends, and thus setting off into the world on a quest to find someone good and true enough to be a Real Friend to him. Then we get a lot of satire/commentary on the various sorts of wickedness and falsehood to be found in eighteenth-century London, a lot of David meeting different people who narrate their dramatic backstories in long digressions, and eventually David finds some True Friends (his love interest, her brother and his girlfriend) with whom he lives happily ever after. This was all good fun—I do enjoy sentimental, dramatic eighteenth-century novel digressions. There were no long-lost parents in this one, though there are other coincidental reunions and family reconciliations. At one point the love interest and brother are accused (obviously falsely) of incest, in so many words, and I was slightly surprised that that wasn't too shocking to write about openly. Fielding also wrote two further books, an epistolary spin-off and a sequel; I'm intrigued by the idea of continuing the story after what's clearly the conventional ending point (the last chapter is literally titled 'Containing Two Weddings, and Consequently the Conclusion of the Book') and will read those at some point.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (1967). This book, set in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century, is not really either a mystery novel or a boarding school novel, though it's about a mystery that takes place at a boarding school. Three girls and a mistress go missing while on a picnic in the Australian outback; one of the girls is eventually found, uninjured but with no memory of what happened, and beyond that the mystery is never solved. Much of the book is rather following the ramifications of the disappearance, beginning with the big dramatic event and then exploring what happens afterwards, and as it goes along not solving the mystery it quite cleverly obscures that it's actually building up to a dramatic and properly chilling climax which, while in a sense also a consequence of the mystery, is not directly related to it. I knew going in that the mystery wasn't going to be solved, and I'm not sure how disappointed I would have been if I hadn't known (sometimes it feels like a more typical mystery, with apparent clues to what happened, and at one point the omniscient narrator even saying that something is an important clue which the police missed and so never followed, but not explaining what its importance is!); I was a bit disappointed by how little there was of typical girls' boarding school material (in fact quite a lot of the page-space is taken up by a rather slashy cross-class friendship between two male characters; though there is also a younger girl with a tragic crush on one of the girls who disappears). I did really like Lindsay's omniscient narrator, who comments freely, dispassionately and ironically on events, and who seems to know the truth of what really happened. I think this book will stick around haunting me for a while.

Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare (1942). This is a proper mystery novel, although the structure is entertainingly subverted (

spoilers

not many murder mysteries where the murder only happens a few chapters before the end of the book!

). It's very enjoyably written—Hare really knows how to end a chapter, among other things—and all the details of the legal setting are great. The victim character is a judge who's just going on circuit at the start of the book, and we see various aspects of how provincial assizes work and also the more domestic non-legal details of how a judge on circuit lives; there's also a lot of interesting stuff about sexism and gender roles, with the judge's wife—who, years ago, qualified as a barrister herself but was prevented by sexism from advancing in her own career, and who it's suggested has used her marriage essentially to have a legal career by proxy, playing the wifely role to support, not to say create, her husband's success—also being a major character. I was not convinced by Hare's commentary on the unequal application of justice: early in the book the judge injures someone in a drink-driving accident, and of course it's terribly important that the whole thing be covered up and he not face the consequences that an ordinary person would, because it would destroy public trust in the legal system, and anyway isn't the agony of conscience he feels and the threat that his career will be ruined far worse than trial and imprisonment would be??? That last bit might or might not have been true of powerful people in the 1940s; I certainly don't believe it now; Derek the indulgently-mocked idealist is right, there's no justice if it isn't justice for everyone. Anyway: This is apparently the first in a series featuring detective (well, 'detective'; the police do a lot of the actual mystery-solving here, he just puts the final and most legal-specialist pieces together) Francis Pettigrew, and it was really a bit of a spoiler to read this book in an edition (on Faded Page) presented as 'book 1 in the Francis Pettigrew series', because Frank is actually an otherwise-plausible suspect for quite a bit of the time. I shall continue with the rest of the series eventually!

I'm finding this a fun game with other people's lists, so I decided to make my own!

https://www.listchallenges.com/regshoes-100-books

The rules I used to make the list:

• Memoirs, diaries and letter collections count, but not other non-fiction.
• Maximum of three books per author, so the list isn't 41% Discworld.
• Novellas and standalone short stories count. Plays count if I've read them as a book, not if I've only seen them on stage/as a film.

In choosing the books I've tried to strike a balance between 'I like this a lot', 'I think this is very good' and 'this has been a major influence on my tastes/values/opinions/id', and pick a range of things from different times of my life, though I think it's ended up biassed towards the last few years.

Observations:

I'm gratified by how few books I had to add manually, but displeased that all the Hornungs were among them.

I do not have a second favourite Robert Louis Stevenson book! I've included a couple I like, but they rank a long way below Kidnapped in my mind. Eager to see whether this changes when I've read Treasure Island and/or re-read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which I decided I didn't remember well enough to include now.

Highly entertained by the editions of A Month in the Country and South Riding having the same cover image. I don't know exactly where that is but I'm pretty sure it's not the right part of Yorkshire for either of them.