etirabys | Reading

A belated Reading Meme this week, as I was busy yesterday having a gas fireplace installed (!!!!).

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

There’s a Little Free Library near the nature center where I volunteer as receptionist. On my most recent shift, I found Jean Fritz’s The Cabin Faced West, a slender volume that I zipped through and then returned to the LFL. Young Ann Hamilton’s family has just moved into the wilds of western Pennsylvania, and she’s pining for the civilization of Gettysburg until she begins to fall in love with her new home…a process that culminates when General George Washington stops by for dinner! Based on a true story of the author’s great-great grandmother.

I also read Autumn Term, the first of Antonia Forest’s Marlow series. I’ve heard about these books for years and mis-osmosed wildly that they were children’s fantasy, but the first one at least is in fact a children’s boarding school novel. I also love boarding school novels, so I adjusted my expectations without regret, but I remain a little puzzled where I had picked up the idea that these books were basically Green Knowe. Truly the human mind is a mystery.

Anyway, we are following the boarding school adventures of twins Nicola and Lawrie, who spend their first term trying to distinguish themselves like their many older sisters, only to accidentally distinguish themselves in the end by putting on a play! They refuse to do Twelfth Night (the classic twins play) and perform The Prince and the Pauper instead. Love it when characters put on a show.

I also finished Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way, a gift from

littlerhymes. I struggled a bit because the book starts out simply tossing you in the deep end with absolute masses of characters, but as I continued on I more or less sorted them out (regret to say that I took most of the book to grasp that Otto Werner and Ivan Warner were different people, though) and enjoyed myself - a vast cast can be frustrating if it’s hard to keep track of anyone, but there’s also a certain richness to a world so densely populated.

The book starts on New Year’s Eve 1979 and ends in 1984 after the miner’s strike failed. It was published in 1987 and was therefore contemporary, but reads like historical fiction because there’s so much detailed information about current events and material culture - a snapshot or newsreel recording a moment in time.

What I’m Reading Now

In the midst of a number of books but nothing I have deep thoughts about right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

Apparently, the Marlow books were never published on a wide scale in the US (presumably because American publishers hate us and want us to suffer), which explains why I never found them as a child and also why I’m going to have to interlibrary loan the rest of the series. The Marlows and the Traitor is next. Evidently a sea story?? Year of Sail is everywhere…

minutia_r

Hello! Whether you're here because you're my assigned creator for a fandom exchange, a pinch hitter, someone who wants to make me a treat, or whatever: Thank you for your interest in making something for me! I'm sure I will like whatever you make, so if you've already got an idea feel free to ignore the rest of this letter (and the prompts in my signup if applicable). But if you're looking for inspiration, read on:

( Read more... )

osprey_archer

I picked up George Bumann’s Eavesdropping on Animals: What We Can Learn from Wildlife Conversations in the hope of picking up some quick tips about how to better understand the animals around me. However, this is not a quick tips sort of book, as Bumann emphasizes repeatedly that if you want to really get to know about the wildlife conversations in your area, there is really no substitute for repeated observation over time. The individual observations may not be long, but they have to be repeated again and again and again, as if you’re learning a musical instrument or a new language, which indeed you are.

A couple of stories that struck me:

Bumann recounts the time that a friend tried to sell the U.S. Army on training their soldiers in interpreting birdsong. The army was skeptical, until the friend sent a unit out on a training exercise, and remarked casually to one of the observing generals, “They’re about to come out of the woods right there.”

And then the unit came out of the woods right where he’d indicated. The general, thunderstruck, asked how he’d known. Well, the birds had just flushed out of that tree, making their human-specific alarm call.

In general, if you’ve gotten to know the calls of your own wildlife in your own area, you can follow whole radio dramas in the woods without ever seeing the participants. There goes a bobcat, traveling east to west. Up there is a Cooper’s hawk looking for a meal. And there’s a hiker traveling through: you can tell not just by the calls but by the silence.

Silence, says Bumann, can be the most eloquent communication in the woods, because it’s the state of high alert that follows alarm calls. But humans often see this as the resting state of the wood, because that is often what we hear when we pass through - because we induce an alarmed state into the other animals in the forest with the way that we tromp heedlessly through, without listening to any of the calls/social cues that organize the forest for its inhabitants.

It occurred to me, as I read this, that there is a certain arrogance in the classic SF question “Is there anybody out there?” - the assumption that humans are (tragically, heroically) alone on this planet because we are too special and unique for any other creature here to communicate with us, when in fact we’re alone because we’ve cut ourselves off from communication. The solution to this problem is not to fly into space to find other creatures who are intriguingly (perhaps sexily) alien, but also so exactly like us that they can speak to us in our own words. It’s to open our eyes and ears here.

skygiants

I saw the newer film version of True Grit when it came out in 2010 and liked it at the time enough to vaguely intend to read the original, but I did not actually get around to this until it arrived in my home by way of

genarti's library requests last month.

For those unfamiliar, True Grit is the story of Mattie Ross, the most 😑-faced fourteen-year-old force of nature in ninteenth-century Arkansas, who goes to sort out her father's affairs after he's killed by their family farmhand on a routine business trip to buy ponies. Instead of accompanying her father's corpse back to the family farm for the funeral, Mattie decides that it's her responsibility to see appropriate vengeance done, armed only with:

- her father's revolver [which she does not technically know how to use]
- the contact info of her family lawyer [not present] [not enthusiastic about this adventure]
- really top-tier clerical skills [more frequently useful in this situation than expected]
- a unending well of stubbornness, the depths of which have never been plumbed

After terrorizing the pony-seller into ponying back all her father's cash with the liberal threat of legal action, Mattie immediately uses said cash to hire the most trigger-happy local U.S. Marshall -- a theoretical agent of the law whose body count is so high that it's even raising eyebrows in 1870s Arkansas -- to accompany her on a hunt for the murderer and the outlaw gang he's hooked up with. A Texas Ranger also shows up, who offers to hunt the guy for free, because he's wanted for another, different murder -- but no! Mattie Ross will have none of this! The Texas Ranger is going to be taking him off to face justice in a different precinct, for a different crime, for which he might not even hang, and Mattie Ross is determined On Vengeance, Fatal, And Specifically For Her Father, Please And Thank You.

Nonetheless, the Texas Ranger (LaBoeuf), the trigger-happy Marshall (Rooster Cogburn), and Mattie all eventually end up heading out on an outlaw hunt together. Unsurprisingly, many people die. But not Mattie, as we know, because she's narrating this whole story to us from fifty years in the future, in one of the all-time great highly specific first-person voices of American literature. Vengeance will NOT have her digging two graves today. Or, I mean, it will, but for other people.

Well, as we all know, I love a horrible force-of-nature girl-child with an unending depth of stubbornness, so for me book definitely worth reading, kind of want to rewatch the movie now, and --

-- wait hang on in the course of adding links to this post I discovered that there's a sequel to the 1969 True Grit movie?? titled Rooster Cogburn, or, in alternate title, Rooster Cogburn ... and the Lady?? wherein Rooster Cogburn has a road trip with Katherine Hepburn, presumably because someone was like 'hey Katherine Hepburn's current screen persona is essentially Mattie Ross but old, we could just rerun The African Queen and True Grit at the same time and make One Billion Dollars!'???? (they did not make one million dollars) (film panned by reviewers) (c'est alas la vie)

osprey_archer

After Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, a translator’s memoir with less focus on translation than I had hoped and dreamed, I embarked on Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, a memoir about learning Italian which turns out to focus even less on translation.

However, although it wasn’t what I was looking for, it turned out to be enthralling. I kept picking it up with the intention of reading just one essay and then I’ve read five essays and it’s an hour after my bedtime and I have work tomorrow, but since it’s so late ANYWAY I can surely read one more…

The book is, in the first place, a love letter to Italian - although not the kind of love letter that spends pages gushing about the beloved, so you are not going to come out of this book with any new knowledge about the Italian language or Italian culture.

Rather, it’s a chronicle of the way that Lahiri’s love for Italian transformed her life. Lahiri is an internationally acclaimed writer in English, but after a few years of studying Italian in America, she moved with her family to Rome to immerse herself in the language. While in Rome, her love affair deepened until she only read and wrote in Italian, a process which culminated in her writing this book about her Italian journey in Italian, which was then translated into English by Ann Goldstein, and published in the US with facing pages: Italian on the left, English on the right.

It also becomes, over the course of the book, a memoir about Lahiri’s relationship with language and identity. For the first few years of her life, she spoke only Bengali. When she started school (in England and then America), she also learned English. But the two languages remained strictly separate: there was no one at school who spoke Bengali, and her parents didn’t allow her to speak English at home. The separation ended up creating the sense that she had two identities, but both incomplete: “Because of my double identity I saw only fluctuation, distortion, dissimulation” when she looked at herself; “something hybrid, out of focus, always jumbled.”

Her love affair with Italian offers a new way of relating to language, and therefore to identity. She’s not certain where the path will lead her, but nonetheless it’s the path she has chosen to follow.

In the years since this book was published, her Italian journey has led her to publish a novel in Italian, a book of poetry (!) in Italian, a number of English translations of Italian novels, and Translating Myself and Others, a book which might, in fact, be the book about translation I’ve been looking for. Third time’s the charm?

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week I rounded out John W. Crowley’s trilogy of books about William Dean Howells with The Black Heart’s Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells. I greatly enjoyed Crowley’s other books about Howells, particularly The Mask of Fiction, although I did complain it spent too much time on Freudian interpretation.

Little did I realize how lightly I escaped in The Mask of Fiction. The Black Heart’s Truth is all Freudian interpretation all the way down, and listen, there are only so many times you can say “this arises from the repressed desire to kill the father and have sex with the mother” before it starts getting repetitive.

Some interesting tidbits nonetheless. I was thrilled to learn that John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, was Howells’ uncle by marriage.

I also read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s slim novella The Dawn of a To-morrow, mostly because the subject was listed in the library catalog as “Indian National Congress - History.” I was fascinated what Burnett could possibly have to say about the Indian National Congress.

It turns out that answer is nothing. The catalog is simply in error. This is a weird little book about a suicidal man who drags himself out into a London particular to buy a gun, but gets lost, as the fog is so thick he can’t see his hand before his face. He falls in with the cheerful street urchin Glad (played by Mary Pickford in the later film version), who introduces him to her neighbor who has discovered that the secret of life is to take the Bible literally when it says “Ask and you will receive.” Our suicidal protagonist remembers that he did ask if he could be saved, and discovers that he has indeed received an answer: rather than shoot himself, he will remain alive and spend his absolutely massive fortune helping people like the street urchin!

I sojourned to the archives to read Valenti Angelo’s Paradise Valley, mostly because I liked his Newbery Honor novel/memoir Nino. Paradise Valley shares many of the charming features of Nino - food and gardening descriptions! - but is comparatively a bit shapeless: it just meanders around till it stops.

What I’m Reading Now

I struggled with the beginning of Margaret Drabble’s The Radiant Way, as the book dropped us directly into a New Year’s Eve party with about two hundred guests. However, now we’ve moved forward to an extended “I bet you’re wondering how we got here” about the three main characters, starting with how they met at Cambridge in 1952, and I’m feeling far more oriented.

What I Plan to Read Next

Last week I announced my intention of making Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters my next Large Book… and then I was ambushed by Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in a Little Free Library. So that’s going to come first. But I’ll swing back around to the Gaskell thereafter!

minutia_r

Creators have been revealed for the Jukebox 2026 collection, so now I can reveal that I wrote three stories:

How Much You Wanna Risk?, based on Nikita Kuzmin and Vito Coppola's dance routine set to The Chainsmokers and Coldplay's Something Just Like This on Strictly Come Dancing. About 3.5k words, rated T (perhaps in an abundance of caution), an m/m teen romance set in a superhero universe.

After the War, based on Paul Simon's Rene and Georgette Magritte and Their Dog After the War. About 1k words, rated T. This has got original characters and an original apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic setting, f/f, f/m, and poly romance.

Tebald and the Star, based on Jared Benjamin's Believe it. About 2k words, rated M. A wizard's slave conspires with his master's latest acquisition for freedom and revenge. f/m.

Also, I received this gorgeous Art Nouveau style art:

Night Flight, based on Starling Arrow's Fly Away!

skygiants

A year or so ago I dug up my old copy of Michaela Roessner's The Stars Dispose from my parents' house to reread in preparation for a panel on food in fantasy because I vaguely remembered it as a Fantasy Novel About Renaissance Culinary Arts. However I did not get around to it in time and so I set it aside and

genarti picked it up and read it instead, and then we passed it on to another friend who was looking for books in the brief nineties trend of Fantasy Novels about Renaissance-ish Apprentices [a trend I am always hoping will be revived, so far in vain]. Now it has at last returned to me and I thought: well, I didn't read it for the panel on food in fantasy, but perhaps now I'll read it in time for the panel on centering the arts in alt-history --

Well, I didn't actually succeed in doing that either. But I have now reread it! What a weird and charming* book!

*with caveats

So, the fantasy premise of this book is that there are various parallel universes that all impact each other, and some bad parallel universe forces are Out to Get the City of Florence Specifically for ambiguous reasons. The fate of the Medici is all tied into this in some way so it's very important that beautiful wise clever baby Catherine de Medici (yes, that Catherine de Medici) (this isn't quite popehunk but it's not NOT that either) survive and flourish, so the city can flourish, and both the city's chief astrologer and Catherine de Medici's cook are doing different sorts of magic to ensure that happens despite the sieges and plagues and various other dangers that are constantly besetting Florence through this time.

This is the premise, and the plot, more or less, but it's not what the book actually cares about. What the book cares about is a young man named Tommaso (the son of the cook) learning how to cook beautiful Renaissance cuisine, and also then apprenticing in the art of Renaissance sculpture, and then bringing these two fields together for incredible innovations in the world of edible art. Approximately 70% of this book is rich, beautifully researched descriptions of Tommaso's coming-of-age as a young and gifted artisan in Renaissance Florence coming into his own artistically despite the plagues and the sieges and the breakdown in his parents' marriage, and then the other 30% is interstitial scenes reminding us that Tommaso's mom is very concerned about supernatural dangers from another dimension and they'll probably strike via the Pope's bad decisions for some reason.

Now, when I say coming of age, the book starts when Tommaso is eleven or twelve and covers two or three years of his life and, well -- by the end of the book, Tommaso has both graduated from his apprenticeship and is about to take over as a household head chef, and engaged in a sexual affair with Michaelangelo* which Roessner clearly wants us to see as very poignant and romantic .... great position for a promising eighteen-or-so year old food artist to be! Really charming as long as I was careful never to do any math about it whatsoever!

*Michaelangelo like Catherine de Medici is also vitally supernaturally important to the well-being of Florence

But I do think Roessner is interested in, and pretty good at, writing from within a sixteenth-century mindset rather than a modern one; she's certainly interested in and good at writing about the immediate details of carving a roast, casting a medal, baking an extremely fancy loaf of bread, and about the satisfaction of learning to do these things well. I miss this kind of fantasy. It can come back into fashion any day now.

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"He who understands the baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke."

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