Books read, late December

[mrissa]

 

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Rereads. I had run out of TBR before Christmas, and it seemed like time. And oh gosh. If you'd asked me the plot of Eight Cousins when I was small--when it was my favorite LMA--I would have said that the plot was "girl has too many relatives, chaos ensues." (This was a form of plot I found very relatable.) But upon rereading, oh my goodness. Oh MY goodness. So there is one aunt who has been giving Rose dozens of "patent medicines" and another aunt who says straight out to her face, "Oh, shut up, Myra, we all know you killed your kid with laudanum," and all the nicer characters are like, "welp, harsh but fair." (This is only barely a paraphrase.) (Also, rather than thinking this was a weird family conversation, I immediately identified which of my great-aunts I thought would be the one to deliver the "you killed your kid" line and went on reading. WELP.) The plot of Eight Cousins is actually "for the love of Pete will you people stop drugging your daughters into immobility." So much wilder reading it that way. The plot of Rose in Bloom has always been "which of my cousins should I marry, obviously not someone unrelated to me, don't be daft." So I always found that one alarming for the same reasons as I found the first one very relatable. I have so many cousins, and I am so glad to be married to zero of them. So at least one of my sets of memories here was intact, but it was the wrong one.

Stephanie Balkwill, The Women Who Ruled China: Buddhism, Multiculturalism, and Governance in the Sixth Century. Interesting detail about which women had power, and how they had it, and who was opposed to it, and how it was recorded/discussed after. Filling in a bit of history I didn't know much about.

K.J. Charles, Copper Script. A friend suggested that I might enjoy this one, since I have enjoyed Charles's mysteries and there is a strong mystery/thriller component here as well as a strong historical romance component. Friend was correct, this worked very well for me because I found the romantic obstacles sympathetic and believable and because it stayed reasonably far on the action plot side of the line. Will be poking around to see what else might suit in Charles's back catalog, as one can only expect her to write so many murder mysteries in a year.

Amanda Downum, The Poison Court. Kindle. Fantasy court politics and magical politics entwined, as they must do, with interpersonal politics, lush and engaging, not sure why I thought this was a shorter work than it is but I'm very glad I've gotten to it now.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War. Reread. I had, I repeat, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I noticed that 2019 was a minute ago, so I had not in fact "just read" this one. I reveled in the language and playfulness of it all over again.

Margaret Frazer, Lowly Death and The Death of Kings. Kindle. I'm not finding her short stories particularly transcendent, but they are compulsively and conveniently readable, and I'm out of novels, so. The first is a murder mystery, the second is a political mystery about the death of Richard II, who is the wrong Richard for me to really engage, ah well.

Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionaries: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists After 1848. Everybody knows I love me some '48ers. This is a study that deliberately looks at different regions of America and genders and classes of German-speaking immigrants rather than treating them as a monolith, so it's full of all sorts of interesting treats of information.

Alice Hunt, Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade, 1648-1660. What I really like is that Hunt is really good about questions like "what was going on with the Caribbean colonization at the time" and "okay but what were they writing and doing scientific research about that was not politics." It's about Britain in this decade+, not just about its politics. Really solid stuff, makes me very happy to have.

Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley. Kindle. I'm pretty sure I read this as a child, but I have neither record nor memory of it. It is a delightful gentle fantastical collection, with many of the stories focused on the pleasures of quiet and solitude in a way I find entirely congenial.

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel. This was 3/4 of an interesting novel about art restoration, chess, and murder, but then it veered off into mid-late 20th century attitudes about gender and sexuality in ways that I cannot recommend. Go in braced if you go.

Linda Proud, A Tabernacle for the Sun. Kindle. Historical novel in the milieu of Lorenzo de Medici, centering on him but not featuring him as protagonist. This is the first in a trilogy apparently, and if you want to sink into thumping big historical novels, this sure is one. I do sometimes.

Alice Roberts, Tamed: From Wild to Domesticated, the Ten Animals and Plants That Changed Human History. The friend who gave this to me for Christmas opined that it was hard to get more in my wheelhouse than a book that discussed both dogs and apples, and he was correct, and this was fun and interesting and made me happy to read.

C.D. Rose, We Live Here Now. Surreal and sinister and sometimes quite funny, this is a book with a fairly niche audience, and that niche is: have you ever made snarky jokes about Anish Kapoor? To be clear, this book is not about Anish Kapoor. But it's steeped in contemporary art, and that's a pretty good synecdoche for its direction. We make a lot of Anish Kapoor jokes around here. I found this delightful. Installations and disappearances and different angles on similar happenings. (I find it so delightful when I read/listen to interviews with artists from the 1960s who are constantly having happenings! So many happenings! Why can't we have more happenings, I ask you. But this book is significantly more contemporary than that.)

Sean Stewart, Mockingbird. Reread. I had, I am telling you, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I remembered very little of this. It holds up quite well, having really good depictions of family dynamics as well as worldbuilding.

Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. An examination (nonfiction) of what that work actually said and did and also where it ramified in cultures not its own, really interesting storytelling stuff, hurrah, glad to have it on the shelf and think lots of thoughts about exoticization and fantasy.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King. Reread. I had, I hope you understand, run out of TBR before Christmas, and I had not reread this one since high school. I found that while there were a few images I remembered from the last three sections of this omnibus, it was for the most part the first one I remembered. It turns out there's a reason for this. Basically anything where White has to depict a female character is terrible, they're all irrational and yelly and stupid, and it looks to me like he's going "I don't know, I guess people want a one of these? sometimes?" The first section, the best-known section, though: when I first read this when I was 11, I got the vast majority of the funny bits and I did not get the cri de coeur, I did not get that it was someone who had been there for the Great War screaming into the void that another was coming and the alternative was worse. I'm glad to have a renewed sense of it, and also ow, ow, ow.

Robert Wrigley, The True Account of Myself as a Bird. This poetry collection was right on my knife edge between "observes something ordinary in a way that makes it extraordinary" and "plods along in the utterly undistinguished ordinary," with some poems coming down on one side and others on the other.

Comments

[skygiants]

Rereading The Once and Future King for the first time post-childhood, I kept stumbling over parts that made me go 'oh YOU put this in my head, White. I always thought I just happened to think it, but it came from you.'

I don't think he's good at Guinevere but in a way I find it endearing to watch him try: the whole paragraph where he's like. Well. She must have been a real person. She must have been an interesting and compelling person! I'm telling you this instead of putting it on the page because I'm not good at doing that but please believe me that she was --

[larryhammer]

I remember just enough about the women of The Once and Future King that I have not wanted to reread it. I was not always the most observant reader about such things as an undergraduate, which has always made me think that he was very bad indeed at female characters.

[selki]

Wow, your description of *Eight Cousins*! I've read some of Alcott's Gothic short stories and they do get pretty dark, but this is dark in a different way.

[mrissa]

I think the Gothic shorts are dark on purpose but the thing about Eight Cousins is that she just had an uneasy feeling about all the opiates, she didn't actually have modern science, so it's all weighted differently and is dark but WEIRD.

[carbonel]

When I read the two Alcott books as a tween or teen, I remember thinking how creepy it was that Rose was pretty much stuck marrying one of her cousins, even if it was an allegedly free choice as to which it would be. Had I been more romance-aware at the time, I might have wondered why her uncle wasn't in the eligibility pool.

ETA: I also remember thinking how it felt rather like a cheat for Rose to choose philanthropy as her lifework, since it depended on her starting from a point of privilege. I then felt meanly satisfied (in a small way) when it turned out things weren't as simple as she thought.

I have requested Tamed from the library on the strength of your description. I don't read anywhere near as much nonfiction as you, but this one sounds interesting.

[mrissa]

They actually comment on her uncle! In a non-creepy way which is sort of a relief. Someone else was worried that he might go after Rose himself, and Uncle Alec says, what, ew, no, don't be gross, I am functionally her dad.

WHEW.

The reasoning for why she has to marry one of her cousins is really wild, though, it's because her uncle knows and trusts them and doesn't really know and trust other young dudes, and like...why are you trusting cousin Charlie? Cousin Charlie would have made a terrible husband. Even leaving aside the cousin thing (WHICH LET'S NOT), to know Charlie is to instantly run screaming from marrying him, I would think.