Books read, late September

[mrissa]

David Carkeet, Double Negative. This was fine, but there wasn't enough linguistics research in it, and also I saw no reason for anybody to like the main character, no matter how often we were told that everybody did. I didn't. Why would I? What was there to him? Sometimes short mysteries are concise and taut and all of those good things. Sometimes they're just short.

E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady. I did not fall head over heels for this book the way some of my friends did, but it was entertaining and well worth my time. It is what it says on the front, the "diary" (clearly written for public consumption at the time, not repurposed later) of a mother and wife in Britain in the 1920s. Could not stop brain from placing her and hers in the Farthing universe down the road, alas.

Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key. Hurrah! It's a Sarah Dessen novel where the male love interest is not a violent criminal and does not Teach The Heroine About Life! They teach each other things instead! And the peasants rejoiced! This one made it clear that the others were taking place in the same Southern town, which is neither a bonus nor a drawback for me, I guess, seeing the cameos other characters made. I will be interested in how many of the others are similarly situated. (I don't think she thinks she specified Southern, but trust me, these folks are not Northerners.)

Paul Fussell, Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear. This is, no kidding, the worst book I have finished in recent months. It's disorganized and sexist and randomly biased against other people's interests for no particular reason, and also it's often just plain wrong. And did I mention poorly researched? And not very well thought out? And badly edited? I had to keep checking the date, because I was thinking, "Maybe that was the case in the 1970s, but...." It was written in 2002. So when he says that each male college student for the last fifty years has had a pair of penny loafers...wrong. When he talks about how baseball uniforms have recently started being obsessed with being skin-tight...wrong. When he talks about Girl Scout uniforms and blathers briefly about old blue dresses before talking about how brown knee-length shorts have been the thing for decades now...wrong, wrong, wrong. Like, "What is wrong with you that you thought you were even remotely qualified to write this book?" levels of wrong. And some of the disorganization looks extremely unfortunate, and also why on earth would you have a book like this with no illustrations? None. No photos, no line drawings, nothing. This book was so bad that I went and took the other Paul Fussell book off my Amazon list. I've enjoyed stuff of his before, but part of the point of my Amazon list is that anything on it would make me say, "Hey, cool!" if someone bought it for me, and it's going to take quite some time before my reaction isn't, "Oh, it's him," instead.

Michael McKinley, Hockey: A People's History. This was so much better than the last hockey histories I read. Oh wow, so much better. Among other things, it acknowledged the existence of women, black people, and Métis. And labor disputes that were not all smiles and laughter. And lo these many other good things for a hockey history to acknowledge. My only caveat is that it is very much A Canadian People's History; if you want to read about hockey in the US or Sweden or Finland or Russia, there's not much of it here except in that it affects Canadian hockey. Which to me just means that I need to find more hockey books, not that there's anything wrong with this one; and anyway if you have to have a history of hockey in just one country, Canada would be the one.

Ruth Rendell, A Sleeping Life. The problem with reading a long, ground-breaking mystery series that started before one's birth is that sometimes the ground that was broken has since been trodden into paths, then paved and landscaped. This is one of those: the stunning twist at the end was frustratingly obvious thirty years after the fact, and while it was interesting to watch how it was handled early on, it was more interesting as an historical artifact than as a book.

Kate Ross, Cut to the Quick and A Broken Vessel. These walk the fine line between "fun mystery equivalent of swashbuckling" and "over the top." For me they were successful in that, and I'll read the other two in the series as the library gets them to me. Regency mystery, in the sense that there are Regency romances: they are not actually very concerned with a sociopolitical depiction of the Regency period, but who cares? If the answer is, "I care," these are probably not the books for you.

Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park. It took me a bit to get into this one, and then things really took off. Detective in a totalitarian state, uff da. Not always an easy book, but a good one, I think; I will look for the others in the series.

Jo Walton (papersky), Half a Crown. Discussed elsewhere. Highly recommended.

Comments

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Martin Cruz Smith's Renko series gets even better with time. My favourites are Wolves Eat Dogs (set largely in the Chernobyl Exclusion Area) and Polar Star (set entirely on a Siberian factory fishing ship), but they're all excellent.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Looking forward to it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Pity about the Fussell. I wonder if the temporal disconnect comes from the fact that Fussell is now in his mid-80s, and thus at an age where 20 or 30 years is as an eyeblink, and so, effectively, he may still be writing as if its 1979.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That could very well be. There have been a couple of times when my grandfather has had the impression that "kids" were using a piece of slang that no actual kids had been using in several years, and Grandpa at 80, from the evidence of this book, is a great deal more intellectually organized and has much more respect for other human beings and their foibles than Paul Fussell.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I can contribute a piece of evidence from a different Paul Fussell book, whose title I do not remember; it purported to be an analysis of class in the United States circa 1970, it may or may not have been accurate, and at one point he was at pains to explain how more than 90% of the colleges in the country were not Real Colleges by the standards of ... himself, it seemed, although he might've meant it to be the standards of the low end of the upper class as he was defining it.

So on the one hand I could imagine that in his mind, students at Real Colleges would of course continue to possess penny loafers.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I did my undergrad at a Real College by his definition, and, um, no.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, no kidding. We could take a survey of people who attended Real Colleges By Paul Fussell's Standards, right here on this lj, and I would be very surprised if most of them had owned penny loafers, if men, or had known men who did.

So he is fond of pulling things from orifices, not just in this book. Right. Good to know.

[carbonel]

Wow on the Fussell thing. I just reread Ball Four, which is a baseball diary from 1969, and the author talks about about skin-tight baseball uniforms then. He quotes one player (don't remember the name) who says something like "I add 50 points to my average if I know I look bitchen out there."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh.

And it really seems to me that if you're going to talk about how uniforms change over time, noticing that 1969 and 2002 are not the same is kind of important to your own thesis. Sigh.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I thought I did a post on Delafield and the Provincial Lady books (and her other novels) at one point but can't track it down. Although she has several points of contact with Delafield's own life and situation, 'The Provincial Lady' was a fictional character constructed by Delafield when asked to produce a regular column in the feminist periodical Time and Tide. Delafield was already a respected and successful novelist and writer at the time (unlike the PL). This point does not seem to have been entirely clear to her biographer, or, indeed, such critics as have written on her work. I strongly suspect that Paul Dashwood was entirely in on the joke - they first met after he wrote her a fan-letter about one of her novels - how more unlike 'Robert' could one get?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah. The introduction to the edition I read was extremely misleading, then, whether intentionally or not.

[coalboy.livejournal.com]

I read the whole series. Since you didn't like #1, don't touch the rest. I disliked #1 the least.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Since I said "entertaining and well worth my time," how did we get to me not liking it?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Delafield did live in Devon, she had 2 children, a girl and a boy, her husband was the land-agent for the local estate, she was active in the Women's Institute etc: but she was all this plus a successful writer moving in the Time and Tide circle and other literary milieux - there was a wonderful book about the T&T circle recently, though one of my quibbles was Not Enough on Delafield. It is that phenomenon I have posted about more than once, where a writer writes something that looks autobiographical, except it leaves out the thing that makes them the person who is writing the book and who became a successful literary/cultural figure instead of e.g. a provincial businessman with vague cultural aspirations, or a draper's assistant who comes into money. The talent, the ambition, the ne-sais-quoi.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The difference in spouse looks like it matters from here, too.

[aedifica]

If you'd like to borrow the other two Kate Ross books, you'd be welcome to.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The third one is winging its way towards me even as we speak, through the joys of the Dakota County Library System. We'll see how I'm doing there whether I ask you to bring the fourth to Convivial.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Hm, the only Sarah Dessens I've read didn't feature violent men (This Lullaby and um...whats the title...the one where the girl's dad died and she works for a catering company).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The boyfriend in that latter book had a violent criminal record before the book began.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

Whoops, forgot that.

Oh well, Dexter in This Lullaby is pretty much a puppy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, to be clear, I'd read two Sarah Dessen books and was hoping it wasn't a pattern, rather than having read all the rest and thinking it was.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

A book I'm hoping to get my hands on is Black Ice (http://www.amazon.com/Black-Ice-History-Maritimes-1895-1925/dp/0965116875/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222961230&sr=1-2), which has a documentary associated with it due out soon. Of course, you may not want another book about odd bits of hockey history, but if you do then there this one is.

I can see the Provincial Lady sliding into the Farthing world all too easily, and without even realizing it--eep! I also thought the Kate Ross books were closer to Heyer than most of the so-called regency Romances one sees out there.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do want another book about odd bits of hockey history. Thanks!