Today is TAMDRAL day 1, my friends, and this year we are reading The Old Curiosity Shop.
Jump on in and read at a pace that works for you. I'm aiming to finish in about a month.
This book offers the most villainous villain in all of Dickens, as well as the scene most likely to cause accidental drownings in the bathos.
Ready, set, TAMDRAL!
Posted at 08:00 AM in Books, Dickens | Permalink | Comments (5)
Today is release day for Casey Johnston's memoir, A Physical Education, and you should buy it. Even though I was given a free version, I bought the book today because I want her publisher to hear the message: more of this, please.
She writes persuasively about the misery that accompanied her quest to take up less space by means of cardio and calorie restriction, and the freedom she found in getting strong. It's a terrific story, skillfully told.
My recommendation is not just about the story, which you could mostly get from her author bio. It's really about her voice, which has been an important factor in my own continued willingness to show up in the weight room. You belong there, she says. You can take up space there. You can also take up more space in the wider world.
Perhaps because I was 50 when I started lifting, my own trajectory has been less linear than the one she describes in this book-- more breaks, slower progress. Even so, it has changed the way I look at myself and the way I move through the world. I keep wanting to say to people, "Have you considered deadlifting?"
An older female relative was complaining about the flatness of her behind after years of aggressive dieting, and I bit my tongue so I would not say out loud, "Have you considered deadlifting?" It is just the thing for a beauteous gluteus.
A friend was talking about how she tweaked her back and had been really limited in her mobility, and I bit my tongue so I would not say out loud, "Have you considered deadlifting?" A stronger back has set me free from all the niggles and pains and mayonnaise injuries that used to plague me.
A woman in an online group for wool& fans was talking about returning a pair of pants because she didn't fill out the seat darts. I did not comment to say, "Have you considered deadlifting?" because I am not going to tell strangers on the internet how to inhabit their bodies. But I did think it.
The BBC tells me about the association between grip strength and longevity and suggests that I squeeze a tennis ball to improve my health. "But wait!" I want to say to the author. "Have you considered deadlifting?"
We live in a nation full of women who have been told that they ought to strength-train but only v-e-r-y carefully: don't hurt yourself, don't get too strong, avoid the b-word at all costs. (That would be the b*lky b-word.) In this maelstrom of madness Casey Johnston offers calm and sanity. She says, "No, actually, you can push yourself. You can do hard things in the weight room, and they will make your life easier and better." The NYT publishes a story headlined "Why Women Can't Do Pull-Ups"; Casey Johnston acknowledges the difficulty of the movement while simultaneously making you want to embark on a pull-up training plan already.
What are you waiting for? Go! Read this book! Come back and tell me all about it.
Posted at 07:54 PM in Books, Fitness | Permalink | Comments (1)
Last night I finished my 28th Trollope novel, Nina Balatka. It is set in Prague, and it is about a young Christian woman who is engaged to a Jewish man.
I suspect that Trollope's treatment of Jewish characters is akin to his treatment of Irish characters: it seems pretty grim to present-day readers even though he is making an effort, at least some of the time, to push back against stereotypes. Ezekiel Breghert, in The Way We Live Now, faces down overt antisemitism. He is so much more gentlemanly than the ostensible gentlefolk of the Longstaffe family.
Nina Balatka is surrounded by people in a hurry to tell her that her engagement is a terrible idea. Like a lot of Trollope novels, this one focuses on decisions about marriage: why do people get married? What are the most important factors in their decisions? Should those be the most important factors? Can we make any reliable predictions about happiness in marriage?
Nina's fiancé Anton is driven to suspicion by the lies of Nina's extended family and their trusted servants, and Nina tells herself she should have known that he, being Jewish, would eventually be suspicious. Trollope seems to be asking an interesting question: how much of a stereotype is self-fulfilling prophecy? And how is it that Christians can behave badly, in ways that clearly violate their own moral code, and still view themselves as superior? This book includes the second Catholic priest I've encountered in a Trollope novel, and he is -- unexpectedly -- much more gentle with Nina than any of her Christian relatives have been.
Spoilers for a book from 1867: Nina and Anton marry and resettle themselves in Frankfurt, which was reputedly more accepting than Prague. The internet tells me that in the 1930s about 5% of Frankfurt's population had Jewish heritage, so let's hope the happy couple and their children found a welcome there. (Let's also hope their great-grandchildren left before things went south, since otherwise their outlook might have been bleak.)
One last interesting note about this book: Trollope published it anonymously. He had written a bunch of novels by the mid-1860s, and he didn't want to rest on his laurels. Would people read it if they didn't know it had been written by Anthony Trollope? The answer, alas, was no.
Posted at 09:16 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (0)
I am about a quarter of the way through Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, and I am enjoying it so much. I might be the ideal reader for this book, which looks at the emergence of written language in antiquity, the usual development of reading in young children, and the differences observed in kids with dyslexia. It is chock full of interesting nuggets about neuroscience and history, including some surprising bits about written language learning among Sumerian and Chinese women. (It does cite Hart & RIsley uncritically, which is not my fave.) You might not share my enthusiasm for languages from antiquity or the processes by which kids' brains acquire language skills, but I bet you'll find it interesting too.
Posted at 09:10 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)
Suzanne asked me which Dickens novel is my favorite, and that is a harder question than you might think.
When I finished the Dickens novels in 2010, I would have grouped the books like this:
| Short, very good | Excellent, long | Good, long | Bleh |
| Great Expectations Tale of Two Cities Oliver Twist |
Pickwick Papers David Copperfield Bleak House |
Our Mutual Friend Nicholas Nickleby Little Dorritt Barnaby Rudge |
Dombey & Son Martin Chuzzlewit Old Curiosity Shop Hard Times |
My ratings have changed over the course of the AMDRALs. I loved Our Mutual Friend the second time around, but the second time through I found the young women in both Bleak House and David Copperfield pretty grating. Much to my surprise, I really enjoyed Martin Chuzzlewit in 2017.
One of the trends I have observed is that my life circumstances often influence my enjoyment of a Dickens novel. When I went back to Pickwick for the 2018 AMDRAL, I had trouble enjoying it. It's the most playful of the novels, but I was teaching a fully online summer class for the first time and it wasn't going well. I wasn't feeling very playful.
That's the reason I am very curious to revisit Dombey & Son. I read it for the first time in August/September of 2008, and my plate has rarely been fuller than it was then. I was being investigated by CPS, I was pregnant with my fifth child (and still throwing up in my third trimester), I was drafting the first half of my dissertation in preparation for a fall-semester prelim, and I had an absurdly long list of household tasks I wanted to complete before the baby arrived, like getting a new roof for the garage. Oh! And! in the first part of that window I was still closing out my early intervention caseload!
Not long after I finished Dombey & Son (grumpily, so grumpily), I read an article asserting that Dombey & Son is the Dickens novel most likely to be appreciated by people who think they don't like Dickens novels. At the time, I thought, "Are you kidding me? DOMBEY & SON?!" (I thought I remembered that this was Adam Gopnik writing in the New Yorker, but I can't find it in their archives and Google isn't turning it up elsewhere.) For that specific reason I am very curious about what it will be like to go back to that one -- it seems like an interesting place to land after so many years and so many re-assessments.
If pressed to pick a favorite-- wait, no, I can't pick just one.
Best short novel: Great Expectations
Most fun: Pickwick
Most skillfully crafted: Bleak House
The one I am most likely to pull of the shelf and read a chunk of, just because: Our Mutual Friend
Posted at 09:05 PM in Books, Dickens | Permalink | Comments (0)
This year will be the Twelfth Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, which means that we are nearing the end of the list of Dickens novels. Here's where we've been:
2024 Hard Times
2023 Great Expectations
2022 Nicholas Nickleby
2021 Little Dorrit
2020 Oliver Twist
2019 Tale of Two Cities
2018 Pickwick Papers
2017 Martin Chuzzlewit
2016 David Copperfield
2015 Our Mutual Friend
2014 Bleak House
We have three left: Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Dombey & Son. I think I want to save Dombey & Son for last, and I'm leaning toward Old Curiosity Shoppe for this year and Barnaby Rudge in 2026. Any opinions? We'll start a month from today, after I submit spring semester grades.
Posted at 03:43 PM in Books, Dickens | Permalink | Comments (1)
I finished Trollope novel #27 recently and it was not my favorite.
The MacDermots of Ballycloran was Trollope's first novel. It shows. I read recently that his mother, herself an author, was preeeeetty skeptical about her son's ability to write a novel that anyone would want to read. Ouch! And yet it is true that I had to haul myself forcibly through the first half of the novel.
Trollope lived in Ireland for a while as a young man, and he set several of his books there. In this one he keeps trying to capture the dialect difference in his spellings of the Irish characters' dialogue. Because of my professional background I am the worst possible audience for that. It grated on me the whole way through. It's very difficult, I know, to spell out dialect in a way that's consistent and transparent, and still I was irritated from start to finish by the lack of consistency and transparency.
To my eye, the narrator seemed to be looking down on the Irish people, gawping at their poverty and blaming it on their laziness and fondness for alcohol. Honestly, I was a little shocked by it at first. Imagine my surprise when I learned that his Irish novels didn't sell well because English audiences thought he was too sympathetic toward the Irish!
The second half of the novel moves more briskly than the first, and it raises interesting if familiar questions. One of the characters finds himself accused of murdering another character. What actions can a man legitimately take to protect his sister? Is true justice possible or is it destined to be corrupted by personal opinions and interests? The thing I might remember most warmly from the book is the decision of the accused man to return from his hiding place after fleeing initially, and face the legal consequences with all the courage he could muster.
One of the central characters is a Catholic priest; he might be the first one I've seen in a Trollope novel. It's also the first time I've seen a Trollope character develop dementia, and I'd say it's skillfully done: the man who was initially just cantankerous and isolated becomes unable to reason and remember, in a way that will probably ring true for readers who have watched a loved one's cognitive decline.
Twenty-seven down, twenty to go! Next up: Nina Balatka.
Posted at 09:29 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (0)
I finished the second Vera Wong book yesterday and it is even funnier than the first. I kept setting down my Kindle to laugh helplessly.
It probably works better to read them in publication order, since many of the characters from book #1 are back and part of the fun of book #1 is the uncertainty about who deserves sympathy vs. suspicion.
In both books it's not hard to guess where the plot is going, but that will not deter me from buying the third one whenever it comes out.
Posted at 09:43 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)
A friend from church recommended Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love to me and I've been reading it slowly in the mornings. I am enjoying it so much. I wake up looking forward to the next installment. I should tell you, though, that it's a little odd.
She was a 14th-century anchoress, who lived in a small cell attached to a church. She was granted a series of visions, or Shewings, in the wake of a serious illness, and the book describes them. My friend says this is the oldest extant book written in English by a woman.
You are probably already familiar with her quote "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." So far (I'm only about a fifth of the way through) the book is describing her visions and the things she learned from them. As a language geek I am delighting in the text, which sounds like lightly updated Middle English, but I also really enjoy her voice. She comes across as someone who was transformed by an unexpected experience; it rings true for me in a way that keeps surprising me.
I felt something similar when I read St. Augustine's Confessions -- a connection across the centuries. If I had lived in Norwich in Julian's lifetime I might have been a regular visitor at the window of her anchorhold. I have the feeling I would have learned a lot from her.
Posted at 09:54 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (1)
In February I read Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers and I was totally charmed by it. I saw the ending coming fairly early on, but I didn't even care. It made me laugh and laugh, which is maybe not what you'd expect given the topic. I enjoyed it so much that I pre-ordered the sequel, which came out on Tuesday.
I looked around for other books by the author, and downloaded Dial A for Aunties. And-- no. Too much sloppy over-the-top plotting, with an egregious continuity error. I finished it grudgingly.
On Tuesday the new Vera Wong landed on my Kindle, but I haven't started it yet. (I'm finishing a Camille Pagán that popped up in my Kindle suggestions. It's fine.) I'm so curious: will the new Vera Wong be as hilarious and delightful as the first? Or will it annoy the heck out of me like Dial A for Aunties?
I'll have to tell you all about it. How about you? What are you reading these days, and how do you like it?
Posted at 06:50 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (2)
I've been ticking along with my pleasant slow read of War & Peace. My college friend Stephan is doing it too, and occasionally one of us will send the other an enthusiastic text. But I am having some thoughts about the chapter in which Prince Andrei's son is born, and I don't think Stephan is the right audience for them.
Spoilers for a 160-year-old book: Prince Andrei returns from the war to find his wife in labor. He listens from the next room. Here's how it goes down in the Project Gutenberg version:
He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek—it could not be hers, she could not scream like that—came from the bedroom. Prince Andrew ran to the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.
“What have they taken a baby in there for?” thought Prince Andrew in the first second. “A baby? What baby...? Why is there a baby there? Or is the baby born?”
Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; tears choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill he began to cry, sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his shirt sleeves tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling jaw, came out of the room. Prince Andrew turned to him, but the doctor gave him a bewildered look and passed by without a word. A woman rushed out and seeing Prince Andrew stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He went into his wife’s room. She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen her in five minutes before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming childlike face.
Part I of the weirdness is that I remember half of this vividly. Our professor talked about Prince Andrei's moment of confusion when he heard the baby cry, and that particular moment has stayed with me since 1990. But how, friends, HOW did I forget that in the very next paragraph he found his wife dead?
Part 2 of the weirdness is that I do not think this makes sense obstetrically. Probably 1990 Jamie thought, "Ah, yes, women died in childbirth all the time in 1806." But deaths in childbirth have a mechanism. This doesn't add up, right? She was making loud noises right until the baby was born. The baby wasn't in bad shape -- he was making a good respiratory effort if his cries could be heard clearly in the next room -- but then something so sudden and final happened that the doctor walked away without attempting to save the princess.
What could it have been? I don't think you can push effectively and scream loudly with fulminant eclampsia, can you? That doesn't really sound like someone having a seizure or a stroke, right? And I know that lots of women bled out after childbirth, but it takes a little time to bleed to death. Even in 1806, they were massaging hemorrhaging uteri, weren't they? What causes sudden maternal death with no hope of effective intervention? Amniotic fluid embolism?
Dr. Google says that placenta previa was the "condition which aroused more anxiety in the attendant and was more dangerous to the mother than any other complication of childbirth." Maybe that was it, but I'm not convinced. Five minutes from actively pushing to so-persuasively-dead-the-doctor-walked-away -- is that plausible?
Posted at 08:15 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (3)
On January 1 I started Trollope novel #26, The Vicar of Bullhampton, and I finished it last night.
Its central character is a clergyman named Francis Fenwick, who lives with his wife Janet in a village with a mill. We see a lot of the miller's family, because they're at the heart of one of the three plot strands. One of their sons gets mixed up with some unsavory characters, who are implicated in a murder. This situation arises in the wake of another sorrow: one of their daughters was beguiled by a scoundrel, and she has been cast out. There's so much Victorian vagueness that it's a little hard to tell what's going on with Carry Brattle, honestly. Is she an occasional sex worker? because she didn't have a lot of other options open to her? or is this a more permanent state of affairs? The vicar is trying to figure out how to help the Brattles, and floundering. Carry is perceived as being so degraded that she's beyond help, but the vicar is determined to figure something out.
Another plot strand involves the vicar's closest friend, Harry Gilmore, the squire who owns the mill. Gilmore is hopelessly in love (I'm using that phrase literally) with a character named Mary Lowther, who does not love him in return. Trollope, as is his wont, spends big chunks of the book musing about marriage through these characters. How should we make our decisions about marriage? How much influence should money have? How much should we care about the perspectives of our family and friends? How much does falling in love matter?
The third plot strand involves a conflict between the vicar and the Marquis of Trowbridge, a silly and pompous old man who resolves to believe the worst of the vicar. The Marquis decides to punish the vicar by allowing the local Methodists to build a hideous chapel with a cacophonous bell right outside the vicar's front gate. (In Trollope's day, Methodists were dissenters and outsiders, not the mainline denomination that they are these days.)
I really enjoyed the character of the vicar, who wrestles persuasively with what it means to live a Christian life in a messy world. He keeps asking himself hard questions: what's the role of a clergyman in assisting his flock to live virtuous lives? I also enjoyed Janet and Mary and their relationship.
This is a Barsetshire-adjacent novel, in which we get a brief glimpse of the Dragon of Wantley and hear from a familiar bishop, but it's not part of the chronicles. In addition to the marriage theme, we see some other Trollope touchstones: the human costs of the slow grinding of the legal system, the useful work that a skilled lawyer can do. We have a sprinkling of quirkily named characters (the tailor Cutcote, the publishing house of Bringémout & Neversell), and a uniquely Trollopean mode of condemnation: the dreaded annuity. It seems to me that whenever Trollope writes "..and they settled an annuity upon him," he's pretty much channeling this woman:
Next I think I'll read one of Trollope's Irish novels. Watch this space for more scintillating Trollope content!
Posted at 07:09 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (1)
You might remember that I decided to read a string of hefty books by men, kicking it off with Trollope novel #25. The Claverings tells the story of a woman who marries for money and immediately regrets it. There are lots of people in Trollope novels who are busy weighing up the financial assets of prospective spouses, but Trollope goes all in on the heartlessness of Julia Brabazon's choice to marry Lord Ongar. The book is mostly about the subsequent choices of her spurned lover, Harry Clavering, in an era when breaking an engagement was a much bigger deal than it is these days.
We spend part of our time with Harry's family; his father is a Barsetshire clergyman whose elder nephew is the current Lord Clavering. This elder nephew is distressingly boorish, and his younger brother is comically inept. I've read a lot of Victorian proposals in which a fellow tells his sweetheart that she will make him the happiest man alive if she says yes, or at least the happiest man in all England. Cousin Archie says he'll be the happiest man in London, which seems to say, "I mean, yeah, I like you, but let's be real." (His would-be fiancee declines.)
This book seemed a little unpolished. There are some veiled allusions to the circumstances of Lord Ongar's death and his relationship with a Polish count, and perhaps I was supposed to know more about how to read between the lines. Instead it just felt murky, as if maybe Trollope hadn't wanted to bother with fleshing out that facet of the plot. There's a deus ex machina episode that felt a leetle too tidy. The Kindle edition is full of typos, with a bunch of weird differences in chapter divisions vs. the Project Gutenberg version. But Julia Brabazon is a memorable character, as is her Polish-French friend, and overall the book is a satisfying blend of funny and serious.
Now I'm reading Wellness, and I like it. I haven't been completely sucked in, like I was with this author's first novel, The Nix. I was surprised to find that Gladlyville makes a brief and unflattering appearance. So far it's the story of a couple who fell in love as young adults and hit a rough patch twenty years later. Hill's writing voice is engaging and the story is the same kind of mix of funny and sad that I enjoyed in The Nix. I'll keep plugging and tell you more as I get further in.
Posted at 06:30 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (2)
Of the novels I read that were written more recently than 1875, the large majority are written by women. The list of authors whose books I pre-order is almost exclusively female; the books I recommend to others are generally written by women. Publishing has been a boys' club for long enough; the guys don't need me to amplify their voices any further.
Obviously, there are occasional exceptions to this trend. My current TBR list has a cluster of fat novels written by men, and I think I might just jump in and read them all in a row. First up is The Claverings. I want to read one more Trollope novel before the end of the year, and this one is next in the queue.
Years ago now, Jennifer Fulwiler posted that she loved Shantaram so much that she was sad when it ended. I bought the book on the strength of her recommendation (she is the reason I read The Long Ships, which I would probably never have read otherwise; it is fantastic). I have started it a couple of times without getting to the riveting part, but I'm going to give it another shot.
My mother told me I should read Covenant of Water, and I didn't finish it before the library's copy was due. I decided to buy the Kindle version instead of getting back in the library queue, and then I lost momentum. This was last October (alas), so I'm going to need to start over.
The last one on my list is Wellness, which I bought last November because I loved The Nix so much. It's another doorstop-sized book, but I loved The Nix so much that I compared it to a Dickens novel, which is high praise in these parts.
I bet it's been 30 years since I read four novels by men in a row, though maybe it's only been 25. WILL I wind up needing a little palate cleanser at some point in this project? WILL we know who the next president is before I finish them? WILL a pile of fat novels diminish my election stress? Stay tuned and we'll see.
Posted at 09:40 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (5)
I'd never heard of Margery Allingham before I signed up for this summer knitting community, but I've read 8.5 of her books since May. If you enjoy Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, you'll like these too.
I read a boatload of Agatha Christie as a kid. I enjoyed the tidiness of her books -- the way the loose ends were squared away in the final chapters -- and the glimpses of a different world. They haven't aged very well, I don't think. (The last time I flipped through one at the library I said to myself, "Hercule Poirot is totally on the spectrum and I wonder if he's also gay." This made me think that Sherlock Holmes and his brother are probably also on the spectrum, which led me down a rabbit hole. I am not the only person to think these thoughts, apparently!)
I didn't read any Dorothy Sayers until I was in my 40s, and then I binge-read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries within a few months. I enjoyed them; I might reread them at some point. But he's not my favorite fictional detective. Sometimes I want to give him a brisk shake and say, "Lord Peter, put that in plain English with no obscure quotations, please." (You know, that relentless propensity for literary allusions makes me think about echolalia in movie-quoting kids on the spectrum...)
Margery Allingham was writing detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s and she's considered one of the Queens of Crime from the golden age of the genre. But she kept writing detective fiction long after the 1930s, and her detective character, Albert Campion, ages across her novels. I don't know why she's so much less familiar to US audiences, but I like her books better than either of her more famous counterparts'. She creates an atmosphere without overdoing it; her characters are enjoyable enough that it's fun to see them reappear in later novels. The plots are paced well, and the conclusions are satisfying.
They are available inexpensively in Kindle format, though some of them seem to have been shoved out into the Kindle market with dubious production values. I bought an edition of The Beckoning Lady with a conspicuous typo on the cover: the title is rendered The Becokning Lady. My edition of Hide My Eyes has the wrong author's name and photo on the cover! You have to wonder who oversaw those decisions, don't you?
But the content is pleasingly diverting despite the bungled details. I'm going to keep reading them, even though the summer discussion group is winding down.
Posted at 09:56 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (4)
My husband used to trot out the name Trollope as a metonym for overrated Victorian fiction: dull, overlong, irrelevant, generally unpleasant. In consequence I had very low expectations of Barchester Towers: I did not have any idea that I would love that book. Yesterday I was telling Stella about the Kindle Unlimited report on my most popular and most obscure reading choices. "Let me guess," she said. "Trollope is the most obscure?" (Trollope is indeed the most obscure. Is He Popenjoy? is not getting a lot of love from Kindle Unlimited users.)
It is true that Trollope revisits a lot of the same ideas across his books, but who among us could write 47 entirely distinct novels in the early morning hours before we went off to our real jobs? I am going to make a list of what I've read so far to minimize the memory blur.
I started my Trollope adventure in 2014 with the Barsetshire Chronicles, which I will reread someday. There are six of them, and I finished #6 in 2017. They are probably the best point of entry for the Trollope-curious. They can stand alone; I read #2 before #1 and it wasn't a problem at all. I read the six Palliser chronicles between the beginning of 2020 and the middle of 2022, and then resolved to head off into the depths of the back catalog.
Wish me luck! Only 23 novels to go!
Posted at 12:10 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (1)
Today I finished Trollope novel #24, which means I have read more than half of the 47 novels he wrote. It feels like a bit of an accomplishment.
This was a small novel, less than 160 pages long, but I will remember it. Trollope writes a lot about marriage: what's it for, and what happens when people have competing ideas about it? How much should you marry for financial stability vs. companionship vs. capital-L Love vs. political or logistical reasons, in a culture where marriage and biological children determined the future of titles and estates?
We're still chewing on some of these questions 150 years later, right? If you marry somebody from a wildly different background, is heartache inevitable? If someone's engagement seems to be a colossal mistake, what's the best response?
Novel #24 was Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. It follows the trials of Sir Harry, "a mighty person in Cumberland," as his daughter bestows her affections unwisely. In some ways it is very much a Victorian relic. These days a parent would say, "No, you cannot marry your second cousin, because consanguinity is a terrible idea," rather than wondering if it might be a good idea to invite the second cousin for consideration as a marriage prospect. The unspeakably shameful acts that put the second cousin beyond the pale are lying and card-sharping, neither of which would be viewed as absolute dealbreakers in the 21st century. (In fact, James Bond plays the Duke of Cumberland bridge hand in one of the Ian Fleming books, and in my memory it's presented as proof of his versatility and ability to keep a cool head.)
The parts that I'll remember are the timeless bits, though: who can decide when a person is irredeemable? What happens when we pray for a person who appears irredeemable? Why do some people choose alcohol over the ones they love, and how should we respond to them?
Trollope is much funnier than I expected him to be. He is said to have laughed himself to death, by reading a book he found so funny that he laughed until he had a stroke. This is a sad book, though. Sometimes you appear to have it all, and you wind up losing what's most important. Sometimes you do the best you can, and it's still not enough.
Posted at 08:46 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (0)
Part of the Kate Davies summer knitting community involves reading novels by Margery Allingham, ranked alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as one of the UK's Queens of Crime. I've read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books and short stories, and I devoured Agatha Christie as a kid. So it seemed likely that I'd enjoy the Allingham books as well. I finished the third one today.
I'm enjoying them enough to keep going. Our hero Albert Campion reminds me in some ways of Lord Peter Wimsey. The books are pleasantly diverting and they do not overwhelm a sensitive reader* with gore or tautly suspenseful plot lines.
*(It's me; I'm the sensitive reader. When I was a preschooler I found Scooby-Doo too frightening to watch, and so I would cover my eyes until the scary parts were over. That probably gives you a sense of my capacity for gore and suspense. I can only tolerate murder mysteries written for the delicate flower.)
It's interesting to be reading Allingham at the same time as my Trollope novel, though. In Trollope's world we can know that a person is inexcusably vulgar if he wears yellow gloves, a sartorial mishap that occurs in both Miss Mackenzie and Marion Fay. In Allingham's novel Flowers for the Judge, I lingered over the description of a natty dresser who disappeared mysteriously. His elegant ensemble included -- can you guess? -- yellow gloves. Were yellow gloves still vulgar, and their presence was supposed to tell us something about either the disappearing man or the tobacconist describing his disappearance? Or had yellow gloves been plucked from the Trash Heap of Bad Fashion Choices and placed in the Catalog of Snazzy Choices by the 1930s? Who can say?
In Trollope's novels, "making love" means "wooing." Obviously it acquired a very different meaning at some point between the 1870s and the 1970s, but when? When an unhappily married Allingham character tells a rival to go ahead and make love to his wife, is he inviting the rival to flirt with her or to pursue carnal knowledge of her? The internet tells me that the current meaning took hold in the 1920s, beginning in the US. So had it traveled across the Atlantic by the 1930s? Who can say?
I'm a little behind the reading schedule for the Kate Davies group (perhaps because I'm trying to finish another fat Trollope novel at the same time), but I am going to keep plugging along. Next up: Dancers in Mourning.
Posted at 10:44 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (2)
I'm reading Trollope novel #22, which has the improbable title Is He Popenjoy?, and we are just about to meet two characters whose advent has been the subject of exclamation-point-filled dread for many chapters. These characters come from the Bad Place: Italy.
Perhaps you have never thought of Italy as a bad place. Perhaps you even like Italy; perhaps you plan to visit Italy someday. But Trollope would like you to re-evaluate. Any time you encounter the label "Italian," know that it actually means "under a permanent cloud of suspicion."
It took me a while to figure this out. In Marion Fay, a character is discovered to be an Italian nobleman, and I failed to grasp the full implications of this discovery at the time. Would you want to be a nobleman under a permanent cloud of suspicion? I thought not. You'd probably renounce your title too.
I didn't tell you about Lady Anna aside from my introduction to it via the Trollope Society (I figure there are probably limits on the number of Trollope posts you are willing to read), but Lady Anna's father was a nasty piece of work. We know this in part because of his romantic involvement -- in Italy. (Parenthetically, to the few of you who are intrigued by Trollope, Trollope's treatment of Lady Anna reminds me of the ending he wrote for John Eames. Both of them surprised me.)
Oh! Also! I'd never thought about this before, but there's a character in Barchester Towers whom we're supposed to regard as indolent -- a sketchy guy with a sketchy family -- and guess where he just spent twelve years? Italy, that's where!
Italy seems like a strange place to vilify, but Trollope apparently had very firm ideas about it. I guess I'll have to wait and see what these characters get up to. It seems unlikely to bring happiness to our heroine.
Posted at 10:06 PM in Books, Trollope | Permalink | Comments (0)
Catherine Newman's new book, Sandwich, came out last week, and you should probably read it. If you're a woman in the 45-55 age range, it will make you laugh until you weep with its devastatingly hilarious takes on the indignities of midlife. If you're married to a woman in that age range, it will make you say, "Weeeellllll, things could definitely be worse around here." If you are outside those age ranges, it will give you some insight into the goings-on inside the aging brains of your middle-aged loved ones.
It is uproariously funny. I was reading it in public over my lunchtime sandwich and I snort-laughed helplessly. I thought maybe I would just get a quick coffee and squeeze in another chapter (or two) before I went back to my office, and I laughed until I had actual tears running down my face right there in the coffeehouse.
It reminds me very much of her first novel, We All Want Impossible Things, which I blogged about in early 2023. It intertwines heartbreakingly sad parts with the laugh-so-hard-you-inhale-your-beverage parts in a way that I find memorable and effective. This one is more about marriage than the earlier book, and it combines the moments of "I don't know who I would be without you" and the moments of "I might kill you in your sleep" in a way that might -- just possibly -- resonate with some of the folks I know navigating marriage at midlife.
Although the main character's kids are grown, the book talks a lot about pregnancy and miscarriage and abortion. It does so in ways that left me pretty uncomfortable, but maybe that's the point. I am guessing that even if your views on abortion diverge from mine, parts of the book will make you squirm.
Across both books there are things that struck me as implausible, but not in a way that torpedoed my enjoyment of the book. (Although, just in case the magic of Google alerts ever brings this post to the author's attention: next time you're writing about early speech development, shoot me an email. I'll happily volunteer as your subject matter expert.) Mostly what I will remember is the distinctive voice: smart, aching, acerbic, riotously funny.
Posted at 08:28 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (1)
Welcome to my blog, where I mostly natter on about my life with five kids. Occasionally (not very often, because teenagers keep a person humble) I dispense parenting advice. Occasionally I write about other things, like books. (Those are probably affiliate links in posts about books. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will pay me a little bit of money.) Or faith or food or my secret strategy for dealing with annoying kid behavior or whether I am fit to be a mother. Also: who is the mystery intruder? And: does stay-at-home mothering rot the brain?
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