Light and Momentary

Just a little more Trollope blogging

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.

1. Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. Short, sad, just blogged about it yesterday.
2. The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. A haberdasher goes out of business, as told from the perspective of the partner in charge of publicity. Wince-inducing, with some zingy and still-relevant thoughts on advertising. I was glad it was short.
3. Is He Popenjoy? My favorite of the six I've read in 2024. The second son of a noble family has a title and land but no money. He marries a young woman with money but no title. Will she be faithful? Will he be faithful? The older brother is a memorably ignoble noble, a recurring Trollope trope.
4. Lady Anna. A wicked old nobleman leaves his widow and daughter in penury. The daughter wants to marry her first love; her mother has higher aims. Like Marion Fay, it illustrates the toll parental ambition can take on parental character.
5. Orley Farm. A second wife desperately wants her son to inherit a place to call his own. A deeply unlikable eldest son and a slimy solicitor are in the right under the law. If we hope they lose, are we in the wrong? One of my favorites. 
6. Cousin Henry. A squire with no son faces hard decisions when he writes his will. Like Sir Harry, he has a winsome daughter and a clever solicitor.
7. Marion Fay. A tale of two engagements that cross class boundaries; feels like an overly sentimental rehash of familiar characters and ideas. Reminiscent of The Duke's Children but we have less investment in the characters.
8. The Fixed Period. Very strange dystopian fiction; predicting the future is hard.
9. The Three Clerks. Early and autobiographical, funny and perspicacious. Infighting and moral dilemmas in the Victorian civil service, plus hopeful love stories.
10. Dr. Wortle's School. Like Orley Farm, this one looks at the question of well-intentioned people doing illegal things. Do they deserve opprobrium, sympathy, assistance? Does our perspective shift if the people who are technically in the right are icky and unpleasant?
11. Miss Mackenzie. What happens when a poor spinster inherits some money and becomes marriageable? 
12. The Way We Live Now. Justly famous, but painfully long and crammed full of unlikable characters.

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!

In which I cross the halfway point

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.

Adventuring with Allingham

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.

The Bad Place

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.

The Trollope Project Continues

You might remember that I am working my way through the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope, with the goal of reading them all by the time I'm 60. I had planned to read one per season, but I'm on Trollope novel #4 for 2024 and it's only March. Today I attended a virtual meeting of the Trollope Society, and my husband laughed out loud when I told him about it afterward. So maybe I'll tell you all a little bit about it too.

After I read Marion Fay, I turned right around and started reading Cousin Henry. It's about an old man who is torn about where to leave his property, and it has a deeply unlikeable title character. It seems like a pretty bold authorial choice, actually, to name your book after the character whose downfall your readers will all be hoping to see -- as if Dickens had gone with "The Adventures of Fagin" instead of "Oliver Twist." It's only about 200 pages long, which is practically a short story in Trollope's world, and as soon as I finished it I plunged right into Orley Farm.

I loved Orley Farm. It might be the book I'd recommend to someone who wanted to read a standalone Trollope novel. It's much heftier than either Cousin Henry or Marion Fay, but I found that it moved briskly. At one point I texted my family to tell them about an exciting plot development. (They found it less riveting than I did; go figure.) It asks a bunch of interesting questions: how do we balance justice and mercy? What's our reaction when an extraordinarily unsympathetic character demands justice? How much of a court case is about truth, and how much is about lawyerly skill? 

When I finished I thought to myself, "I wish I could talk to a pal about Trollope." And LO, the Trollope Society exists specifically for people who want to talk about Trollope. Their spring book is Lady Anna, and I decided to jump in and read the first chunk of it in preparation for their initial online discussion.

A retired American chemistry teacher spoke for about 25 minutes to a surprising number of attendees (5 screens of them! 5! for a conversation about this totally obscure novel!). She had clearly put a lot of effort into investigating this book's background, and she had also prepped discussion questions for people to chat about in breakout rooms.

This is the part that made my husband burst out laughing: I told him that she said, "Now I know that this book is quite a page-turner, and many of you will have already read ahead. Be sure you don't share any spoilers in your breakout room!"

"A page-turner," he repeated to himself, chortling helplessly. "A page-turner!" 

I had started to think I was being a little nutty about Trollope, as I embarked on novel #21. But after this meeting today it's clear to me that I know nothing -- nothing -- about real Trollope fandom. 

The Readers Have Spoken

Well, okay, one reader has spoken. Probably she does not represent an eager horde of Trollope lovers, jostling each other impatiently as they await my thoughts on Marion Fay. But let's talk about Marion Fay anyway.

It's a late Trollope novel, published in the year he died. Some of its elements are memorably thoughtful and mature. He does a marvelous job showing us how an ordinarily ambitious stepmother might become a wicked stepmother, at least temporarily. He builds on questions he first raised at the end of the Palliser Chronicles; here, too, two children of a widowed nobleman want to marry outside their class. But for the most part the young people are more skillfully drawn here, and we understand more of what they are thinking. 

I say "for the most part" because I'm not sold on the characterization of Marion Fay herself. She's like a refugee from a Dickens novel -- a little too perfect for plausibility. And her strand of the plot is a little too Old-Curiosity-Shop for me; I thought it veered into mawkishness, which is not a flaw I have observed in other Trollope novels. 

Another flaw I'd never noticed in Trollope's other books: I wasn't a fan of the pacing. It seemed to me that perhaps he decided in advance to write it in three parts, but when he got to part 3 he realized he'd painted himself into a corner, with too many chapters and not enough plot remaining. Chapter 45: Lord Hampstead Experiences Angst. Chapter 47: Lord Hampstead Writes Letters About His Angst. Chapter 49: Lord Hampstead, Now With More Angst. It's not as if each one of the 900+ pages in The Last Chronicle of Barset is awash in richly plotted excitement, but at least the reader never has to pause and think very hard about whether she already read this chapter because it's so much like the one that came before.

Despite its shortcomings, I'm glad I read Marion Fay. Lots of interesting contrasts: the post office clerk's strength of character versus the nobleman's weakness, the machinations of the loathsome and lazy CoE clergyman versus the straight shooting of the dutiful Quaker characters. Trollope sends up the nobility, showing us their enthusiastic reactions to a newly conferred title; he sends up civil service workers in his snapshots of office life. It wouldn't be at the top of my list of favorite Trollope novels, but overall I enjoyed the time I spent with Lady Amaldina Persiflage's friends and relations.

The Trollope Project

Anthony Trollope wrote a staggering 47 novels, and I am going to take a crack at reading all of them. I started with the six Barsetshire Chronicles, and then read the six Palliser Chronicles followed by The Way We Live Now. Last year I took a deep breath and plunged into the obscurer corners of his oeuvre.

I kicked it off with Miss Mackenzie (spinster begins anew; contemplates marriage proposals), followed it up with Dr. Wortle's School (how should we assess the moral weight of making an unacceptable decision for a compelling reason?), moved on to The Three Clerks (don't judge your books by their covers, and don't underestimate the Department of Internal Navigation), and then read The Fixed Period (a comically weird book set in a dystopian future). Last month I also read one of his pieces of short Christmas fiction, Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage.

For those of you counting along at home, this means I have 30 Trollope novels to go. If I aim for one per season, I'll be done when I'm 60 (pushing 61, but let's go with the round number). I do love a good long-haul reading project. 

This year I am going to begin with Marion Fay, a book chosen randomly from my Kindle version of the complete works. (Parenthetically, isn't it astonishing that I can fit the complete works of Trollope in my pocket? Let's hear it for living in the future!) Later this year I will probably read The American Senator and Orley Farm, but we'll see which way my fickle impulses steer me. I also think I'll read one more Christmas story before the Christmas season ends, even though Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage was a little disappointing.

The trouble with an obscure hobby is that it doesn't usually make for very compelling blogging. If I tell you that the first chapter of Marion Fay reminds me of the beginning of The Duke's Children, it's unlikely to make you say "oooh! tell us more!" But perhaps we'll hear again from the hypothetical Aspasia. In any event, I continue to find that a daily Trollope chapter is a pleasant peaceful way to end the day. And if a person reads enough chapters for enough nights, eventually she will read all of Trollope.

A trip to Britannula

If I say, "I just finished a novel set in a dystopian future, where all adults get euthanized at age 68," do you have a guess as to the author?

Did you say Trollope? Probably not, huh?

Because it's a Trollope novel: The Fixed Period. This was Trollope novel #17 for me, and it was my least favorite by a wide margin. I guess if you publish 47 novels, something's got to fill out the bottom tier.

But it was still interesting. It's set in 1980, where ship-to-shore communications are enabled by "hair telephones," a more sophisticated version of a tin can on a string. In Trollope's 1980, bicycles can go -- wait for it -- twenty-four miles per hour! The game of cricket has been revolutionized by a steam-powered machine that does the bowling. Although steam-powered tricycles exist, horse-drawn carriages remain popular. Also, comically, breach of promise suits are still a thing for couples who once considered themselves engaged.

It was intriguing to see how much of the future was literally unimaginable, even for someone who had a remarkably fertile imagination. Airplanes? Gasoline? Women in the workplace? He didn't see any of it coming.

Maybe the weirdest thing about the book is that he seemed to get tired of writing it and just...stop. The book is written in first person, in the voice of the president of Britannula, a fictional island that has decided to eliminate old age and all its associated hassles. We know from the very beginning that he is being taken to England by sea, and most of the book tells us how he wound up on the ship. I found the ending so strange and abrupt that I wondered if the free Kindle edition was missing the actual ending. The Project Gutenberg version is equally strange and abrupt, though, so I guess that's just the way it ends. 

"Well," I imagine Trollope saying to himself in the middle of the last chapter, "this has been a wearying and unpleasant experiment. Time to be done and write more novels about class differences in the British Isles. Endings are overrated anyway." 

I'm still enthusiastic about my Trollope project despite the weirdness of this book. Seventeen down, thirty to go. I figure if I read about one per season I can finish by the time I'm 60. Unless there are a lot more like The Fixed Period, in which case some re-evaluation will be necessary.

A couple of interesting books about women that might be niche recommendations

I am reading Peggy Orenstein's pandemic memoir, Unraveling, and I am really enjoying it. She'd always been a knitter, but during the pandemic she decided to learn how to shear a sheep, process and card the fleece, and spin her own yarn. But I don't think -- I'm not sure, but I really don't think -- it's too fiber-artsy for the non-fiber-arts-inclined among us. And you guys, there is SO much interesting stuff woven in (ha! see what I did there!) among the spinning bits. For instance, she discusses:

• research quantifying the amount of labor required of Viking women to produce sails in a time before spinning wheels
• textile millworkers as key drivers of both organized labor and the women's movement
• the face recognition abilities of sheep (better than mine!)

She has a lot to say about the fashion industry, and it's well timed for me given my recent forays into more sustainable clothing. The writing is zippy and engaging, and it's such an evocative book. That was a wild time to be alive, and lament and uncertainty are beautifully interleaved with fabric factoids and anti-fast-fashion segments. Enthusiastically recommended, with the caveat that I might have more patience for passages about sheep breeds than the average reader.

Yesterday I finished Trollope novel #14, Miss Mackenzie. On one of my recent-ish book posts, Nicole-the-Victorian-lit-professor (as distinct from Canadian Nicole, whose teaching interests lie more in the yoga-ward direction) asked me what I thought about Trollope's female characters, and the answer is that I am generally a fan. In contrast to Dickens, who has approximately five female characters to whom he assigns different names across all of his books, Trollope usually does a nice job creating interesting characters who also happen to be women. I had low expectations for this book because of its obscurity, but I'm glad I read it.

I wish I knew of a Trollope-loving corner of the internet. There are UK and US Trollope societies, but they seem to be a little too academic for my taste. I want a 1990s-ish bulletin board, or something like Pemberley, only Trollope-flavored. Lady Glencora Palliser makes an appearance late in Miss Mackenzie and I was so pleased to see her there-- alive and well, not yet a duchess, presumably rolling her eyes affectionately at Plantagenet's plans to decimalize English currency. Alas, the number of people to whom I can say, "You guys, you guys, it's Lady Glencora Palliser!" is approximately zero.

Well, I did say it to my husband, who nodded patiently if bemusedly, but you know what I mean.

13% of #13, or In Bed With Trollope

I have read thirteen of the 100 chapters in The Way We Live Now, which is my thirteenth Trollope novel. 

I think, though I am not fully committed to the idea, that the novels of Trollope will be my next long-haul reading project. It's just -- phew, that man wrote a lot of novels. He wrote f-o-r-t-y-s-e-v-e-n novels. FORTY-SEVEN. This is a lot of reading and I am already 52 years old. That's, like, the equivalent of three Dickens projects. It's a lot.

Even so, I am going to take a stab at it and see if it brings me joy. I've told you before about how much I enjoy his voice-- he had clearly been thinking for a long time about what makes people tick, and why they do the goofy things they do. The Way We Live Now involves some of the same characters and places I already know from the Palliser Chronicles, and that appeals to me as well. I do NOT love Mr. Melmotte. Have I read somewhere else that he is going to be exposed as a shameless fraud? Or is he just enough like Mr. Merdle from Little Dorrit that I know he's like a nineteenth-century Bernie Madoff? Or maybe I don't actually know that, and he is going to turn out to be a perfectly reputable businessman. I would be preeeetty surprised if that were the case, but life is full of unexpected happenings.

I am finding that it works well for me to read a chapter a night in bed. Reading faster-paced books in bed sometimes keeps me awake longer than is good for me, but Trollope is a very pleasant way to end the day: interesting but never heart-stopping, amusing but not hilarious. I never wake my husband up snort-laughing because I am reading Trollope, but his books often make me smile.

I am not making him sound particularly compelling, am I? If I were trying to start a Trollope club I'd have to rethink my approach entirely. Maybe I'd post some Instagram pictures of me making serious and interested faces at a Trollope novel while reading it over my açai bowl. Maybe I'd make a reel highlighting the funniest parts, except I'd have to learn how to make a reel first. I am pretty sure #Trollope is not going to be making the rounds among the hashtagging mom-fluencers, but luckily this has never been a mom-fluencer kind of blog. 

You will just have to imagine me in my pajamas, smiling and nodding and then nodding off. Probably not the next big TikTok trend, but maybe, if you're looking for a way to ease into both sleep and Victorian literature, you would enjoy it too.

And done!

Today I completed one of my new year's resolutions: I finished the Palliser Chronicles. Turns out that if you just keep reading them, even big books come to an end.

In the end I didn't like it quite as much the Barsetshire Chronicles, but it was well worth doing.

This is the 169th day of the year, and I have read at least a chapter of Trollope on all 169 of them. I think tomorrow I'll start The Way We Live Now.

A dollop more Trollope

Today I finished the fifth Palliser Chronicle, The Prime Minister. Reading at least a chapter a day of one of the Palliser Chronicles is the only one of my new year's resolutions that I have stuck to consistently for all 95 days of 2022, and it's working out pretty well. I have been finding that the first halves of the books tend to move slowly, and then I get enthusiastic about reading the second halves. Now I only have one left.

Except-- I'm feeling a little reluctance about this last one.

Last month I was poking around on the Trollope Society's website, trying to remember some obscure character from the Barsetshire Chronicles who pops up again in the Palliser books, when I discovered that there is a NEW EDITION of book 6, The Duke's Children. When Trollope was first serializing this last book, he hit a snag.

He wanted to publish it in All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens, Jr. But Junior did not want to publish the original version of The Duke's Children, which he thought was way too long. (When I first read this story I thought it was The Inimitable himself saying somebody's novel was way too long. Which, dude. Pot/kettle much? Maybe Charles Dickens Jr.'s impatience with long novels is a little more understandable. The guy probably had to read a lot of long novels if Charles Dickens was his father, don't you figure?)

Most of the editions of The Duke's Children currently floating around out there are abridged. But! The Trollope Society is delighted to announce that you can now obtain THE EXTENDED VERSION, so you don't miss a single word.

At this point, you guys, having read something in the neighborhood of 3 million words by Trollope across these 11 novels (6 Barsetshire, 5 Palliser), I wondered if maybe, just possibly, I might stick with the abridged version that was already living on my Kindle. But I said to myself, Hey, self, if you're going to read the Palliser Chronicles, you might as well read the whole thing.

The excised text amounts to 65,000 words, which is about the equivalent of the full text of The Sun Also Rises. The EXTENDED VERSION appears to be a smidge under 300,000 words, or approximately as long as The Pickwick Papers.

So here I go. I have my very own copy of the extended version. I have read the first chapter. There are 79 to go.

Currently reading

My morning book is Tenderness, by Eve Tushnet. I love it, you guys. I love her voice, I love her thoughtfulness, it is helpful and challenging and fun to read. I will have more to say about this one, but if you have any interest in the question of how the Church can respond more pastorally to the gay community, this book is worth your time.

I am now three-sixteenths (but who's counting?) of the way through book 5 of the Palliser Chronicles, The Prime Minister. It's fine. It's not gripping, but, you know, it's Trollope. I am going to have to give him another twenty chapters before we have any hope of gripping.

By the numbers (i.e.., chapters completed), I am more than 80% of the way through Sketches by Boz. But by the page count, the proportion is much smaller. The last twelve sketches are much more substantial than the first 44, and I have bogged down. Perhaps I will knock it out during spring break. I had a funny experience reading this one in tandem with The Prime Minister, you guys. I hopped into bed and opened up my Kindle app to read my nightly chapter of The Prime Minister. At the beginning of a Trollope novel you're always meeting a bunch of new characters, and it's not unusual for him to introduce people in groups, where he has a plausible way to say, "Look, here's the crew we'll be talking about in this novel." So I nodded knowingly to myself when I saw that the chapter title. I pulled up short at the street name, which was Something-coram Court. I thought to myself, "Like Tattycoram in Little Dorrit. How often does that -coram bit show up in Victorian novels, I wonder?" I filed away the character's name for future reference, and then I observed to myself that he sounded decidedly odd for a Trollope character. I turned another page and read a little farther in increasing perplexity. "...Wait a minute," I said to myself, as I tapped my way to the book cover. Sure enough, this was a Dickensian gathering.

I guess this is a predictable hazard of reading two Victorian novels at the same time on the same device.

The Hardcore Dickens Club has gone on to Pickwick. They make it sound so enticing that I thought, "I could reread Pickwick with them! I love Pickwick!” But man, they are a committed lot. I think I will finish Sketches and then leave them to it until they hit Nicholas Nickleby.

Two of my library holds came in this week. I galloped through Black Girls Must Die Exhausted in a couple of days and put the sequel on hold as well. I'm not very far into The Maid but I predict it will be a quicker read than The Prime Minister. I have some baked-in skepticism about neurotypical people attempting to write from the perspective of characters on the spectrum, which seems to be what's going on here, but we shall see. (Did you read the Rosie books? I found them fun but also problematic. There was also some of that same thing in Eleanor Oliphant.)

I have also been inching my way through The Church's Best-Kept Secret, Mark Shea's book on Catholic social teaching. I really like it: clear, succinct, sensible, helpful. I'm going to aim to finish that one up by the end of spring break too.

As usual, these are Amazon links; if you click through and buy a book, Amazon will send me a few cents' worth of store credit.

The Invisible Editor

I have been inching along through Phineas Redux, reading my chapter a day but rarely more. It's fine; it's not riveting; I haven't especially cared about what's happening. But as I say, it's fine.

And then things get weird.

I am envisioning a fiery older sister whose opinion Trollope respected. One fine day she comes sailing into his house. "Anthony!" she bellows, smacking her fan against his desk, "what is the purpose of all this parliamentary nonsense? No one cares what Mr. Daubeny said about Mr. Gresham as they debated disestablishment! I've told you before: there was QUITE ENOUGH of that in book 2 of this endless series."

"But, Aspasia," he says meekly, "I think that speech by Mr. Daubeny is really rather fine."

"EXCITEMENT, Anthony," she says, narrowly missing his knuckles with another fierce rap of her fan. "The modern reader WILL HAVE excitement. Do you wish to lose all your readers to that theatrical Mr. Dickens, or only most of them?"

"Very well, Aspasia," he sighs. "I'll add in some gunfire."

She returns a week later. "Anthony," she said, "how you DO go on about these Cabinet appointments. What you really need to do is to bring back Lizzie Eustace."

"Oh, dear," sighs Trollope, "Lizzie Eustace is so vulgar that it pains me to write about her. It amuses me for a chapter or two and then she makes me positively dyspeptic."

Aspasia has been peering down at his newest chapter, and now she eyes him pitilessly over the top of her lorgnette. "If you aren't willing to suffer for your art, Anthony," she announces acidly, "then all the rest of us will have to do so."

"Very well, Aspasia. Lizzie Eustace you shall have."

Alas, after another week Aspasia is beside herself to discover that readers will be wading through more discussions of decimal coinage. "Anthony!" she roars. "Decimal coinage and disestablishment! Were you to seek out the most soporific subjects known to man you could hardly find any more suitable. I shudder to think what your readers have had to slog through. You must make it up to them."

Our long-suffering author has had enough. "Fine!" he says. "Out!" he says. "Excitement they shall have. Leave me in peace, Aspasia. I'll give them some excitement but you must let me write in peace."

What, he wonders, will keep Aspasia at bay? A murder, he decides. He'll throw in a nice little murder.

Whatever will become of the decimal coinage initiative now? The suspense! Who knew Trollope could be suspenseful?!

Books

I am in the middle of a bunch of books. Would you like to hear about them?

First there is Phineas Redux. Do you remember what a trial I found the first half of Phineas Finn? All is forgiven. I have grown genuinely fond of our hero and I am enjoying this return to his world. Also this book has fewer Parliament scenes and cabinet meetings and the like, which featured prominently in Phineas Finn and always made me want to turn to reading some nice refreshing phone book pages. 

I am also trucking along through Sketches by Boz with the Hardcore Dickens Club. I can imagine that it would have been easy to get distracted without the steadying influence of the HDC folks, so I'm glad we're reading it together. It's interesting to see how many of the things that caught Dickens' eye at 20-something continued to rattle around in his brain for the rest of his career. It makes me wonder: how much are our middle-aged selves like our younger selves, generally?

My morning book is Interior Freedom by Fr. Jacques Philippe, and it is fantastic. Our pastor loves Fr. Philippe and has encouraged the parish to read his books for years. They've never really done it for me, until now. This one is exactly what I need to be reading. I am underlining and marginalia-fying and taking pictures of especially stirring bits to send off via text.

I am also still plugging along in Thinner This Year, but I do not love it. Too moralizing, too fat-shame-y, too willfully oblivious to the charms of butter, which is a GIFT of the LORD. I am going to finish it before it is due back to the library, because the nutrition science is presented at a level and in a way that works for me and because I want more details about implementing the exercise plan described in Younger Next Year for Women. But I am going to finish it a little grudgingly.

In between I am reading No Cure for Being Human, which I purchased in the fall because someone on Twitter told me to, and then left languishing on my Kindle until my friend Becky mentioned that she was reading it. It's really good. I might be enjoying it more if I weren't reading too many other books at the same time though.

In a decision that might seem a little strange for a person who already thought she was reading too many books, when the Kindle app suggested that I might like to read Miss Cecily's Recipes for Exceptional Ladies I said to myself, "Everything I am reading right now is so heavy; maybe a nice fluffy novel would be fun." It feels like I am interspersing bites of metaphorical Cool Whip with bites of metaphorical kale salad. I do not know if I will finish it; a tub of Cool Whip is a lot of Cool Whip. We shall see.

I am the soul of temperance, it turns out

You guys, I have to tell you about a thing I found on the internet today. Have you ever thought to yourself, "That Jamie Gladly is kind of obsessed with the Victorians"? It turns out I am not obsessed at all! Not even a teeny bit.

Today I found a corner of the internet in which dozens of people -- dozens! (dozens as in 2 and a bit, but still: dozens, plural) -- are planning to read the major works of Dickens across the next two years.

That is a gobsmacking commitment to Dickens, my friends. That is SO MUCH DICKENS.

And maybe, possibly, I will take part of the ride with them.

For a while now I have wanted to read some portion of the Dickens I haven't yet read. The problems are that (a) there's so much Dickens and (b) I have found the quality variable in my few excursions beyond the novels. The Christmas novellas, for instance-- bathos! sentimentality! blargh!! 

The club members are reading in roughly chronological order, starting with Sketches by Boz, which I have never read. I love the exuberance and playfulness of early Dickens (Pickwick forever!), so that might be a good one to read with them. I'll sit out the next two on their list (Pickwick and Oliver Twist), since I've read both of those pretty recently, but they are going to be starting Nicholas Nickleby in May. Perfect timing for an #AMDRAL pick, and I haven't read that one since 2010, when I finished up my 10-year Dickens project.

I finished up Eustace Diamonds over lunch today and started Phineas Redux tonight. I don't think I've ever had a Dickens work and a Trollope novel on the go at the same time, but I guess I'll give it a whirl.

Seven Quick Takes: Dull Girl Edition

1. This week was my spring break, and yesterday I was feeling a little grumpy about it. You know how all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy? I was feeling pretty dull. I'd set myself a long list (an impractically long list) of Stuff To Do.

2. Things I did: filed federal taxes, completed the diocesan scholarship application with all its invasive questions about our finances, cleaned out the gecko tank, emptied work/personal email and the backlogged paper cubby, steam-cleaned the grubby tracks on the dining-room carpet, and weathered a snow day (on the twelfth of March, I ask you).

3. It was a productive week at work, too, in which I sent a manuscript draft to a co-author and made good headway on another draft. I sent off one IRB and edited another, and all but finished the slides that are due tomorrow for a conference presentation.

4. But somewhere in there I slid across the line from happy-productive to grim-productive, all the while realizing that I was going to have to head back to teaching in a small and dwindling number of days. So today I had some fun.

5. I finished Barchester Towers this morning. Oh, you guys, I loved it. I loved it immoderately. I loved it so much I am a little embarrassed to admit how much I loved it, because it is 600 pages of clergymen's attempts to outmaneuver each other. But it is laugh-out-loud funny, and so spot-on observant. I kept highlighting passages just because they were such a pleasure to read. I think I've found my next ten-year project.

6. I've been thinking about Trollope vs. Dickens. Trollope's strength, at least in this book, is the utter believability of his main characters. You've known people like these people before. You understand why they're doing what they're doing. There's not much in the way of plot, but that's perfectly fine. With Dickens, the plot is simultaneously the strength and the limitation. I love the intricacy of his plots -- when it's not causing my Implausibility Meter to honk like a pack of territorial geese.

7. I suppose geese do not really consort in packs. But I am out of time to tell you more about my happy day, which included a quiet lunch out with potato-leek soup and a trip to the used bookstore AND the yarn store, where I bought one gorgeous hank of laceweight merino/silk blend in the peculiarly hopeful green of new willow leaves.

Visit Jen for more quick takes.

The Darwins' Immediate Book Meme

1. What book are you reading now?

Barchester Towers. I should have read it years ago. My husband and I share many tastes, but he is unreasonably squeamish about the 19th century. He told me for years that the only Dickens novel he liked was Tale of Two Cities, because it wasn't like any other Dickens novels. (But really, it is SO much like other Dickens novels.) Way back in 1991 he practically retched when I told him the senior seminar for comparative lit majors was on the 19th-century historical novel -- I do believe he'd have preferred to have a couple of fingernails ripped out. (Mostly I enjoyed the readings, although I did not love Salammbô.) I should have learned early to filter out his anti-19th-century bias. But when he talked about Trollope as reading one would only undertake as penance, I believed him. When he gave me a copy of Barchester Towers and said, "Here, I thought you might like this," in the same tone one might use while handing a box of laundry starch to a pica sufferer -- I said thank you wanly and put the book on the shelf.

But! I love it! I should have known I would. It is so witty, and the characters so interesting, that I can't wait to read more about the wily machinations of imaginary English clerics. Go figure. It's possible that 600 pages might be a whole lot of machinating, but I'm happy for now. 

2. What book did you just finish?

Have His Carcase. Finals prompted a Lord Peter Wimsey binge, because the idea of a world full of careful observations and sparkling language usage and a right answer that no one can argue with has a certain appeal at finals time. 

Stolen. This was a Lissa recommendation. In contrast to most Lissa recommendations, it didn't grab me.

Thea Gallas Always Gets Her Man. A budding lactation consultant solves a murder mystery! This must be the first time that the Journal of Human Lactation has featured in a book about body-hiding hoarders with dark personal histories.

When We Were On Fire. A memoir of growing up evangelical and becoming disillusioned. I think that this one and the previous one were both recommended by Rixa.

3. What do you plan to read next?

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's newest is coming out on Monday.

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

Oh, ugh. In the fall of 2011 I bought Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names for Love. I'm two-thirds of the way through. I also have had My Peace I Give You sitting partially read on my iPod for, like, ever. I'm generally a little obsessive about finishing books I buy from the Kindle store. We will not discuss my dusty pile of book-books.  

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

Romola. I keep thinking that George Eliot should be my next multi-year reading project, and then I keep not reading George Eliot. I loved Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, but all of them took me a good long while to warm to. I did not love Middlemarch. Is that heresy?

6. What is your current reading trend?

Other bloggers' recommendations. I am a reed in the wind lately.