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The Incandescent, Emily Tesh. For years I have been complaining about the lack of SFF written from the point of view of a teacher, and Emily Tesh probably wasn't listening but she wrote this book anyway! Tesh taught classics at a boarding school for two years, and the worldbuilding of her boarding school in a world very much like ours only with magic is very much informed by that experience -- this is the sort of book that has a lot to say about education in our world, while also having creative and thought-provoking worldbuilding. It's not quite the type of story about a teacher that I wanted, but I hope it will lead to more of these.

(Also, I do still need to read Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic, which is the only other example I know of a fantasy novel from the point of view of a teacher.)
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System Collapse, Martha Wells. I took a break from Murderbot to read a bunch of historical stuff, partly because I'd remembered that this wasn't as good as Network Effect. Which is true, but I still liked it better the second time around, though in some ways it's less of a fun read. I mentioned when reviewing the early books in the series is that part of the appeal is that while Murderbot is a huge bundle of anxiety, it's also stunningly competent in what it does, especially when it has a reason to care. However a lot of the first half of this book is Murderbot having to deal with stuff going on that is making it less competent, which is useful character development in that it gets to work more as part of a team, but means that the fun stuff is really loaded into the second half of the story.

(I have seen the first two episodes of the show, but would prefer to have this be a book-discussion-only zone.)
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Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Kate Douglas Wiggin. I think I started reading this book as a kid, but didn't get very far into it -- I certainly knew it existed, but what I didn't realize until [personal profile] osprey_archer reviewed a biography of Kate Douglas Wiggin was that it was by the same person who wrote "The Birds' Christmas Carol", a story that did make a big impression on kid-me. So I thought I'd give Rebecca another try. It's very readable, and clearly was a major influence on L. M. Montgomery (it predates Anne of Green Gables). But because of that I keep comparing it to other books of its genre that I read younger and have more emotional attachment to. And while maybe I might have loved it if I'd gotten into it as a kid, as an adult it just feels like "another one of those".

Memories and Adventures, Louise Héritte-Viardot, translated by Emma-Sophia Buchheim. Louise Héritte-Viardot is my newest discover of a forgotten woman composer, thanks to the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective having just released a recording of her Piano Quartet No. 1. I'd already heard of her mother Pauline Viardot-Garcia, also a composer as well as a charismatic opera star and friend of George Sand, who used her as the model for her protagonist Consuelo. (I've previously written here about my reading of Consuelo and its sequel, which are absolutely wild books to read, especially knowing almost nothing about them.) Sand convinced young Pauline that marrying the older writer and theatre director Louis Viardot was a good career move, and their marriage was generally happy even though Pauline was not in love with Louis.

As a result, Louise grew up in a household frequented by major literary, artistic, and musical figures, many of whom were in love with her mother, and also got to accompany her mother on visits to perform for aristocrats and royals. Louise played hide-and-seek with Prince Friedrich of Prussia, the future (briefly reigning) Kaiser Friedich III. The early part of her memoirs is full of charming childhood memories of famous people who befriended her, and also includes a section defending her family against rumors about their involvement with Turgenev, who lived with or near them for many years.

The memoirs give a good sense of Louise as a strong-willed, intellectually ambitious woman constantly pushing against the limitations of the role of women in her time -- she mentions learning the Greek alphabet as a child as part of a desire to read the classics in the original, never fulfilled. As a composer she was mostly self-taught, and the main feedback she got from the older composers she knew was to keep on doing her own thing. She expresses confidence that she was a good and successful composer, though her career was held back by bad luck and prejudice against women: "I have composed over 300 works, and I supppose they will all be published in good time, though I care very little about it". I wish she'd cared more, since as it happens only a handful of these survive!

Like her mother, Louise married young a much older man; her memoirs are unclear as to how she chose her husband, but unlike her mother, she was not happy in her marriage : she followed him to a diplomatic appointment in South Africa, but returned to Europe a few years later and lived apart from him, financially self-supporting with her own career, for the rest of her life, during which she traveled around Europe. As a result, Louise's husband barely appears in the memoirs. The later part of the book is in the genre of peroid travel memoir that inspired Marie Brennan's The Memoirs of Lady Trent, though unlike Lady Trent Louise is smugly superior to everyone she encounters who is not a Western European. Of the travel adventures my favorite was the section where a teenage Louise accompanies her mother on an operatic tour of the British Isles, acting as a backstage factotum and dealing with all sorts of theatrical mishaps in front of a humorless English audience that takes Opera Very Seriously. Also I was struck by this quote from the chapter on "Russian Illogic", which seems apt to our times.

"The Russian Government has built new universities at a great expense. No sooner are they opened than they are closed again for fear they should be frequented by young people with revolutionary ideas. That is Russian logic."
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Poet and Merchant, A Picture of Life from the times of Moses Mendelssohn, Berthold Auerbach, translated by Charles Timothy Brooks. As I mentioned last week, this was recommended as a ``bad biographical novel from the 19th century'', but it's actually really good! I don't know to what extent it accurately portrays its historical setting of German Jewish communities in the 1700s, but the protagonist has in common with the author that he was originally intended to be a rabbi but chose instead to take a secular literary path, which adds resonance and depth to the story. This is also the sort of story which takes the opportunity to insert historical figures whenever plausible; this requires some suspension of disbelief but is still fun. And the scenes at Moses Mendelssohn's salon are both enjoyable philosophical debates and well-integrated with the larger story.

Much of it has the feel of the sort of biographical novels that I enjoyed reading as a kid, but there are also some serious themes about Jewish life, anti-Semitism and assimilation. Ephraim Kuh, the protagonist, comes across as a kind of Jewish Hamlet, painfully aware of the injustices of the world but unable to do anything about them. I also liked the female supporting characters, who though not as thoroughly sketched or as deep thinkers as Ephraim, all come across as people in their own right -- there's a fun scene where the characters discuss the newly-published Werther.

This was translated into English by Charles Timothy Brooks, a Unitarian minister and Transcendentalist who translated a bunch of German literature. It has some issues as a translation with using Christian religious terminology in Jewish contexts. The introduction to Brooks's collected poems contains the line "A series of translations of Berthold Auerbach's novels led to a correspondence in which the less amiable traits of that eminent author were displayed.", which makes me very curious to know what complaints Auerbach himself had about the translations.
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I've been doing some interesting reading lately, but also it's been a long day, so this will not go into as much detail as I'd like.

Network Effect, Martha Wells; this is an excellent book, my favorite of the Murderbots, but I don't have any specific comments.

Tintinnalogia, or the Art of Ringing by Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman and Campanalogia, or the Art of Ringing Improved by Fabian Stedman. Since I'm currently working on ringing Stedman Doubles in tower, I thought I'd take a look at Stedman's original books on the art of change ringing from the 1600s. Bell ringing actually hasn't changed that much! Things I was entertained by include this example of why peal composers do not make the best poets and the random (non-ringing related) combinatorics problems in the intro of Campanologia, e.g.:


A man having twenty Horses, contracts with a Brick-maker to give him one hundred pound Sterling; conditionally that the Brick-maker will deliver him as many Loads of Bricks, as there are several Teams of six Horses to be produced out of the aforesaid twenty to fetch them, and not one Team or Sett of six Horses to fetch two Loads. The Brick-maker might be thought to have made a very advantageous bargain, but the contrary will appear.


Poet and Merchant, A Picture of Life from the times of Moses Mendelssohn, Berthold Auerbach, translated by Charles Timothy Brooks. I asked sherbertilluminated on tumblr for recs of "bad" 19th century biographical novels, and was recommended this 1840 novel about the 19th century Jewish German poet Ephraim Kuh, which is actually pretty good, and quite readable once you get through the first chapter. Since I know nothing about the protagonist or any of the other historical characters, except for a bit about Moses Mendelssohn and his gentile BFF Lessing, I'm not bothered by historical inaccuracies. I'll have more to say about it next week, I'm sure.
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Enjoying that this seems to be the moment where everyone is rereading Murderbot (even those uninterested in the TV series).

Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells. Reading in chronological rather than internal publication order this time. Yay Detective Murderbot on Preservation Station!

Network Effect, Martha Wells. About a third of the way into this so far; I remember finding it confusing to follow everything that was going on in my first read-through, but I'm doing better at it this time. I appreciate getting to spend more time with everybody, and raising the emotional stakes; Murderbot is still very competent, but also pretty upset. Amena is still great as a teenage sidekick who gets off to a rocky start with Murderbot.
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A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett. This had a satisfying ending, but I didn't find it as compelling as The Tainted Cup. Still invested in Ana and Din and their very strange world, and staying along for the ride! Also amused that these books are both leviathanpunk (in the sea monster sense) and Leviathanpunk (in the Hobbes sense).

Life of Moscheles, Charlotte Moscheles. Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) was a composer, pianist, and conductor, who knew almost everyone who was anyone in classical music in the first half of the 19th century, including Salieri, Beethoven, Lizst, Chopin, the Schumanns, Rossini, but is particularly known as a close friend of Felix Mendelssohn. I was idly browsing the unsungcomposers.com forums, where someone mentioned that there was an entertaining biography of Moscheles by his wife, so I picked this. It does have fun tidbits, but it is also very much a Victorian biography of the sort that draws heavily on diaries and letters without doing much to investigate interesting questions like what Moscheles' relationship was with religion: he was raised Jewish, continued to practice as a young adult, but at some point converted to Anglicanism. I'm not actually sure I should have finished this rather than find a modern biography that puts the material in context, but I do plan to do the latter. Also, as you can tell from the title page where she is only named as "his wife" Charlotte is very much a self-effacing Victorian helpmeet and angel of the house, and you only get to see tiny snatches of her as a person here and there. (The book, like Moscheles, is not very generous to Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel as a composer, and at one point gets her age wrong (confusing her with Rebecka?). So while it's always pleasant to spend time with the Mendelssohn family this is not the place to look for Fanny.)

All Systems Red, Artifical Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Martha Wells. I'm intrigued by the trailer for the new Murderbot TV series, which I hope lives up to its promise. In preparation, I'm rereading the books, and they're still good! (I expect I'll get more out of rereading the most recent ones, which I've only read once.) I think that part of what makes the books fun to read is that while Murderbot is a bundle of anxiety and self-blame, it is also fantastically competent at its job.
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Thank You For Listening, Julia Whelan. Enjoyable though sometimes serious romance/women's fiction novel about an audiobook narrator, by an author who also narrates audiobooks. I enjoyed the characters' genre self-awareness, and how the protagonist, who doesn't believe in romance and happily ever after, is completely taken aback and freaked out to find she's been living a romance plot, while everyone else finds it hilarious.

A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett. Sequel to The Tainted Cup, second in the series of Ana and Din mysteries. Like the first book, this has fascinating and sometimes creepy worldbuilding, and an intriguing mystery -- I'm curious to see how it works out.
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I haven't been on top of book posts because Wednesdays are my busiest day; possibly I should move to another day of the week.

The Clouds, Aristophanes. Readaloud. I'm glad I read this, but I didn't find it as much fun as Lysistrata. Partly I'm just uptight about bathroom humor. But also the plot is basically: father sends his son to Socrates's Thinkery to get an education, and the son comes back apparently brainwashed, with weird ideas about about (grammatical) gender, liking all sorts of inappropriate literature, and generally lacking respect for his elders, and the father burns down the Thinkery in revenge. Which is certainly relevant to the present moment, but not in a fun way.

Wind and Truth, Brandon Sanderson. I finished Stormlight Arc 1! This book generally provided a solid conclusion to that arc while setting things up for the second half of the series, but it wasn't my favorite of the series. I am interested enough to keep reading this series but probably won't reread any of the Arc 1 books.

The Shadow Rising, Robert Jordan. I prefer the Wheel of Time show to the books, because I only have so much tolerance for Jordan's weird gender politics and his male POV characters thinking about how women are inscrutable/being annoyingly and unnecessarily chivalrous. But I'm also the sort of person who prefers to read the book before watching. I most recently set aside the series in the middle of book 4, but the show has now almost caught up to the point where I was in the books, so I took this book along on a recent trip and finished it. There are things I liked, and I'm glad I read this in preparation for the show, but I expect I'll enjoy the show more.
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The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Francis Beaumont. Play readaloud. I'd heard multiple people rave about this odd, metatheatrical play, and it is in fact as fun as it was hyped up to be. A grocer and his wife attend a performance of The London Merchant, which would be a mostly forgettable play if not for the grocer's insistence that actually his apprentice should be the star of the show as the titular Knight of the Burning Pestle. The grocer and his wife (who has never seen a play before) are absolutely delightful as they continue to share their opinions on the play and what should happen next, to the continual dismay of the cast. The play has a bunch of songs in it, and I thought it would make a fun musical, so I was happy to learn that there was a musical version with songs by Peter Schickele (of PDQ Bach fame), and you can hear the songs on youtube.

The Earl Who Isn't, Courtney Milan. Third and last in Milan's Wedgeford series, set in a late Victorian town largely settled by East Asian immigrants, which has been steadily deconstructing the genre of "romance with nobility". The plot, particularly in the first half, hinges on lack of communication for reasons that feel realistic but still mildly frustrating. The female protagonist is neuroatypical-coded in a way that I found somewhat relatable, and I was interested by the note at the end mentioning that Milan had intentionally written her as having rejection-sensitive dysphoria.

Knights of Wind and Truth, Brandon Sanderson. I've now made it through day four of ten, the flashback chapters have started, and the plot thickens. Still not sure where it's going.
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Macbeth, William Shakespeare. Readaloud. I've lost count of how many times I have been in readalouds of this play, and I'm not even counting playing Banquo when I was 13. But it is a very, very good play to read aloud, and I am not yet tired of it. This time we did the whole thing with only 5 people, which was intense.

Rhythm of War, Brandon Sanderson. Reread. I finished Stormlight book 4! Lots of stuff happened at the climax, the details of which I had only vaguely remembered. A major part of the second half of the book is about resistance during occupation, which hits differently now than it did in December 2020.

Wind and Truth, Brandon Sanderson. Not a reread -- finally made it to the new book! I'm partway into Day Two (of ten) and stuff certainly has been happening. Not sure where things are going, but hoping for interesting worldbuilding reveals.
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The Devil's Charter, Barnabe Barnes. Readaloud; thanks to [personal profile] a_t_rain for the rec! This is a revenge tragedy about the Borgia family that is not particularly faithful to history: that Rodrigo sold his soul to the Devil to become Pope Alexander VI is arguably one of the lesser divergences in this AU. It's not great literature nor does it have any psychological depth, but it is absolutely never boring. It's also light on misogyny/slut-shaming, especially compared to e.g. The Revenger's Tragedy, it only has two real female characters but both kick ass. It's exactly as anti-Catholic a play as you expect from the premise, and no more. A fun readaloud.

Rhythm of War, Brandon Sanderson. Halfway through the book: Stuff has happened, also the dramatic flashbacks have begun. And Navani is going to get to do science next!
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Edward III, William Shakespeare with an unknown coauthor. Readaloud. Like King John, this is a history play with some very good bits that doesn't quite hang together as a whole. Edward III is not a good person, as we especially see in the first half, but he is ultimately a successful king in the sense that he gains territory.

Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw. Readaloud. This was good fun, even if I was rooting for no one to get married.

Oathbringer and Rhythm of War, Brandon Sanderson. Rereads (only another 900 pages until I'm done rereading Stormlight, at which point I'll be rewarded by getting to read the last volume for the first time!). I'm getting to the point in the series where I'm finding there's a lot of plot that I've forgotten from my first read, though I remember some vague outlines.

Given Our History, Kristyn J. Miller. So I have been complaining for over two decades now about the lack of books about homeschooled kids/teens with a storyline other than "protagonist transitions to public school". And well, my generation is adults now, and we were all told to "write what you know" (though many of us ignored that and wrote fanfic/speculative stuff anyway) so it's not like there aren't people capable of writing this. Anyway I learned about this book from [personal profile] ladyherenya, and apparently the way to get a story about homeschooled teens published is to include it as the backstory in a second-chance romance! I enjoyed the detailed backstory that was clearly grounded in the author's experience; the problem is that the present-day academic setting does not feel grounded in the same way (this is partly that the book is doing the thing that books do with trying to act like COVID never happened, but it's not just that). I liked the protagonist's relationship with her younger sister, but the characterization of the love interest felt underdeveloped.
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Catching up on the last month's reading, so this will be some quick takes.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, art by Tove Jansson. Christmas present. Alice is still in Wonderland, and I'd seen Tove Jansson's illustrations before, but good to reread and re-look at. Maybe NYRB classics can do The Hunting of the Snark with Jansson's illustrations next? (Though it looks like there's already an edition of that in print. And now I'm sad that she never illustrated Through the Looking Glass.)

The Iliad, Homer, Emily Wilson. I'm glad to have actually read this in its entirety, though I read a large portion of it the night before the e-book was due to be returned, so maybe haven't fully processed it. Some sections felt like excessive action scenes, but things really picked up and the language in the translation felt lyrical after Achilles learns of Patroclus's death. Things I was not expecting included the incredibly detailed description of Achilles's new shield (srsly, can I just hang out with Hephaestus and his robots in the workshop?) and the detailed blow-by-blow of what went down in Patroclus's funeral games.

King John, Shakespeare. Readaloud (but I was sick and had a bad sore throat, so I was mostly just listening). Second time I've done this play, on the one hand it has some really good bits, particularly act 4, but also it is just structurally kind of weird. It also seems like the sort of play that would benefit from a director's interpretation rather than just a cold reading. Also, despite having done the play before I was wondering halfway through "wait, who's going to succeed King John?", and kept wondering it until suddenly his son was introduced out of nowhere for the final scenes (admittedly Henry was 9 when his father died, though the play ages him up).

Oathbringer, Brandon Sanderson. I have made it to the exciting climax! I will probably just get back to reading this. :-D
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Oathbringer, Brandon Sanderson. Started this, but as it's a giant brick of a book did not bring on my holiday travel. One note here is that I now know Shakespeare's history plays much better than when I last read any of the Stormlight books, and it's interesting to reflect on the Alethi political plots with that context (two of the major viewpoint characters are the uncle and cousin of a king who inherited young).

The Iliad, Homer, translated by Emily Wilson. Read some of this during travel -- so far I'm appreciating it but not blown away. It is interesting to read with the thought of "did this character/bit have an analogue in Perhaps the Stars?", but also this feels like too much intellectual effort to bring to the book on a first read.

The Queen's Gambit, Walter Tevis. Reread. I have only seen the first episode of the TV series (I mostly watch stuff with my partner, and it's not his sort of thing). However, my dad was a fan of Walter Tevis, and recommended Mockingbird to me when I was maybe 15 or so, and I enjoyed it. A bit later in my teens, I found his copy of The Queen's Gambit lying around, and felt slightly transgressive sneaking a read.

Anyway, I reread it now, and it was as readable as ever, I liked some of the character/coming-of-age stuff, and I can see how it was written to be adaptable to the screen. But also, at its heart it's a sports movie about chess, and I feel ambivalent about the sports movie genre because of the focus on young people who are The Best, but part of how any competitive endeavor goes is that most people who do it are not The Best.
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Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare. Read-aloud. The language in this play is, of course, fantastic, and I love the first three acts, but I seem to lose interest around act 4, either because of my attention span, or because Friar Laurence's plan is just such a dumb idea, why can't Juliet run off to joint Romeo in Mantua without faking death! (Yes, I know part of the point is that Juliet is just a 13-year-old girl, she doesn't have the resourcefulness of most of Shakespeare's heroines, but really Friar Laurence you should know better!)

Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson. Lots of Shallan, yay Shallan! Just about at the climax in my reading now.

"To My Best Friend": Correspondence between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, 1876-1878. Reading Princess Napraxine led to a chain of thought that reminded me of Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's wealthy patroness, who paid his living expenses so he could compose without distraction, on the condition that they should never meet in person. I'd heard about her as a kid, but had never stopped to think -- what was the story like from her point of view? what was she like as a woman, and what was her life like? The blog post I linked answered some of those questions, her Wikipedia article, which is long but full of [citation needed]s, answered others, but both left me wanting to know more about this unusual woman.

So I read this, the only English translation of both sides of the Tchaikovsky/von Meck correspondence, covering the first two years 1876-1878 of their intense epistolary friendship, and it was delightful! I was disappointed, wanting more, when it just stopped abruptly at the end of 1878, though there is something to be said for stopping before the friendship starts to go downhill. Von Meck is just so very much a fan of Tchaikovsky -- she expresses how much she loves his music, and how she feels from it that he is the only person who understands her, and is happy to do whatever she can to help Tchaikovsky when he's extricating himself from his disastrous attempt at marriage and dealing with his own mental health problems. And Tchaikovsky recognizes her as a kindred spirit -- though of course it helps that she's offering so much while asking so little, but he appreciates the friendship she can give and writes back to her sharing what he can of himself and his thoughts on music and life. He values her opinions as a fan and amateur rather than a professional musician or a critic, even when he respectfully disagrees on matters of taste.

Here's an intersting bit where Von Meck talks about herself:


Stories generally made a strong impression on me and had a great influence on my system and consequently on my whole life; they developed my imagination and heart to a passion and rebelliousness with which I have never been able to cope. That is why I forbid my children to read stories, I wish them to have as much equanimity, as little susceptibility and passion as possible. But I would never exchange my own rebelliousness for the most blissful serenity, for the simple reason that, if one lives with one’s whole being, one does not wish to relinquish any part of oneself: a living person does not want to be a dead one. I don’t at all like Dante’s Indifferent Ones, but, as I don’t bring up my children for my own enjoyment, I think it is more tranquil for them to be a little more placid in all things than I am.


(Content note: there is occasional nasty anti-Semitism on Tchaikovsky's part.)
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Symposium, Plato, translated by A. D. Lindsay. Group readaloud. This is still my favorite Platonic dialogue, not least because of all the fun bits.

Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson. About 2/3 of the way through. So much plot has happened, so much more to go!
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Princess Napraxine, Ouida. Finished the book! (I was right to be worried last week, though not for the right reasons.) I am curious what the sequel will do, but also feel like the book stands on its own despite the unsettling aspects of the ending.

The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt. I finished this -- it was good, remarkably engrossing in the final sections, and I hope to reread it sometime and get more out of it. I was in some ways disappointed by Ludo taking over the narration and plot, I found Sibylla more interesting, but it also became clear that part of the reason that Sibylla was fading out of the plot was because she was going through serious depression, and she was still important to the story through the end even though she wasn't actively doing anything. Ludo's voice as a narrator didn't feel very different from Sibylla's, which I actually think is realistic given that he's spent most of his life around her with the main outside influences being the literature and movies they both watch. (It made me maybe slightly question whether Ludo could be a figment of Sibylla's imagination, but that is not the sort of place that this book goes.)

Funny Story, Emily Henry. Romantic fluff, didn't stand out much from its genre. Partly set in a library, which was nice -- there was some mention of a character who cries at the end of books, which made me feel validated that I cried at the more emotional bits of this, but they didn't stick with me.

Margo's Got Money Troubles, Rufi Thorpe. 20-year-old deals with the challenges of being a single mom financially supporting herself on OnlyFans, while bonding with her pro wrestler father she barely knew and her LARPer roommate who deserved more page time, but, well, it's Margo who's telling the story. Fun and also very meta about storytelling and performing a character. Less about the financial aspect of things than I expected from the title.
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Princess Napraxine, Ouida. Exciting plot developments, and I am now very very concerned on behalf of a certain character in advance of the final book club installment. (Will be writing more when the next readalong post goes up chez [personal profile] lunabee34.)

As You Like It, Shakespeare. Play readaloud. This play no longer holds any surprises for me, but it's still delightful fluff with some depth!

The Sibyl in Her Grave, Sarah Caudwell. I needed a book for a 5-hour plane trip, and this did an excellent job of filling the time. I'm glad I was warned this was darker than the other Hilary Tamar books, but it is also very well-plotted with multiple layers of misdirection. (Also, the new cover does not live up to the Edward Gorey glory of the original cover.)

The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson. Continuing along with these though I am very much not going to catch up before book 5 comes out next week (especially as I did not take Words of Radiance along on Thanksgiving travel). I still really like the start of Words of Radiance, and hope it keeps up (though I know I'll be getting another regularly scheduled installment of Kaladin angst.)

The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt. For people who haven't heard this recommended/reviewed already, this is a literary novel about an American-born, Oxford-educated, graduate school drop out single mom and her son, who is a polyglot prodigy à la John Stuart Mill. I'm about 2/3 of the way through, and I can tell that this book is trying to do something ambitious, but I'm not really sure where it's going and what the payoff will be. I am however very much enjoying the language.
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Princess Napraxine, Ouida. [personal profile] lunabee34's readalong continues with Volume 3, which I'm now halfway into and everyone is kind of miserable. Very curious how things will resolve (or not resolve, as there is a sequel).

Impressions that Remained, Vol 1. and Vol 2., Ethel Smyth. So part of why I haven't posted in a few weeks is that I keep on feeling like I should write a review that will do this book justice, and I haven't managed it. So I'm going to try for some quick takes.

The most delightful part of this book is the section about Smyth's student days in Leipzig, where she gets to live independently, meet all sorts of musical personages, befriend interesting women, and encounter so much more music than she had been able to experience in England -- she mentions hearing Beethoven's Seventh for the first time, as well as an early performance of Brahms's Second Symphony conducted by the composer (who wasn't a particularly good conductor, and the orchestra didn't know what to make of the work). I only discovered this later, but Liana Serbescu has an album of the piano works that Smyth wrote as a student, which, although Smyth dismisses them as insignificant early works, would make a good soundtrack to this section. (Srsly, where is the Ethel Smyth biopic? There is no shortage of material in her life.)

Ethel Smyth realizes that people don't want to have their reading of a memoir interrupted by lengthy quoted letters, so she puts the relevant letters in appendices interspersed throughout. This mostly works, as a lot of the letters are interesting enough to read on their own (it's fascinating getting older Smyth's account of her student days followed by the letters she sent home to her mother), but works less well in the second volume where the appendices interrupt the story more often.

I will be looking for further reading on Ethel Smyth: she has no shortage of published memoirs, but I think at this point I want an outside perspective. The easiest to get would be Leah Broad's group biography Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World, though the sample I read felt a bit shallow. I became more interested in Christopher St. John's 1959 biography of Smyth when I realize that the author was a lesbian suffragist writing under a male name. Unfortunately it's harder to find, but I will hopefully track it down sometime. (There's also an abridged version of Smyth's memoirs available on OpenLibrary, but it doesn't seem to have much contextualizing material.)

Oh, also I can't quit Smyth without recommending her orchestral/vocal work The Prison written later in her life, which grabbed me from its first moments when I listened to it and is really not quite like anything else. The performance is excellent and I can see how it won a Grammy.

(Bedtime, so Brandon Sanderson and Sarah Caudwell will have to wait for another post.)

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Alison

May 2025

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