The Land of Nowhere

Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky. That sure was an Adrian Tchaikovsky novel! It succesfully did what it did but I've read enough Tchaikovsky that I didn't feel like it really stood out.

Chroniques du Pays des Mères, Élisabeth Vonarburg. Still having to resist from reading ahead of book club pace, but also this past week I went and reread/skimmed everything I'd already read to help keep track of all the plot/worldbuilding details. Our protagonist has just left home for the first time and I'm curious to know what comes next.

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: An Introvert's Year of Living Dangerously, by Jessica Pan. Saw this recommended as a self-help book, and thought I'd try it. It's very readable -- the author is the sort of shy introvert that I can easily relate to, and I appreciated that her writing voice was very confident in discussing her anxiety. This sort of self-help memoir is a bit odd in that she's trying to position herself as an everywoman, but reading between the lines it's clear that she wasn't just working to break out her shell so she could make more friends and overcome anxiety, but also so that she could write a book based on it; which seems like it has advanages both in motivation and in getting access to expert professionals to provide advice.

To Ride a Rising Storm, Moniquill Blackgoose. Sequel to To Shape a Dragon's Breath. At heart these are school stories, and even when they're not at school the focus is still on the characters and relationships, with a lot of social commentary about colonialism in an AU North America, with the political plot and the dragons and alchemy, while present, being less of the focus. I liked the new characters here, in particular the Jewish ones. (This AU, instead of "Jewish", uses a different word with Slavic etymology; I'm aware there's a related word in Russian that's an offensive slur; I wasn't bothered but some people migh be. Anyway AU Judaism does not seem to have any noticeable differences from our world.) This book ended on a rather abrupt cliffhanger, so now I can't wait for the next one.

Rather than do a usual Wednesday book post, I'm going to aim for a more in-depth review of the most interesting book I read this past week.

This was another fortitous historical find thanks to the Song of the Lark blog -- I'd previously heard of Johanna Kinkel, and listened to some of her songs, but the blog post there, helped put together for me the arc of her life. She left her abusive first husband and supported herself with a successful musical career (here's her setting of Heine's Die Lorelei). Then she secured a divorce, fell in love and married again. She and her new husband got involved with politics, which led to him being sentenced to death for his part in the revolution of 1848-49. However, she used her connections to first commute his sentence and then help him escape from jail, after which they moved to London and struggled to get by with four children, but despite declining health found a second career writing and giving public lectures on music. Sadly, just days after writing her novel Hans Ibeles in London, she fell out of a window and died; she was only 48.

I also learned from the blog post that Johanna Kinkel's novel had been translated from German into English in 2016 as part of the Ph.D. thesis of Angela Sacher -- so of course I had to try reading it, and it drew me right in with the story, characters, social commentary, and sense of humor. That said, while for the most part I greatly enjoyed reading it, I don't think it entirely works as a novel, and I can only recommend it with the reservations that it's depressing in stretches, and the final section has weird melodrama and uncomfortable race stuff. (More on that later.) I also feel a bit daunted writing this review, since, while there is some scholarly writing about Hans Ibeles in London out there, I could only find one short book review of it on the Internet, and it's quite short (here, in German, also contains a link to a epub of the original German text).

While the book draws deeply on Johanna's family experiences as German refugees in London, the story is only very loosely autobiographical. The titular Hans Ibeles is a small-town composer and conductor in Germany, who gets caught up in the revolution and then has to flee to London, with his wife and their seven children. But it is his wife, Dorothea, steadfast, practical, and domestic, who is the heart of the story -- Hans's character sometimes feels a bit out of focus, but we always know where we are with Dorothea as she navigates the culture shock of moving to England, makes friends, faces difficulties, and ultimately comes to respect her Victorian middle-class neighbors and find a place among them.

There's a scene early in the book, where Hans and Dorothea are making their first round of calls in England, and one of the people they call on is a Great Man of Letters, who turns out to be an incredibly dull conversationalist, more a businessman than an intellectual. Ultimately they come to the following explanation for their disappointment: London is just such a fascinating and multifaceted place that one just has to tell it like it is in order to make a good story. And that is absolutely part of the appeal of this book -- the incredibly detailed depiction of London from an outsider's perspective, as well as showing a side of London society, the German refugee community, that you don't see in more British novels. And this is a book that is deeply concerned with woman's lives and the domestic sphere -- there's a chapter where a character recounts her experiences of working (and seeking work) as a German governess in England, and another chapter about the process of hiring a housemaid in London.

But while one of the literary strengths of this book is its realism, and its unflinching look at the conditions of genteel artistic poverty that reminds me of George Gissing, it is also a book that indulges in some less-realistic tropiness at times. I particularly enjoyed the episodes where various revolutions describe their daring escapes from Germany, including the story of how Hans was hidden in a mausoleum by an eccentric musical young lady. The book also has the appropriate amount of coincidence for a 19th century novel, and some scheming plots that never entirely come into focus. There's a Polish countess who befriends German refugees while secretly working on behalf of Russia -- but her pretensions at being a femme fatale are undermined by the story, as we see her from the perspective of her German governess, and ultimately she comes across as a well-rounded, good-hearted, character.

Two-thirds of the way through I was telling people I liked the book so far but I wasn't sure if I could recommend it until I got to the end. I could tell that the main tension in the story was due to Hans and Dorothea's failing marriage, and I wasn't sure if it would resolve happily or sadly. What I didn't expect is that it would resolve by way of melodrama with some problematic racial stuff. The shape of the ending, as far as Hans and Dorothea are concerned, is a fairly standard sentimental plot of betrayal, forgiveness, and reconcilation. But in order to set off the betrayal Johanna Kinkel feels the need for a Bad Woman, and the countess has been defanged and won't do. Instead, the new Bad Woman is a beautiful woman who murdered her husband and got away with it in the eyes of the law, but to escape the infamy of her reputation has disguised herself in blackface with the help of her devoted mixed-race former nurse. We get one conversation between the two women that does give their characters some depth, but ultimately I don't rally want to excuse the choice made here.

Finally I feel like I should end by emphasizing the feminism of the novel -- this is a book that is deeply focused on its women characters, and interested in the predicament of women's lives in general, which the characters all have different perspectives on -- I'm particularly fond of Meta, the countess's German governess, who is the most outspoken feminist.

I'm really glad I read this book, and it's given me a lot of food for thought, much more than I've brushed on in this review.

The Devourers, Annie Vivanti Chartres. I've been getting into the archives of Emily E Hogstad's blog The Song of the Lark recently, which has some really good deep dives into forgotten woman in music -- after reading The Devourer and the Devoured about child prodigy Vivian Chartres and her mother, ex-prodigy poet Annie Vivanti, who wrote this semi-autobiographical novel about a poet mother of a violin prodigy: as Hogstad says, "One gets the impression that three-quarters of the novel is, in fact, a memoir. But which three-quarters? ". The writing in this novel is really good, and I generally enjoyed the panoramic family saga aspects, but ultimately the worldview and the thesis that geniuses destroy everyone around them is just too depressing. Also the novel has an interesting combination of realism in its setting (which spans Europe and New York) and a plot which defies the laws of probability. Some racism, including a few uses of the n-word (though no characters on color are portrayed) lots of not-very-examined classism, and the Italian characters lean into unflattering stereotypes sometimes. I have mixed feelings about this novel but unreservedly recommend the essay I linked above, which has some of the better quotes quotes.

Rooftoppers, Katherine Rundell. Read because of skygiants' review which sums it up pretty well. I too would have adored this book at age 10! This pairs interestingly with The Devourers in terms of setting and theme, but ultimately it's not trying to do serious social commentary, it's trying to have an adventure with fun hijinks.

Pride and Prejudice, play adaptation by Sherwood Smith (sartorias) of the Jane Austen novel. Thank you sartorias for letting us read your adaptation of P&P originally performed by high school students! It did a really good job of condensing the plot while leaving in some dialogue that adaptations often leave out, and it was funny!

Much Ado About Numbers, Rob Eastaway. I picked this up again and finished it, but found that the bits that I'd already read were the most interesting to me. I found this book to be strongest when it was explaining the technology level of Shakespeare's time, and weakest when it was going into speculative interpretations of Shakespeare. (Though some of the theories it admitted were too far out there, like the joking theory that Cassio the "great arithmetician" might have inspired the naming of the Casio calculator.)

Alice James: Her brothers, her journal, edited by Alice Robeson Burr. I recently learned about Alice James, sister of the better known late 19th century American intellectuals Willam and Henry James, and was interested enough to pick up her diary. This book also contains Alice Robeson Burr's essay on the James family, which had some interesting tidbits that led to my learning more about forgotten 19th century American women intelectuals, like Mary Moody Emerson, aunt of and inspiration to the better-known Ralph Waldo, and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, of which Burr writes "In those days and communities, there was always a woman who read Greek, and in Concord it was Mrs. Ripley who had this distinction."

I'm about halfway through Alice James's diary ; being a diary (and without contextual footnotes) it is slow going although it does have some good passages writing about her chronic illness and other things.

St. Helios, Alice Robeson Burr. The diary being slow going, I decided to look into what else Anna Robeson Burr had published -- she was a prolific popular novelist, and encountered this entertainingly snarky review of her novel St. Helios, which was enough to get me to pick it up. I found it to be very readable but ultimately disappointing novel. It is set in 1920 and centers on the triangle between an aristocratic British poet who is both a relic of the Victorian era and a Byronic figure, his illegimate daughter, and the American lawyer who falls in love with both (though the book is not that slashy). The daughter starts out as the most interesting of the three main characters, but halfway through she gets a change of heart and moves from manipulative schemer to damsel in distress. After reading, I found two more contemporary reviews of this book, which are just as entertaining as the NYT review.

Testimony of Mute Things, Lois McMaster Bujold. Another Penric! This should have gone in last week's book post, but I forgot, which says something about how much of an impression it made on me. I was looking forward to "Penric and Des solve a murder", but wasn't as excited by the book as I'd hoped. On the plus side, we got more princess-archdivine, who is the best archdivine, and not just because I like saying "princess-archdivine".

Much Ado About Numbers, Rob Eastaway. A book about the ways math is used in Shakespeare that provides relevant historical context, this lands smack in the intersection of my special interests Venn diagram. I thought it might be gimmicky, and it does have some trivia, but I really liked it, and it has helpful tables of things like units of measurement used in Shakespeare and how they compare. Unfortunately I only got about 70 pages into it because it was an overdue book that my mom needed to return to the library. Will be picking up for the rest, though.

Unabridged, Stefan Fatsis. A book about dictionaries, past, present, and future, seen from the perspective of Merriam-Webster, where Fatsis worked part-time proposing new words and definitions while researching that book. Very readable, I learned some things and enjoyed the inside peek at Merriam-Webster (which reminded me in some ways of my own workplace). However I found Fatsis's "I'm a sports bro, not one of these nerds" narrative posture a bit distracting (I think I felt the same way about his book Word Freak on tournament Scrabble when I read it over 20 years ago).

Lucky Few, Kathryn Ormsbee. lannamichaels reviewed this author's autobiographical-ish middle grade graphic novel Turning Twelve, and since I've been whining for decades now about the lack of books about homeschoolers that have plots other than "homeschooler goes to school for the first time", I was intrigued. (I'm pretty sure there are now a lot of millenial writer homeschool alumni who would happily write what they know, and the challenge is figuring out how to sell it; Kristyn Miller's Given Our History did it by having the homeschool bits be flashbacks in a second-chance romance, and I enjoyed the flashbacks but felt that the present-day romance suffered from being less grounded in reality.)

I picked this up because I was more interested in reading a YA book than a middle grade graphic novel, and I needed an airplane book; however I suspect that Turning Twelve is a much better book. Lucky Few did do its job of entertaining me during an extended travel delay, it had some good banter and I liked the protagonist's super nerdy BFF. I'm not going to get into a detailed critique of the book (though I could, and if you set me off in the comemnts I might), but this managed to make homeschooling come across as entirely unappealing. Now, not every book can be Libby on Wednesday with the awesome house and extended family. But the homeschooling here was pretty heavily on the school-at-home end of things, and had pretty much all the same drawbacks as school in terms of social life, as well as background toxic homeschool group parent dynamics, while not seeming to come with any real advantages.

Ariadne in Mantua, Vernon Lee (1903). Readaloud. This play sets itself up as being in the Extended Shakespeare Universe: "The action takes place in the Palace of Mantua through a period of a year, during the reign of Prospero I, of Milan, and shortly before the Venetian expedition to Cyprus under Othello." However it's an odd, sad play, and not one that Shakespeare would have told. One of the laws of the Shakespeare Universe, as I interpret it, is that nobody dies of unrequited love; you can't die of a broken heart unless somebody else dies first to break your heart. (Ophelia is arguably an exception, but still her father dies first.)

Mona Maclean, Medical Student, Graham Travers (a pseudonym for Margaret Todd). I enjoyed this, though the romantic happy ending dragged out a bit. I feel that the title does it a disservice, as it is not a school story; there are a few scenes in the medical school setting, but that's not the main focus of the story. It is however enjoyable as a late Victorian novel with an introspective and intellectual protagonist, feminist themes, and strong female friendships. Also, the love interest recites the poem Stradivarius by George Eliot, which I was glad to be introduced to.

The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, Margaret Todd (writing under her own name this time, even though Gutenberg uses the name Graham Travers). Sophia Jex-Blake was one of the first women doctors in Great Britain, and founded the medical school that Margaret Todd attended; the two of them became life partners. So far I've only covered Sophia's youth and education; she was a gifted child who chafed at the Victorian education system that wanted to shape her into a well-behaved young lady, but fortunately manages to get onto a path to a real education. The biography has just covered her brief romantic relationship and unhappy breakup with Octavia Hill, who went on to be equally awesome.

The Strength of the Few, James Islington. Sequel to The Will of the Many, and a change of pace from all these old books by and about women. Not as good as the first book, mostly for structural reasons, but still very readable. I'm about 80% in and it's getting to be a bloodbath, but hopefully there will be interesting plots twists in what's left.

The Barbarous Babes: being the Memoirs of Molly by Edith Ayrton Zangwill is now freely available on Project Gutenberg! Thanks to kurowasan for scanning the book and the volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders for all their work m

This is Edith Ayrton Zangwill's first published book from 1904, an episodic children's book that reminds me of E. Nesbit's non-fantastic fiction. Molly is a relatable protagonist with an engaging narrative voice that sucked me in instantly. I reviewed it in a bit more detail here.

Chronicles of Avonlea, L. M. Montgomery. I've read the Anne series multiple times, but this was my first time with these short stories (which are only very loosely connected to Anne and her books). I was intrigued by ladyherenya's comment that they were mostly about spinsters, especially as I'm still thinking of writing a spinster story myself with this Therese Gauss project. The stories were charming, though by the end it was a bit too much of traditional gender roles and romantic happily ever afters for me. Interesting to note that the book was published a year after Montgomery herself married, unromantically and unhappily, at the age of 37.

Puss in Boots, Ludwig Tieck, translated by Wikisource. Readaloud. I booklogged this fourth-wall-breaking satirical comedy when I first read it, but now I can report that it works as well as a readaloud as I'd hoped! (And I suspect it may even work better as a readaloud than dealing with the difficulties of actually staging it.) It is very clever and I am excessively fond of it. (And probably would be even more so if I got more of the cultural references.)

Silver and Lead, Seanan McGuire. Book 19 of October Daye; don't start here. At this point I'm following along with the story for the ride, but not going back to reread earlier books (though A is following along more closely and able to fill me in with hints and theories). Toby is still not particularly skilled at detective work, but as usual solves things by heroically charging in and assuming that everything will work out, which it does, though with the potential to cause more trouble in later books.

Gauss, Titan of Science by G. Waldo Dunnington, with additional material by Jeremy Gray. I mentioned in last week's post that during recent air travel I watched a movie with a dubiously historical version of Gauss and was entertained but ultimately would accept no substitutes for actual historical Gauss.

This is the biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss that I picked up off a university library shelf when I was 15, and made me go all swoony over Gauss's letter proposing to his first wife (link is to the original German manuscript). Returning to it with less swooniness and a more mature ability to evaluate historical sources, and also reading a new edition with helpful front matter, it's clear the book is not 100% "actual historical Gauss": it starts off with a version of the famous 5050 story, which is based on an anecdote that Gauss reportedly told about his childhood, but probably didn't happen exactly that way.

Indeed, as I learned from the front matter, G. Waldo Dunnington was a professional Gauss stan; one of his elementary school teachers was a great-granddaughter of Gauss, and learning that there was no Victorian Great Man biography of Gauss, he spent his entire academic career (interrupted by WWII) remedying that lack. Since I'm also a Gauss stan, I found the book generally readable if sometimes a bit repetitive, and enjoyed various fun Gauss facts. (In the department of obscure historical figures who ought to be fictionalized, there is Friedrich Ludwig Wachter, Gauss's student who studied non-Euclidean geometry and vanished without a trace at age 25.)

I'll probably do more Gauss reading (though also I now have an unproofread scan of Teresa by Edith Ayrton Zangwill so I may read that first); I've started with the letters online, but may also seek out other biographies. I continue to be fascinated by Gauss's youngest daughter, whose story would make a good historical romance; and having done some Gauss reading I'm starting to think I can actually write this fic.

(It may look like I'm posting this earlier than usual, but nope, I'm just in a different time zone!)

The Will of the Many, James Islington. This worked well as a book to read over the course of a long plane trip, except maybe for the bit where by the time I got to the complicated ending I had lost brain cells from lack of sleep and was rushing to finish before the plane landed. This book is so tropey: in the not!Roman Empire, a lost heir is sent to boarding school to investigate a mystery and climb to the top of the class rankings, which ultimately involves a deadly game of Capture the Flag. It's the first book in a planned trilogy, I will probably keep reading.

The Barbarous Babes: Being the Memoirs of Molly, Edith Ayrton (Zangwill). My Discord friend Vicki, who scans and digitizes old books to get them into Project Gutenberg, obligingly agreed to do some Edith Ayrton Zangwills! She sent me a preliminary OCR'd version with many typos; the text is currently being proofread by Distributed Proofreaders, after which it will appear on Gutenberg! This is not my favorite of Edith's books, but I still enjoyed it. It's in the tradition of early 20th century writers, particularly those involved with the suffrage movement, pushing back against the Victorian sentimentalization of childhood. It starts with a description of imaginative play games with a lot of pretend violence and torture, sometimes with near-disastrous results. Past the first couple chapters it doesn't so much live up to its title, but continues with tales of various family members misbehaving in adventurous ways. Not sentimental, but does have real family feeling and a charming ten-year-old narrator.

A Nursery in the Nineties, Eleanor Farjeon. This memoir got less excitingly plotty and more impressionistic once the author appeared on the scene, but was still enjoyable, and an interesting pairing with the book above, since it also focused on the protagonist and her brother's (less violent) imaginative play games. I put it down wondering what the next steps would be in Eleanor Farjeon's story, which led me to the next book.

Edward Thomas : the last four years, Eleanor Farjeon. This is the other memoir-ish thing that Farjeon wrote. It skips forward over a decade, and focuses on Eleanor's close friendship with the writer and poet Edward Thomas, who I hadn't previously heard of apart from having read his poem Adlestrop. I was more interested in Eleanor (who didn't talk enough about herself) than Edward, though I was charmed by this poem by Edward. Eleanor was in love with Edward, who was married with three children, and the love triangle resolved itself in an unusual way: Edward volunteered for WWI, where he was killed, and Eleanor and Helen remained fast friends for the end of her life.

As It Was and World Without End by Helen Thomas. After this, I was interested to look up how Helen wrote about her marriage with Edward, and these two short memoirs were much breezier reads. Helen Thomas was less of an intellectual than Eleanor Farjeon, but her writing is more emotionally evocative. She met Edward when they were in their late teens, and had an unconventional relationship until she got pregnant and everyone insisted that they should get married. They then proceeded to do something the Edwardian version of the cottagecore life, though this is not particularly romanticized -- Edward being a struggling freelance writer supporting a family the houses they could afford in the country were not particularly nice, and they moved a lot (also, they could afford a servant, which made the country life more pleasant). Helen's commentary on the socially progressive circles that she mingled with but ultimately found shallow were also interesting.