reading wednesday has a lot to catch up on

[landofnowhere]

I skipped a few Wednesdays, and excused myself for not having read much, but then I started reading more, and now I have a lot of ground to cover. If you'd like to know more about anything I mention here, just ask!

Princess Napraxine, Ouida. Posting about this at lunabee34's readalong, as usual.

Boris Godunov by Alexander Pushkin, translated by Alfred Hayes. Readaloud. Basically this is like a Shakespeare history play, except that Pushkin didn't have Shakespeare's belief in the divine right of kings. My getting curious about female librettists means that I had recently listened to Dvorak's opera Dimitrij, which is historically a sequel to Boris Godunov, though there are some notable differences in characterization -- which made for an interesting background to reading Boris Godunov for the first time, knowing more or less how things were going to end up but not how they got there. (I do mean to listen to the Mussorgsky opera but haven't yet.)

The Superwoman and Other Writings by Miriam Michelson, edited by Lori Harrison-Kahan. I was browsing Wikipedia, as one does, and was distracted noticing that physicist Albert Michelson (of Michelson-Morley "failed attempt to detect the luminiferous aether" fame) had a younger sister who was a feminist journalist and best-selling novelist. This book is a good collection of her work, both journalism and fiction. Having read it, I can see why she was a successful journalist -- she writes clearly and engagingly. If I read more of her work it'll probably be the serialized novel A Yellow Journalist based on her own experiences in the profession (of which a couple chapters were extracted in this collection).

Mortal Follies, Alexis Hall. A delightful romp -- more romantic comedies should be narrated by Puck.

The Flatshare, Beth O'Leary. Also a romance, but a less fluffy one. It hit me in the feels, and the characterization was really well done.

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, Alexis Hall. Sherlock Holmes pastiche in a weird fantasy setting. As with Mortal Follies, the narrator has a distinctive voice, but I didn't like it as much. The mystery plot was clever, but mostly the book uses investigating the mystery as an excuse to go on a bunch of outrageous escapades. Lovecraftian fantasy isn't as much my thing, so I'm sure I missed some references there, but the worldbuilding still really worked for me. Would read more in this world, sad there aren't currently plans for this.

Comments

[hidden_variable]

That's really cool about Miriam Michelson--I hadn't previously heard of her either. It sounds like they were a very accomplished family!

[landofnowhere]

Yeah, the family background is very interesting also -- her parents were (non-religious) Jewish immigrants who settled in Nevada. Miriam wrote a semi-autobiographical novel based on her childhood, though she changed the details to be about an Irish family of six girls (I read the except in The Superwoman, but it didn't super grab me). I don't think that Miriam and Albert were particularly close -- by the time she was born he would have gone off to San Francisco for high school. But one of the things about Miriam being from the West is that her writing, especially the journalism, features the racial diversity of her surroundings -- and while not perfect, she's trying to be progressive and depict the Black/Chinese American/Native American subjects of her reporting as people. (She also went to Hawaii to report on local opposition to independence!)

It's hard for me to talk about The Superwoman and Other Writings, because there's so much to say, I don't know where to start, and the surrounding material does a good job of contextualizing it already!

Here's a bit I particularly liked, from her reporting on the San Francisco Women's Congress, 1895:

“I do hope they’ll begin on time. Women never do, you know,” said an excitable, well-dressed young matron. “Perhaps they’re waiting for some man. A man’s name is first on the programme—or rather program,” chuckled a bright-faced woman with short dark hair streaked with gray. The other smiled appreciatively, then she said, “Well, you know, punctuality isn’t one of woman’s virtues.” “I don’t know about that,” said the other stoutly. “I’m always on time and so are you.” “Yes, but we both were business women. Besides, you know, men make such fun of us about that.”
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[lokifan]

more romantic comedies should be narrated by Puck.

They should! That sounds great. And I keep meaning to check out that O'Leary, I've heard great things.

[landofnowhere]

It is! Fortunately for me, Confounding Oaths, the next book in the series of romances narrated by Puck, comes out Tuesday!