wednesday books
31 May 2023 21:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landofnowhereEdward II, Christopher Marlowe. Read-aloud -- I organized it as this week's play-reading, and I think generally it went well! I would like to send this back in time to my 13-year-old self who found Shakespeare's Richard II boring -- that play is absolutely riffing off of Edward II in various ways, but Marlowe's version, while less intellectual is anything but boring! It starts out with gorgeous and very gay poetry, and already in Act I Scene I we're throwing a bishop in jail and taking all his stuff, and it only escalates from there, so that halfway through the play we're in full-on revenge tragedy mode, and as someone noted the final scene features nameless "First Lord" and "Second Lord" characters because none of the lords that we had at the beginning of the play have survived. While not super historically accurate, it does an impressive job of compressing Edward's 20 year reign into nonstop drama.
Consuelo, George Sand. This is a three-volume novel, but Gutenberg packages each volume as an individual e-book, so I was very confused about the pacing until I figured it out. Anyway I'm mostly through Tome I: the first half of it was set in Venice, where our heroine Consuelo, who is the Purest and Best at Singing, launches her career, navigating opera politics and a complicated love polygon where everyone is sleeping around and intriguing in gondolas except Consuelo. Which does a good enough job of what it does, but left me wondering why Sand was so celebrated and influential an author in her time.
Then, however, I got to the second part. After Consuelo flees Venice with a broken heart, I expected the story to continue her operatic career in Vienna. But no! Instead she gets to first spend a couple months at the Castle of the Giants in Bohemia as a lady's companion/singing teacher, which gives off exactly as many Gothic vibes as you would hope for, and I am SO HERE FOR IT! Not only goes Consuelo get to have a conversation with another female character, but it begins with Amelie, her charge, infodumping about the history of Bohemia and its religious wars, because this is relevant background (Amelie is pretty interesting -- she describes herself as a secret fan of the French Enlightenment -- even if she's wasted on Consuelo, who mostly just finds it annoying to have to attend on a young aristocrat with no musical talent.) I was wondering how Sand would set up a love interest worthy of Consuelo, and the answer is -- Albert, the visionary heir to the castle, who his family thinks mad but actually has second sight that allows him to see both into the near future and Bohemia's troubled past, combined with a highly developed sense of social justice and injustice. I approve and am really curious to see where this is going!
Consuelo, George Sand. This is a three-volume novel, but Gutenberg packages each volume as an individual e-book, so I was very confused about the pacing until I figured it out. Anyway I'm mostly through Tome I: the first half of it was set in Venice, where our heroine Consuelo, who is the Purest and Best at Singing, launches her career, navigating opera politics and a complicated love polygon where everyone is sleeping around and intriguing in gondolas except Consuelo. Which does a good enough job of what it does, but left me wondering why Sand was so celebrated and influential an author in her time.
Then, however, I got to the second part. After Consuelo flees Venice with a broken heart, I expected the story to continue her operatic career in Vienna. But no! Instead she gets to first spend a couple months at the Castle of the Giants in Bohemia as a lady's companion/singing teacher, which gives off exactly as many Gothic vibes as you would hope for, and I am SO HERE FOR IT! Not only goes Consuelo get to have a conversation with another female character, but it begins with Amelie, her charge, infodumping about the history of Bohemia and its religious wars, because this is relevant background (Amelie is pretty interesting -- she describes herself as a secret fan of the French Enlightenment -- even if she's wasted on Consuelo, who mostly just finds it annoying to have to attend on a young aristocrat with no musical talent.) I was wondering how Sand would set up a love interest worthy of Consuelo, and the answer is -- Albert, the visionary heir to the castle, who his family thinks mad but actually has second sight that allows him to see both into the near future and Bohemia's troubled past, combined with a highly developed sense of social justice and injustice. I approve and am really curious to see where this is going!