The Land of Nowhere

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 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.

Impressions that Remained, Vol. I, Ethel Smyth. While exploring the music of women composers, I've recently gotten into the English suffragist composer Ethel Smyth -- originally because I heard about her opera Der Wald, the first opera by a woman to be performed at the Met (and it was over a hundred years until the second one, in 2016), and immediately went "this has to be part of the Fire and Hemlock Extended Musical Universe somehow", though I still haven't figured out how. More recently I've been listening to Smyth's orchestral music, and looking up stuff about her extremely interesting life -- she was a larger-than-life personality, as openly queer as an English lady of her time could be, and knew almost everyone who was anyone in music at the time -- decided that I needed to know more about her, and finding that she had written extensive memoirs decided to start with the primary source.

This pairs well with Charles Auchester, as it is the actual memoirs of a musically talented Englishwoman who went to Germany to become a composer, and is written with more wit and humor. (I wonder what Smyth thought of Charles Auchester, if she read it. Probably, like most musical cognoscenti, she thought it was trash, but it seems like the sort of book that might have made an impression on her at the right age.) And on the other hand, it also pairs well with Evelyn Sharp's suffragette memoirs.

It gets off to a slow start with Smyth's early years and family background. (Amusingly, Smyth makes a point of how Parents These Days are overprotective, and that if she had kids she'd raise them more like she was raised. Which is relatable, except that we've been through several generational cycles of this since then, so her examples of non-overprotective parenting are slightly horrifying, such as when she cuts her hand literally to the bone.) However it quickly picks up steam -- I've just gotten to the point where Smyth has started to settle in at Leipzig.

This bit about how Smyth's brief engagement to Willie Wilde, older brother of Oscar, gives a good sense of her personality:


And then ... the love letters began to arrive! Now although to propose to a girl five hours after you have seen her being sea-sick is a proof, as I said to myself, of true love, and though to go on proposing after your seat has given way beneath you argues not only passion but sense of humour, undefeatedness, and other admirable qualities, the fact remains that I had accepted this young man from flattered vanity, light-heartedness, adventurousness, anything you please except love. Consequently the letters, which I have since re-read, and which are really very like the genuine thing, rapidly put me off; nor did I like his gentle but continued insistence on the article of silence. In short, before three weeks were over, probably to his secret relief, I had broken off the engagement, adding that I would like to keep the ring as a souvenir! And keep it I did, until a year or two afterwards, when I lost it while separating two dogs who were fighting in deep snow in the heather. Thus ended my first and last engagement, the hero of which I never saw again--a pity, for they say he became even a better talker than his brother.


I look forward to reporting more on this book!

The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson. Still rereading this, but don't have much to say for the moment.

Princess Napraxine, Ouida. Still reading along -- plot is progressing! Our title character is Having Feelings, even if these feeling are mostly her being upset that she is Having Feelings. See also lunabee34's plug for the fandom (linking to the tag rather than the original post so that it doesn't show spoilers).

Thomas Nast: the Father of Modern Political Cartoons, Fiona Deans Halloran. I was recently reminded that as a teenager I wrote a biographical essay on Nast for AP US History. I realize that non-US readers, and maybe some US readers may not be familiar with Thomas Nast: he was a illustrator and political cartoonist who was massively popular in the years after the Civil War, best known for calling out the corruption of the Tammany Hall political machine and introducing iconic imagery like the modern figure of Santa Claus and the Republican elephant. Teenage me was a political history nerd and enjoyed all this. The main source I used was the biography by Albert Bigelow Paine, written at the end of Nast's life and based on conversations with Nast -- it was what they had at the library.

Anyway, I was curious as to whether there were any modern scholarly biographies of Nast out there, and I found this one (which teenage me could not have accessed without a time machine). It's fascinating -- not just the stuff that I vaguely remembered reading and writing about as a teenager, but also the additional historical context of the New York City that Nast experienced as a young German immigrant. He's enjoyable to read about because you can tell that he possesses both a conscience and a sense of humor. He was anti-racist by the standards of his time, and in his Reconstruction-era work he always portrays Black Americans with human dignity -- on the other hand, he has some unappealing anti-Irish and anti-Catholic portrayals. I'm only partway through this, and will report more later.

Princess Napraxine, Ouida. lunabee's book club has stared up again with volume 2 of this three-volume novel! The plot thickens -- my comments over there.

Gallathea, John Lyly. Play readaloud. I ran across this play randomly in the Folger Shakespeare Library's Early Modern English Drama collection, and wow am I glad I did! This is a pre-Shakespeare romantic comedy about two young women who dress as men to avoid being sacrificed to a sea monster, and who immediately meet and fall in love with each other. Also featuring various members of the classical pantheon and some random dudes who wandered in to be the comic relief subplot. It is absolutely delightful and surprisingly queer fluff, and you can see the influence on Shakespeare's comedies.

(In college I took a class on Shakespearean Genres, which introduced me to Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and others along with letting me read a lot of Shakespeare, but did not actually teach me much about Shakespearean genres other than revenge tragedy. Based on my recent explorations of Elizabethan romantic comedy, which is full of all sorts of genderbending and interesting women characters, I feel cheated.)

Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie. Since last week I read the stories set in the Raven Tower universe, which were in general good but not as good as The Raven Tower. Also interesting to be reading this at the same time as Gallathea, where a god demanding human sacrifice is also a plot point. I would totally read the Ann Leckie take on Gallathea!

The No-Show, Beth O'Leary. I'd gotten saturated with the romantic comedy genre when landingtree recommended this book, which is doing something structurally different with it -- it has three women POV characters, all of whom are romancing the same man, unaware of each other. This made for an interesting experience, since you know that not everyone can get an HEA with the lead, if the latter can even earn his HEA, and which one I was "rooting" for changed while I was reading the book. It's hard to say more about this book without spoilers, but I appreciated what it was doing.

The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho. I think I had gotten myself saturated with genre romance by the time I got this one. It was good at being another one of these, but I don't know that I have much more to say about it.

The First Mrs. Mollivar, Edith Ayrton Zangwill. I've previously written about Edith Ayrton's excellent and underappreciated novel The Call, based on her family's experience in the suffrage movement, about a young woman scientist balancing research, activism, and romance in her life. The First Mrs. Mollivar is the only other one of her books available as an e-book (most of them are in the public domain but haven't been digitized). Like The Call, one of the major themes here is the challenge of an independent-minded woman trying to make the necessary compromises in a relationship while retaining her spirit.

The thing about reviewing this book in the modern day is that the first thing one has to say is that Daphne Du Maurier did this premise better in Rebecca. But The First Mrs. Mollivar is from 1904, and apart from being about a newlywed who finds her husband's house to be haunted by the spirit of his first wife, it's very different. Valeria, the protagonist, is not an ingenue, but an older working woman, the underpaid, overworked secrectary of a Charitable Organization. At the start of the book her job, not to mention her responsiblities to her motherless teenage niece, has driven her pretty much to burnout, and so it's not so surprising that when she runs across an old sweetheart, she accepts his proposal because she would like to have someone to look after her for once. Unfortunately, this marriage turns out to be a terrible idea as Tom Mollivar, while well-meaning, is incredibly stodgy and conservative (he thinks that George Eliot is inappropriate reading for a Sunday), and Valeria hates the house that he inherited from his ex-wife, and feels obligated to retain along with the servants. Valeria does her best to take this all in good humor -- her internal narrative really gives energy to the story. Here's a bit of her wit, when her fiancé insists that she can't visit him unchaperoned before the wedding:

I should require an extremely antiquated chaperon.

"Young maids have old maids at their backs to blight 'em
And old maids have older maids and so ad infinitum."

What a dreadful thing to be the final chaperon -- the parasite of propriety!

I'm also a fan of the teenage engineering student who has a crush on Valeria, and who steals the scene every times he appears.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte. I saw this mentioned somewhere and on an impulse picked it up from Gutenberg. Only afterwards did I realize that the Gutenberg version is an "expurgated" version -- in the second edition, after Anne's death, Charlotte Bronte edited out the bits with the most inappropriate behavior, and most later editions -- So I would recommend tracking down either the original 1848 edition (available on Wikisource, though I'm not sure where to get an ebook) or a modern unabridged version based on the 1848 edition. Unfortunately I did not do this myself and haven't had the patience to go back and compare all the changed bits!

But anyway I am glad I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, it was extremely readable and compelling, and has given me many thoughts. I do now feel like Dude Watching With the Brontes misses the mark a bit -- in Tenant the most dangerous men are the charming, high-spirited ones, and brooding is potentially a good sign that the man in question has gone sober and/or found a conscience, and may yet reform. And Gabriel Markham, our narrator and endgame love interest, definitely becomes more brooding over the course of the story!

Like any Bronte book, the strength of this is in the spirit and character of the heroine, and Helen is pretty great! Even if it is a bit disappointing, that, after having been introduced as Badass Artist Single Mom, she turns out to be pretty much a paragon of Victorian morality apart from having made a bad choice of husband and then leaving him. But she's so well characterized, and keeps on getting to be badass as she clings to her inner moral compass, that it never becomes Too Much.

Confounding Oaths, Alexis Hall. Another romance narrated by Puck! I have only just started this, and I've written a lot already, so I will leave it for next week.

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

And Put Away Childish Things, Adrian Tchaikovsky. An interestingly meta take on portal fantasy. I feel like mrissa did a good job of describing it here, I don't have much to add to it.

Penric and the Bandit, Lois McMaster Bujold. Another Penric! This one is pretty more-of-the-same-ish, we do learn a little bit worldbuilding-wise but it's mainly just "Penric picks up another stray". Bujold likes Penric too much to torture him the way she did her protagonists in her earlier work, which makes these cozy reads but also reduces the dramatic tension.

Unfinished Adventure, Evelyn Sharp. The very readable and witty memoirs of a woman who lived a very interesting life and travelled to a number of places (including Ireland, the Rhineland, and the Soviet Union) as an author/journalist/activist/relief worker in the first few decades of the 20th century. I feel like I should give it a better review than this, but instead I'm going to go off on an extended tangent.

This is the sort of book where famous names show up here and there, particularly in the early chapters when Sharp talks about her time writing for the "Yellow Book". But also later in the book we occasionally get a mention of "I was busy writing a libretto for Ralph Vaughan Williams". So of course I had to look up this opera -- I say that opera is not my fandom, and it isn't, yet surprisingly often I find myself in this position -- The Poisoned Kiss, which seems to have gotten a critical reception of "The libretto isn't great, but the music is". I listened to the recording I linked as background music while doing work and it was quite enjoyable as that, though I wasn't paying much attention to the lyrics.

Anyway that got me wondering about women librettists: I remember that in last week's Jenny Lind reading, Felix Mendelssohn had been in touch with Jenny Lind's friend the writer Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer about collaborating on an opera. Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, about whom I wish I knew more, because she clearly had a very interesting life, did in fact write some librettos, though she's better-known for her prolific output adapting popular novels to the theatre, including an adaptation of Jane Eyre that toned things down by making the woman in the attic not Rochester's wife but his brother's wife. The impression I'm getting is that historically women librettists were more common than women opera composers, but still unusual, and mostly not all that well-known unless they were also composers (e.g. Ethel Smyth). I'm not sure if their work is benefitting as much from the increased attention to women composers and women playwrights we see these days. So if you know any interesting historical women librettists, I'd be happy to hear about them!

Becoming Trader Joe, Joe Coloumbe and Patty Cavalieri. Recommended by queenlua, her review gives a better sense of the book than I can. The memoirs of a very different person with a very different sort of life -- an unabashedly capitalist guy explaining how he built up a successful business.
There's no way I could read this book without being reminded of my dad, who was one of the early customers of Trader Joe's and had a similar writing style, ad I wish he could have read this. Only partway through so may have more to say next week.

I skipped last week because I hadn't read much, and then I read a lot!

Goodbye, Eastern Europe, Jakob Mikanowski. This was good, I'm glad I read it. But while the first half of this book is divided into thematic chapters, the second half is about "The Twentieth Century" in chronological order, a lot of which is understandably depressing and made for a bit of a slog.

Lady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow. Yay con artist romance IN SPACE! Yay sibling relationships! This was a breezy read, but with heart to it.

The life of Jenny Lind : briefly told to her daughter, Mrs. Raymond Maude, O. B. E., Jenny Maude. So I recently listened to "Patience for the Harvest", a "theatrical portrait" done as a monologue interrupted by musical performances based on the premise that if Jenny Lind and Emily Dickinson had ever met, they would be BFF pen pals. Which is a great premise, and the author (Harry Clark) had definitely done his research, but the whole thing just doesn't work on an emotional level.

Anyway, that got me interested in reading some biographical stuff on Jenny Lind. Sadly, there still doesn't seem to be a book-length modern critical biography of Lind in English (and the only recently published books that come close aren't easily available), so I figured that if I was going to get hagiography I might at least get it from people who knew Lind. This one, by Lind's daughter, is a pretty breezy read, but compared to the next item on the list it's mainly interesting for the final couple chapters about Lind's later life (when she had married and settled down).

Memoir of Madame Jenny Lind-Goldschmidt 1820-1851, Henry Scott Holland and William Rockstro. This is the "official biography", published four years after Lind's death, with help from Otto Goldschmidt, Jenny Lind's husband, who was very invested in maintaining the impression that the relationship between Jenny Lind and Felix Mendelssohn was all very pure and spiritual and about Art and not anything that could in the slightest way be considered scandalous.

So yes, going in I knew that I was getting Victorian hagiography that was going to ignore anything that didn't fit the portrait of Lind as a virginal "perfect woman" lacking in any artifice. On the other hand, it turns out that I actually like Victorian biographies! Well, up to a point, but I enjoy the combination of storytelling and in-depth primary source detail. Opera is not my fandom -- the Mendelssohn family and 19th century classical music are -- but this (and a bit of help from Wikipedia) gave me a useful sense of Lind's signature roles.

The most interesting of the supporting characters I met was definitely Harriet Grote, an unconventional society hostess and Lind's patron in Englad, a radical who hung out with the Utilitarians, and was a major political player during her husband's decade in Parliament. (Most of this I didn't get from my reading -- the book just mentioned that the Grotes were friendly with the Utilitarians, but that was enough to get me Googling.)

Unfinished Adventure, Evelyn Sharp. mrissa recently reviewed one of Sharp's school stories, and this reminded me that I was interested in reading Sharp's memoirs. I know Sharp as Hertha Ayrton's biographer, but she was also an author, journalist, suffragist, pacifist, and has plenty to write on here, always very wittily. About halfway through and having much fun.

The Merry Wives of Windsor, William Shakespeare. Play readaloud. For the last few years I've been going around saying that I've read all the Shakespeare plays except The Merry Wives of Windsor, and now I've completed the set. I'm a little sad to be done, so someone had better find Cardenio already!

I enjoyed this one more than I expected, given that I don't much care about Falstaff one way or the other, and the plot of this play, such as it is, is "let's physically punish and publicly shame Falstaff for being a dirty old man" (OK, there's also a B plot in which Anne Page gets to marry the only one of her three suitors who isn't awful, and a bunch of making fun of people with foreign accents). Part of it is that I was reading Mistress Quickly, who is a fun role, and meant that at the point where I should have been noticing that pinching and burning Falstaff is Not Cool I was instead distracted by "wait, this is a singing part? time to try to make up a tune on the spot!"

Children of Dune, Frank Herbert. There was some cool stuff here and the plot was generally fun, but disappointed that Frank Herbert didn't make better use of the interesting female characters he'd set up. Have put down the series, reading the later books is not high priority.

Mister Magic, Kiersten White. Recommended by cahn, and I really don't have much to add to her review -- the premise is great: a "cast reunion" for a children's TV show that everyone remembers watching but no one can find any details on, Mandela effect style, told from the point of view of one of the former child stars who has blocked out all memory of her time on the show. It was very readable, but didn't particularly resonate with me.

Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen. Reread -- I wanted something fluffy, and this generally works for that, though it has a bite. Jane Austen's humor and authorial voice is particularly fun in this one, although I'm also doing some serious eyerolling at the awfulness of the Thorpes. I also like how Catherine is convincingly a teenager.

The Fair Maid of the West, or a Girl Worth Gold, Part I by Thomas Heywood. Play readaloud, recommended by a_t_rain. I was a bit nervous doing this after As You Like It because Shakespeare is a hard act to follow! And yes, it's not nearly as good, and reactions were mixed: "this is totally groundling bait", "well, I must be a groundling, then!" but it was still a fun romp, and interesting to see what the popular entertainment of Shakespeare's time was like. I am now wishing that the Shakespearean Genres class I took in college had had more cross-dressing plays (IIRC it just had the bit in Merchant of Venice and nothing else) -- it's really cool how the Elizabethan era was a time when strong, independent, sometimes gender-bending female characters were fashionable. (Apart from Shakespeare, we've done this and The Roaring Girl, and I'm eyeing John Lyly's Gallathea for the future.)

Dune, Frank Herbert. Still rereading this, most of the way through. Interesting how much attention Herbert pays to his female characters -- there's a certain amount of gender essentialism, but the women get to be people and are not depicted in a particularly male gaze-y way (even if I'm not sure what "tortured by the winds of puberty" even means).