So Many Books...

11:15 pm - My umbrella may not be red, but it's packed.

Off to Bristol tomorrow, to the Diana Wynne Jones conference which starts on Friday. Up until now, I've been helping steepholm organise only to the extent of saying things like 'So-and-so's talk has been moved so it clashes with Such-and-such's? That's a pity!'. Okay, not totally - I did suggest we go visit a few restaurants in person to see about gluten-free and vegetarian catering, and have visited the campus so I'm all set for Friday meeting-and-greeting with fjm and chilperic, while steepholm is external examining Elsewhere.

Everybody on my flist probably knows about this con already, from one source or another, but may not know that we're off to Wales on Monday to another conference! This one is the rather nicely named Asterisks and Obelisks in Lampeter. steepholm is giving a paper there, again nicely named 'The Eagle Has Landed'.

Packed? Ha. Not a chance. Though my mobile phone charger, camera are, and I've got yarn wound up (Shibui Sock, in Dragonfly) and pattern (CanCan fingerless gloves, for Y.D.) printed out! Good time to go organise, right? Instead, a quick - no really! this time quick - write-up of The Patriot Witch. Finished that on the way back from Bristol last time, and though I very much enjoyed many aspects of it, and thought the setting was wonderful, there were two things that kept bouncing me out of the book. One was an unevenness of narrative, as we'd go from seeing things quite naturally from Proctor's POV to seeing things from a very much older, rather flat-in-tone omniscient narrator moving Proctor's lips, as it were.

The other, though, was the language, and that's a constant interest because of the famed History Project. (Famed, right? Okay, I've rattled on about it a bit from time to time. Historical books set in Britain for children/teens. As per steepholm's talk mentioned above.) Others have said it before us, but the register used for historical fiction always presents the author with an interesting choice - and Rosemary Sutcliff may have set a high standard, but her style of writing historicals isn't the only way to do it. Consistency, though, is surely almost always required - unless the author's playing an intentionally twisty game, and is using a startlingly modern term to indicate alternate universe or the like. But for all Finlay's historical Revolutionary War America is different in the existence of magic, he doesn't seem to be playing on that difference in the use of anachronisms. Because the characters generally talk as might be expected for the time and place, the anachronistic words really stand out. steepholm made a list, and as always, we checked his O.E.D. online. There were a few surprises, but only one (which I've totally forgotten now) about which we were wrong and the term far older than either of us had thought. I do remember a couple of 'Hi's, which were doubly wrong in context, a bunch of 'Yeah's, and a night watchman who called "Nine fifty pee em', and then 'Nine fifty-five...' . I think the three worst for us were 'Enough with the second-guessing', ''The way I figure it, we've got a little window here' (that being a window of opportunity), and 'Hack it off already!' (that's her hair, lest anyone be left boggling). The one place where it really got in the way of characterisation was when Proctor's mother and aunt switched into -- oh, I can't think of any way of putting this except to say that they sounded like a seriously stereotypical Jewish (or Irish!) mother and aunt. Right down to his aunt 'on a roll now', telling Proctor how many hours his mother was in labour with him, and then - then - he didn't even wear the good linen jacket she'd given him!

It was only frustrating because so much was good in the story, and a lot of historical research showing, and there's a lot to look forward to in the two books to follow. But every time - bounced out hard. So - did we miss something? Or misread something? (Mind you, the blame is mine if so, as steepholm hasn't read the book itself yet, and just took interest because I never shut up about something like this when he's handy!) Other perspectives welcomed.

05:46 pm - Is it the lead in the pipes?

Serious question, of deep import, coming up.  Children's books set in Roman Britain - with the exception of those written by Rosemary Sutcliff* - seem to be universally Bad.  Sometimes entertainingly so, sometimes just unreadably so.  But why?  (Any good titles disproving this theory would be more than gratefully received, btw!) * [ETA - hafren  mentioned Kipling's stories as another exception, which I'd forgotten.]

Currently reading Roman Invasion (My Story) for the history project, and it's added evidence to my theory admirably.  The hero, Bran, an 11 year old "prince" of a British tribe, is given to declaiming ( a lot) about how he's a British warrior, and will NEVER submit to the Romans, but will die first.  Unfortunately, the first time his tribe finds a group of Roman soldiers small enough to take on, he, his mother (warrior Queen), his two male cousins and his 8 year old sister (brought into this battle because, as his mother says, the British LOVE their families and don't leave them behind like the Romans) are all taken uninjured.  And his mother proceeds to have a long conversation with the Roman govenor -- uh, she speaks Latin, why?  I guess there must be a translation spell floating around in the ether somewhere.

The best bit so far though, is when he's talking with the Greek surveyor working on the road the Roman army is building.  This man has his mute nephew with him and tells our Bran that the boy will have a good career as a surveyor, as he can communicate by drawing.

02:59 pm - Easy to be worth more than a thousand of mine.

Such a great cover - it tickles me every time I look at it. The manly, manly jaw and sharp pointy object so undercut by the stance and wrist limpness... (But is the pose This dagger will be used to pick my nose if necessary - it's my compensation or the more obvious Mention my flaming campness and I'll give you a free lobotomy?

Very interesting read, too - I was babbling to steepholm last night about a few of its oddities, including the fact that Regina, who has 'never had a mother or father' but was owned by a nasty old woman who sent her out begging in the streets of Vinconium, speaks with the perfect, rather formal language Rosemary Sutcliff uses for People from the Past.



This is the more obvious type of happiness - my second completed (all except getting Younger Daughter to choose buttons and then sewing them on) Mrs Darcy cardigan. I'm thrilled to have it off the needles, sewn up and blocked, in large part because I kept making idiotic mistakes which made me sure I need a keeper. There were attempts to get pictures of her wearing it, but she claimed they were all horrible and they were on her camera so I couldn't just ignore her.

Silly, horribly immature pleasure provided by a thread on Ravlery about a new yarn (wrote 'yearn' first time!) called Fannie's Fingering. It *is* a US company, rather than a British or Australian one, and fingering *is* a weight of yarn, but still... Yes - this remains book-related - Fanny Burney - Fanny Price - Fanny Hi... never mind.

08:58 pm - The Foreshadowing (or 'Hurrah - I am NOT an audiobook grouch')

After grousing so much about the last two audiobooks I listened to (Austenland and The Sharing Knife: Beguilement), and being a little worried about sharing Gatty's Tale with steepholm, though I quite liked it, it was a bit of a relief to listen to the sample of The Foreshadowing [ETA - not sure about that link, I've tried it again.] and have no hesitation about choosing it.  I could barely make myself stop listening, and had a strong feeling that this was an almost perfect marriage of reader/narrator and book, to the extent that I suspected I might have found it less gripping had I read it instead of listening. Today I had a look to see if the reader had done any other books they had available, and realised Anna Maxwell Martin is a well-known (BAFTA-winning, indeed) actress, though I've only seen her as Bessy in the wonderful production of North and South.  Her voice -- oh, it's just so good.  And reading this spare, atmospheric, stark prose...  Listen to the sample!  It's well worth it. 

Anyway, the story is an interesting one in itself, and I think the reasons the audiobook narration works so well are also.  Sasha (Alexandra) Fox is the 17 year old daughter of an eminent doctor living in Brighton at the start of World War I. She had her first premonition - of death, always of death - at the age of five, though nobody in her family can accept her entirely unwanted ability to predict the future.  She isn't totally sure about the premonitions herself at first, but when she's finally allowed to go the the hospital her father runs as a volunteer nursing assistant, they start to get clearer and more specific and beyond any doubt.  Like hearing the voice of the person say 'I must go now.  I had a bayonet put into my back as I was doing the same to another man. I must go now. I am dead and I must go.'  (Yeah - imagine that read by someone with beautifully clear diction, and controlled emotional depth.  Chills!) Before she knows he's dead.  She can't do anything about the prophecies, but feels totally alone as nobody believes her - like Cassandra, surely one of the more heart-rending characters of literature. 

When she has a dream showing her brother Tom (just a year older than Sasha and always closer to her than the eldest, Edgar, who went off eagerly as soon as the war began, to 'do his bit') being killed, however, she knows she has time to try to do something to prevent its happening.  She manages to get herself to France, pretending to be a trained nurse and starts working in a rest station in Boulogne.  If you might get a hint just reading this that finding Tom will be a hugely difficult problem in itself, let alone preventing his getting in the way of a bullet, you're not wrong.  I've no intention of saying more about what happens, as there's such tension between the seeming inevitability of the future Sasha has seen and her absolute determination to risk and do anything to stop it happening.  And then the climax - everything goes into slow motion and the tension is even greater when you suddenly realise what's about to happen and what could result...

04:21 pm - Red Moon at Sharpsburg

Short (I hope) bit of preamble, in two initially separate directions. Yesterday, March 10th, was the day on which my father died in 1966 and on which my grandfather also died, five years later. I liked them both, a lot, and more relevantly here, both were big readers, and both helped foster my early book-wormery. According to my mother, my father introduced my grandfather to Anthony Trollope, and my grandfather got my dad fascinated with the American Civil War. Trollope's not so much to the point, as I haven't done much about reading him since a bit of dipping after the BBC serializations back in the -- ? 70s? -ish, but the Civil War is. Rosemary Wells intersects with children's reading and me through some of the favourite picture books I read many, many times to my own two, including Max and Ruby's First Greek Myth, Shy Charles, Hazel's Amazing Mother, and the Bunny Planet books.  So when I heard Wells had written a book about the Civil War, I was well surprised, but knew it was a must-read. 

Red Moon at Sharpsburg is quite a short book, though it takes India Moody from just before the start of the war to just before its end.  Some of that brevity comes from jumps in action that I found a bit disconcerting at first, until I put them in place with a picture book's page-turning, scene-changing nature.  And I thought I was going to be thrown out of the book early on by reading that a neighbour boy, Emory, had 'asthma', which I was convinced was a later word (OED-online proved me very, very wrong on that one) - steepholm took a quick skim while he was here and thought  'white trash' was similarly a term in use only later - he was also wrong, if less dramatically so.  (The author writes in an afterword that she spent 12 years researching the era, and I can well believe it.)  I soon felt I'd fallen into the rhythm of the book, which is rather different  - generally quite spare, but with lovely passages, and a conversational feel I quickly warmed to.  In terms of the author's stated intent of writing a book about the Civil War which told stories of  people's lives and also revealed the 'profound immorality of war', in a way appropriate for younger readers, I'd say she was fully successful.  I might have criticisms - mostly minor ones- but they're out-weighed by the positives.

( Read more... )

04:12 pm - Bits, bobs and BOOKS. Finally

Well, I kind of knew it was going to be an unusual funeral last Saturday, when we finally managed to squeeze into the beautiful, small All Saints Church in Raheny to hear "As so many of you will have missed it while trying to get in, Jacinta will now sing the 'Ave Maria' again for us all."  Not unusual in most churches in Ireland, perhaps, but in a Church of Ireland one?  Decidedly.  Much more importantly, it was one of the most moving funerals I've ever attended.  Along this lines:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

steepholm

In this tale the character of the Conqueror and his deeds are drawn largely from old manuscripts.  Some of them were written by Normans, some by Englishmen; so you can understand that William will appear in a different light according to whether the writer is Norman or English.
[........]

One day you will, very likely, read the old chronicles for yourself and make up your own mind.

steepholm

02:09 pm - The Tar Man

1 slightly demented Lady-Schrapnell with serious headache

+ 1 Firefox/Bloglines crash

+ a Saturday afternoon

- food

=



+ 1 industrial strength headache

+



The first picture is of a rather spur-of-the-moment project cast-on, when I couldn't stand looking at the computer any more and the second represents having finished reading Linda Buckley-Archer's The Tar Man. I could just barely manage to read at first (the headache, not the book!) but it got better. It's very difficult to know how to write about this, as anyone who's read Gideon the Cutpurse will no doubt be eager to read The Tar Man, and conversely, you'd really want to read Gideon before The Tar Man. So behind the cut, a bit of discussion that's spoiler-free for The Tar Man (though it makes it even harder to say anything significant) but not for Gideon. ( Read more (safely)... )