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I've read this book too many times to write a comprehensive review this time. So okay, the thing that struck me most on this reread is how regularly Anne is totally overpowered by her emotions. Honestly, given how often Anne is struck frozen and unable to comprehend what's happening around her because her feelings are in a turmoil, it's astonishing to me that cut for small spoiler )

And okay, yes, she's going through some particularly high-emotion stuff during the time period covered by the book, I gather that people who experience romantic attraction can find that their feelings on the subject are very a lot sometimes, but like, even so. Wow, Anne. Find your chill!

(I still love Anne a lot though.)

The other thing is, the narrative spends a lot of time telling the reader that Lady Russell is a good person and a good friend and worth admiring and being close with and all, but.....never actually showcases her actions in such a way as makes me feel like I should care about her one bit. It's to the point where I can't help but feel it might be deliberate, but if so I'm not quite sure what point Austen might be trying to make with this. Idk. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm just Not Appreciating Lady Russell As I Ought, but I still feel totally unmoved by her supposed qualities.
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Another nonfiction book consisting of the letters home of a 19th century white century woman who travels to a different country, listened to as a Librivox audiobook! This one is by accredited doctor Clara Swain, who travelled to India in the 1860’s as a missionary and stayed for 27 years.

This book is definitely even more colonialist than the one about New Zealand I listened to last year. The New Zealand one just has a few offhand mentions of the native population which means at least the reader doesn’t get descriptions of active terribleness on the part of the white people, just the knowledge that the writer is there as part of a Very Colonial Endeavour. But this one is all about the writer’s regular interactions with the local people as she tries to convert them to Christianity.

I mean, it was obvious going in that it was going to be terribly colonialist and probably pretty racist, the question was merely about degrees. It’s.....not as bad as it could be, which I know is still not saying a lot. Clara is definitely of the benevolent-paternalism school of racism, which is at least not as directly violent as some brands of racism. But it's still unfortunate, and gets rather bad sometimes. An example:

cut for detailed description of a racist incident )

Overall, despite Clara’s issues, the book was an interesting one, though kind of tedious and repetitive at points since it covers 27 years' worth of relatively similar work and the letters are excerpted to exclude anything personal. It was neat to learn about the types of missionary work done in India at that time, especially since at a later era my great-grandparents were also missionaries in India, though in a different region.

And I was also made to think once again about the gendered social roles available to someone like Clara in her era. At one point in the book, Clara makes an offhand comment where she's clear that if she'd been born a boy she would have been an engineer. But in her gender and culture, one of the few ways a woman can have a respectable independent, ambitious, career-focused life is as a missionary. Engineer is right out. It's one of the things that's so interesting in reading about 19th century Western missionary women: wondering what else they might have done with their lives instead, if they'd had more options open to them. Clara seems to genuinely feel called to her mission work, and get real satisfaction out of it (....for better or worse), but she also knows that if she'd been a man she would not have been a missionary. But of course we only get one sentence on the topic because obviously we can't learn too much about Clara's personal feelings about things!

I rather wished in general to know more about what was going on in Clara’s personal life throughout the book, in fact. The extracts from the letters that comprise this book are all about Clara’s missionary work, and there’s just hints here and there of what else might be going on. For example: after 5 years in India Clara goes back to the USA for a home leave, stays for several years, then returns to India looking much more haggard and having clearly uncertain health. What happened during her time at home??

Well, I understand Clara's desire to make sure her published letters didn't include too many personal details since I would probably feel similarly if I were to publish something like that. But it still makes for a less engaging reading experience than Lady Barker's chatty letters from New Zealand.

cut for....spoilers, I guess? )
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This is a nonfiction book consisting of the letters home of a white lady who travelled to New Zealand in the 1860’s to take up sheep farming with her husband and stayed for three years. Lady Barker is a charming correspondent who knows how to tell a story, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening* to her various adventures, opinions, descriptions of life, and occasional real hardships. It’s, you know, a colonial book about colonialism, but you know what you’re getting into in a book like this and it was still very much a good example of the kinds of things I like about 19th century women’s travelogues so I feel well satisfied with my experience.

*I experienced this book as a free librivox audiobook to entertain me while walking places. The volunteer reader was very good!
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This last week I read seven romance novels in a row without noting down any kind of detailed thoughts about any of them to write proper posts about, because it was That Kind Of Week. I'll come back and finish tidying some of my backlogged book thoughts for posting later but figured I might as well just throw these up since I won't be able to make proper posts of them.

1. After The Wedding, by Courtney Milan - a reread of a truly excellent one, still adore it, still deeply want to know everything about Theresa's story following this novel because I care wayyyy too much about Theresa.

2. Briarley, by Aster Glenn Gray - a m/m retelling of Beauty and the Beast which was absolutely lovely and I approved of just about every choice the author made in how to adapt the original story.

3. Sweet Disorder, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #1) - small-town politics involving a young widow being encouraged to remarry for voting reasons but she has her own personal stuff going on too, liked it a lot.

4. True Pretenses, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #2) - a reread, still totally delightful, love everything about it.

5. Listen to the Moon, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #3) - really interesting marriage-of-convenience story about a valet-turned-butler and a maid, really wish I'd had the wherewithal to write down more detailed thoughts about this one because it super deserves it, very much worth the read.

6. A Taste of Honey, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #4) - sweet and cute but it didn't really speak to me.

7. The Blue Castle, by Lucy Maud Montgomery - an old favourite comfort-read which I don't allow myself to reread too often anymore for fear of wearing out the story in my mind but the situation was deserving of a reread and it hit the spot as it always does.
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This quote from the introduction will give you a good idea of what one can expect from the book:

Dear Children:—You will like to know that the man who wrote these true stories is himself one of the people he describes so pleasantly and so lovingly for you. He hopes that when you have finished this book, the Indians will seem to you very real and very friendly. He is not willing that all your knowledge of the race that formerly possessed this continent should come from the lips of strangers and enemies, or that you should think of them as blood-thirsty and treacherous, as savage and unclean.


It's a book written in 1913 about the Sioux lifestyle written by a man who is himself Sioux, who was born in the mid-1800s. But written, as is understandable, from a very particular slant: to make the life seem approachable and acceptable to white people, to make them think more kindly of Indigenous people in the face of widespread prejudice. It definitely seems to me to romanticise things in places.

So it's an interesting look at one man's memories of what it was like to grow up Sioux in the 19th century (...I accidentally mistyped that at first as 29th century and I'd LOVE to read a book about that tbh!) but it probably needs to be taken with a few grains of salt in places.

It's a very episodic book, with each chapter being on its own theme or topic, and the chapters are mostly not connected to each other at all. Some chapters are more interesting than others, and I personally find that the chapters where Eastman's particularly talking about his own experiences are more interesting than the ones where he relates tales of other people. Probably what this means is that I should have instead read Eastman's memoir of his childhood, Memories of an Indian Boyhood, instead of this book but OH WELL this is the one that fell into my hands so this is the one I read.

(One detail in this book that amused me was his mention of young girls' playthings all being small versions of adult tools, and the girl with her little hide scraper happily helping her mother, and comparing it to the main character in The Birchbark House which I read earlier this year where the young girl haaaaates scraping hides.)
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A Victorian-era book featuring a lady detective! Inspired by [personal profile] calvinahobbes' long-ago list of recommendations of such. The books on Calvina's list are all among the earliest examples of female detectives written by female authors and I thought it would be fun to give one a try. The first one I tried is the one by Baroness Orczy as that's the only author on the list I recognized, but in retrospect that was the wrong choice because I already know how sexist and classist and antisemitic Orczy is. I gave up on that book by shortly into the second chapter the instant a character was compared to Orczy's usual idea of Jewish people. I don't need to put up with more of that crap. I might love Orczy's most famous book but it is rather in spite of the author, not because of...!

And then I just chose one of the other books on Calvina's public domain lady detective list at random, and came up with this one about Loveday Brooke. And it turned out to be genuinely worth the read. It's is a collection of short stories in which a professional lady detective inspects the details of a case, comes up with the solution much faster than anyone expects, and then explains everything about what was actually going on and how she figured it out when nobody else could.

Each story deliberately hides details from the reader in the first section, such that you wouldn't be able to solve the puzzles along with Loveday. Which I gather is against the rules of "fair play" in detective fiction, but also this book predates those so-called rules so you can't blame the author for it. And it makes for a pleasant read in my opinion because there's none of the stress on the forgetfully-inclined reader of being bothered with keeping track of a million different Clues to try to figure out what details are worth remembering. I also appreciate that most of the mysteries aren't murder mysteries, which also lowers the drama. (Can you tell that I am not the usual audience of mysteries?)

You don't get to see much of the actual character of who Loveday is, unfortunately - the stories are much more interested in showing how clever Loveday is for figuring everything out than portraying her as a well-rounded human, but you know, I can forgive the book that, because it's nice to see a book of its era where a woman's main character trait is Good At Her Job That's Usually Considered Men-Only.

The book does contain undertones of various unfortunate prejudices of the era (like the idea of it being most appropriate to marry within your class), but never in a way that feels actively hateful like Orczy can be, and this book even occasionally refutes certain prejudices, like the idea of a criminal physiognomy.

And the book does a nice job of setting out a collection of interesting characters for each story and a mystery I wanted to know the answer to.

Overall an enjoyable read and the right kind of detective book for a reader like me. Possibly not the sort of book that would be appealing to people whose main reading diet is modern-style mysteries though!
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Suddenly and randomly got in the mood to reread this one a little while ago. I do like it, even if the author doesn't recognize that Peter's being a rather a boor to Harriet with his romantic interest since she's stuck and cannot escape him since she's in prison, and moreover needs him in order to not be convicted of murder. OH WELL. The best parts: everything involving Miss Climpson and Miss Murchison. I wish I could read a murder mystery novel actually starring one of these excellent women, instead of having them take second place to Lord Peter Wimsey. They did mosts of the hard work on this one anyway!
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Once upon a time when I was much younger I attempted to read Anne of Green Gables because a) it's deeply popular, and b) I loved Lucy Maud Montgomery's other books. But I failed miserably at getting through the first book because I COULD NOT HANDLE my embarrassment at watching Anne get into one scrape after another. So I came to the conclusion that the Anne books were forever lost to me.

But recentlyish I had a revelation at the hands of [personal profile] verity that I could just....skip the books in which Anne is a scrape-prone child, and pick the series up later. So I did! (I also skipped later books that looked like they would be largely about the scrapes Anne's children get into.)

It took me a bit of time to warm up to Anne; she's a little too serious-minded, dreamy, and romantic for me to ever feel like I got her. But I enjoyed her books and I'm glad to have been able to get around to reading the parts of this series I can read!

Under the cut: Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, and Rilla of Ingleside )
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This is a children's book from the 50's, and it reads like it, but in a charming way. I feel like there's a vague small chance that I've actually read this book before when I was a kid, but it's quite possible I'd merely read a different book that covered some similar themes.

This book is about two girls who ice skate. Lalla is the orphaned daughter of a famous champion figure skater, whose guardian aunt is determined that Lalla will live up to her father's legacy and be a champion herself. Harriet is the daughter of a poor shopkeeper, who takes up skating in order to strengthen her legs after a bad illness. The two girls become friends, of course. And it's your standard "poor little rich girl" vs "moneyless girl who is rich in family and friends" story. A good book for the kind of book it is.
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Back in the days after I'd started keeping a list of all the books I read each year but BEFORE I started posting reviews of them, I kept desultory personal notes (ranging from a single word to quite a few paragraphs) on some of the books. And I always vaguely forget I have, and forget where exactly to find them, and I'd like to just have them on my dw so they're FINDABLE again for me. And also some of you might find these interesting/amusing? (N.B. some of these contain what I would now classify as INCORRECT OPINIONS.)

SO HERE'S THREE YEARS' WORTH OF BOOKS IN ONE POST, OKAY GO.

expand this cut to see nested cuts listing all the books )
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Sorry, this is short, I just don't have a lot to say about this book apparently. It's a 19th century ghost story about dead people kicking all the living people out of their town! I was remarkably charmed. I liked getting the different POV's - there was good characterization work in this book. I also enjoyed that the whole thing was just so different in every respect from what a book on this subject would be like if written today.
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This is a novel written in an era when ideas of what novels could and should be were still being worked out! And it's a scifi story from before that genre existed! Consequently it's pretty great. Thanks [personal profile] verity for reccing this to me years ago, I'm so glad I finally got round to it.

Read more... )
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These two books really read like one narrative that happens to be split into two parts. It's the story of one year in the life of a group of seven kids who spend all their time together that year. Five of them are siblings/cousins, one is a hired boy, and one is the neighbour girl.

There's no real overarching plot, just a series of incidents in their lives. The books do a good job of showing characters, and of writing believably about childhood. But the whole thing is suffused with a very strong theme of feeling nostalgia for a good time of life that is gone forever. And I found this theme pretty wearing!

I mean, based on what wikipedia says about the stage in LMM's life when she wrote these books, I understand why she'd write that theme, but it's not one that's calculated to appeal to me. Childhood was not a perfect golden time, and also I'm the sort of person who's much more inclined to live in the present rather than pine for a time gone by, whatever that time may be.

So overall these books just don't really work for me, even though I do care about the characters and their lives. Ah well!
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A deeply ridiculous and kind of objectively terrible book but I mostly enjoyed it anyway!

The general plot outline is well known - child brought up feral by apes, first meets other humans as an adult, falls in love.

But there's more going on than that. Read more... )
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Wow this is a very silly book where none of the characters are sympathetic in the slightest. It kept my attention to the end but that's the best I can say for it.

Read more... )
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These three are old favourites. Still very good! It's odd thought to be reminded of both how very good they are AND how very ridic and obnoxious the overt moralizing is. But it manages to rise above the moralizing!

Read more... )
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Book #3 in the Swallows & Amazons series, but a significant departure in approach from the previous books: the story that this book tells is a story that the children in the series tell each other about a fictional adventure they have, as opposed to this book being about something that "really" happens in the universe of this series.

Read more... )
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Book #2 in the Swallows & Amazons series. I honestly cannot be sure whether I have ever read this book before or not. My childhood library had a very incomplete collection of the series, and I'm no longer certain exactly which ones it did and didn't have. And at the time the library was my only source for these books.

There are some aspects of this book that seem familiar - but is that only because these elements get referred to in later books in the series, or in fanfic I've read? And there are other aspects that seem entirely unfamiliar - but is that only because it's been so long that I've forgotten things? I'm leaning in the direction of thinking I have not read this book before but really WHO KNOWS.

At any rate I do love this book series and Swallowdale is an excellent part of it. The author does a good job of having the children being independent and capable and adventurous while still genuinely making mistakes and getting into scrapes and not being perfect at the things they're doing - but all in a cozy world where nothing is capable of going truly badly. So these books are very comforting sorts of reads. (At least, if you're able to read past the racism. The author is a white dude writing in the 1930's and 40's and includes an unfortunate helping of the sort of casual racism you might expect from that source. Sigh.)
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The power dynamics in the romantic relationship in this book continue to be awfully uncomfortable for me, but I continue to reread it on a semi-regular basis anyways because I am just so endlessly charmed by Judy's narrative voice. I love Judy so much! But Jervis Pendleton can go jump in a lake.

Read more... )

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