A Fan's Playground

This book has been on my mind for a while to give a try to, since genarti said she thought I might enjoy it, and then Dracula Daily happened to tumblr and I signed up for it. And then a few days into it I was like "actually I don't like the slow route, I need to read this all at once" so then I did! A fascinating experience. I liked it a lot more than Carmilla, which I read relatively recently and found enormously boring. Dracula has more interest in developing characters, and in having a plot, and so forth, so despite Dracula being far longer, I found it the easier read of the two. (I'm still sad about Carmilla not being as appealing to me as I wanted it to be!)

Dracula is one of those books that's had a perhaps outsized impact on popular culture. A lot of vampire tropes started here! But living in a culture having been shaped by Dracula, it's amazing to see in the original how very long it takes to get to the vampire reveal, since vampires weren't a known staple of the supernatural genre. You'd never hold off the "he's a vampire" so long in a modern vampire book!

Due to the pop culture pervasiveness, one thinks one knows what to expect from the book even before having read it. And....one would be wrong. Or at least I was! I've never actually directly consumed any Dracula adaptations before, and it turns out I knew basically nothing about any of the plot or the characters.

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A 19th century collection of letters home from an English woman who moved to Egypt for her health - she had tuberculosis, and the cool damp air of England was doing her lungs no favours.

It was not uncommon in the era for letters from travellers to be expected to be shared around in the social circle at home, so they're more like a travel blog than like personal letters; these letters fall into that pattern.

There's not zero personal stuff though. Duff-Gordon regularly updates her loved ones back home on the state of her health, though more often mentioning when she's doing much better than when she's having a downturn. Understandable; she doesn't want to worry them. And it's so obvious from the mentions of her family that she loves them dearly and misses them terribly.

But most of the book is discussions of the life and customs and people of Egypt as she observes and involves herself. Which....is all coming from a white 19th century Englishwoman's perspective. So it's pretty racist? But honestly better than I feared. And it's clear to me that she is working on overcoming her prejudices, and getting better about things as the years go by, and that she's miles better than most of the Europeans in Egypt, and that she truly genuinely cares about the Egyptians she meets and gets to know and is horrified by the way they are treated. She takes the time to learn to speak Arabic so she can communicate directly with people, acts as a doctor to anyone who needs, and spends a lot of time making friends with locals of multiple races and religions.

But she also generalizes terribly about groups of people, semi-regularly refers to how much it's like she's living in the Arabian Nights or the times of the Bible, uses the n-word to describe black people, and has household slaves. So like. Her broad-mindedness only goes so far, and the racism is still very much there. It's interesting to see the places where there are disconnects between these two different lenses through which she's experiencing the world!

I was reminded a bit about how Victor Hugo writes about women. Whenever Hugo presents opinions on women you're like OH GOD NO SHUT HIM UP but he is able to write women as people in such a clear-eyed and realistic way that it's obvious he genuinely knew many women on a deep level and cared about them.

Duff-Gordon's letters are very charming and thoughtful though, and she does seem to be genuinely trying hard and willing to learn and grow, and so I enjoyed the read despite her issues -- but of course ymmv.

A collection of letters from Rabindranath Tagore at the end of the 19th century, consisting largely of descriptions of scenery, weather, people-watching, and philosophical musings. The letters are sometimes beautifully evocative and thoughtful, sometimes self-consciously pretentious in that arrogant-young-man way. Overall the style of writing is...very much the kind of thing I expect of a person who has received major acclaim for Literature, which is not so much my kind of thing. I don't think I would have made it through this book without the Librivox reader, who did a good job of putting animation and feeling into what she was reading. (note though that there's a fair number of editing errors in the audio for this book, more than I have generally found in Librivox)

Tagore almost never mentions anything personal in the letter excerpts he includes in this book. But occasionally he mentions his travels by houseboat, practically the only personal detail that makes it in, and he makes that sound very pleasant indeed. Of course, he's a well-off enough person to be able to just wander extensively by houseboat to wherever he wants, taken care of by servants all the way.

It's pretty clear from Tagore's attitudes throughout the book that he comes from a well-to-do, high-class family and he comes across in places as rather out of touch as a result. The letter where he talks about the servant who comes to work late one day because his daughter died, and then just sets to work as usual, and Tagore takes this as inspiration to reflect on how work can be a consolation in the hard things in life......oof. You don't know your servant's interiority, sir!

There's a part in the letters where he reflects at some length on The Thousand and One Nights, and I found it fascinating to read an orientalist perspective from a non-european. The way he talks about that book!!

He's also sexist, but that one didn't come as a surprise to me.

( cut for discussion of pedophilia )

The thing is, I went into this book predisposed to like it. On a trip I took to India several years ago, I visited the Tagore family estate near Kolkata, where Rabindranath Tagore died, and which is now a museum dedicated to him. And I have very fond memories of that visit. It was a pleasant day, and we got there just after a major rainstorm, so the covered outdoor walkways on the second floor were wet. The sensation of the warm, wet, smooth painted walkways under my bare feet is a sense-memory that still brings me happiness. And it was so nice to just wander that huge estate quietly on my own -- it felt so peaceful, after spending time in Kolkata, which had been overwhelming to me and my sensory processing disorder.

So I wanted to like Tagore, because of those pleasant associations! But I do not like the version of him who exists in his letters, at the very least, and I am appalled by his personal morals around sex. Perhaps there is value in his poetry or his short stories or other works that I can't see in these letters. But I'm not feeling inspired in the slightest to seek out any more of his works, despite how important and influential a writer he was.

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? )

This is an epistolary novel about the USA Civil War, as told through the friendship of two women, one Northern and one Southern. This book was recommended to me after I posted about a real-life Southern woman's Civil War diary I'd read a few years back, as a book that also gives a more complicated view of the war.

And like....it was that, and it was a well-written and well-researched book, and I cared a great deal about the main characters, but.... I don't know. The book ends with the basic theme of "War just generally sucks" which is an idea I can get behind, but I just don't feel like a historical period that is very specifically A War About Chattel Slavery is the right historical period to set your novel that's mainly about the hardships of being a white woman.

Yes, there's some content about slavery and racism, and trying to figure out what Right is, but all of this is from the perspective of white people, and the white people are absolutely the people the book is actually interested in. And yes, white people (and especially women!) did have awfully hard times in the Civil War, and there were people behaving badly on all sides of the war, as there always is because people are people and war is terrible. But in this context, the story just felt to me like it was giving the impression that, if both sides are bad then there's nothing especially wrong about being a supporter of the pro-slavery side.

And I agree with the book's anti-war message, I absolutely believe that war is bad and leads to lots of bad stuff happening - but if you're going to specifically write an American Civil War novel with an anti-war message, I kind of feel like you're morally obligated to indicate you have some sort of notion of how else the abolition of slavery might have been achieved. Or at the very least make clear that the narrative understands that black people being freed from oppression is just as important as white women being freed from oppression.

But as it is, though I feel desperately for Susanna and Cora and the awful things they experienced, a novel about the civil war choosing to focus solely on white people is making a statement about what people are the ones worth paying attention to. And in this book, the black people ultimately don't matter. And that makes me deeply uncomfortable with the entire book. Especially since the Civil War is so unfortunately continuing to be relevant to modern political discourse, and so the ideas about the Civil War that are out there matter to modern race relations and US politics.

I googled the author after reading this book, and discovered that she's the writer of the Benjamin January series I keep hearing good things about, which is a series featuring a black man in the antebellum south, so it's not that the author doesn't care about black people. And knowing that does make me feel better, somewhat. But that still doesn't fix what I see as wrong with Homeland.

In conclusion I would have liked the story about Susanna and Cora and their Romeo-and-Juliet-esque friendship-between-enemies far more if it were set in pretty much any other historical context. And I think this year is the right year for me to finally get around to reading at least one or two of the slavery memoirs on my to-read list.

The title is somewhat misleading - only about half the book takes place on the farm, and she's only there for a few months. But that's okay because the title successfully convinced me to read the book, and the book is great. It's the letters home of a young woman traveling through North America for six months in 1882 with her sister.

So it begins by detailing their travels from England to North America, and then the visits to various eastern US cities, and train ride out west, until eventually they reach Manitoba. They spend several spring/summer months on their brother's farm 17 miles out from Winnipeg, and spend most of this time working very hard on the farm. Then they move on further west to hang out in the Rockies and admire scenery and learn about mining. And then they go home.

The thing that struck me most is how cheerful the author is. She's working hard, and doing some pretty uncomfortable things, and yet her outlook is always positive - she's having the time of her life on this trip and nothing will stop this being the case.

I'm very curious about more of the backstory of this woman and her sister and their trip. Why did they decide to make this trip? Why did their family feel okay letting these two young women do all this traveling on their own? And so forth. She's clearly from a high-class background, what with all the letters of introduction they have to important people, and the money to make this trip, and all that. And they've never done anything like having to cook for themselves before going on this trip, which seems to have been something of a steep learning curve in terms of doing things for themselves.

The writing is charming and full of lots of great details and a definite sense of humour. I thoroughly enjoyed it. (My one warning would be that there are a few bits of period-typical racism.)

Sorcery & Cecelia, or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: being the correspondence of two Young Ladies of Quality regarding various Magical Scandals in London and the Country, by Patricia C Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

This is a comforting old reread. An epistolary novel set in the regency period WITH MAGIC, the correspondence being between two young women who are cousins and best friends. And basically it is a novel about HIJINKS and DOING THINGS THAT NEED DOING and LADIES BEING AWESOME and LADIES BEING FRIENDS WITH LADIES. ( Read more... )