sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: historical nonfiction

I've seen this recommended many times, and this is the year! I was expecting A Room of One's Own to be a straightforward book-length essay arguing about the ways a culture of misogyny has gotten in the way of women's writing and the things women need to be successful writers, but it's got a much more interesting structure and approach than that. Woolf uses the conceit of telling the story of a particular (fictional) day in the life of a woman and the things she experienced and thought about over the course of that day, in order to both straightforwardly argue points like I expected but also to just, like, put forward the realities of women's experiences for the reader to ponder upon and draw their own conclusions.

It's fascinating, it's compellingly written, it's extremely more-ish. It's full of both things where I'm like "YEAH YOU'RE SO RIGHT, BRING IT" and things where I desperately want to argue with Woolf, but like, argue (affectionate). And I'm pretty confident that's what she was going for, tbh!! An invigorating read, and now I want to read more things by Woolf.

I first heard about this book a few years ago, before I first became interested in birding, but was intrigued by it because of the history and context. Birding in a Western context originated with the approach of going out into the field to shoot birds, and then taking the dead birds home with you to analyse in detail for identification. But in the late 19th century there was a movement to change this, because enthusiasts all going out to kill birds is not actually good for the well-being of birds. And this book was written with that agenda in mind: to convince readers that it is worthwhile to examine live birds in the field, and then leave them be.

When I tried reading it at the time I first heard of it, though, I very quickly became bored of it and gave up. But recently it occurred to me that the book might read better to someone who has an intrinsic love of birds properly installed, and gave it another try - and it was so worth it!

It's fascinating to compare this book to modern field guides. Its approach is so different! Of course, due to the type of printing available at the time, detailed full-colour images of every bird can't reasonably be included, so there are just a few black and white drawings here and there. But also the information provided in the text itself is so different! This is where your can really see its agenda. It earnestly takes its time to tell you personalized individual little stories about times the author has encountered these birds, and what an interesting and charming experience it was. It also spends a lot of time describing the birds' personalities, in very human-like ways! But of course it does. It wants to convince the reader that the birds are worth keeping alive.

The other information it provides is more haphazard. It nearly always takes the time to discuss habitats, nesting habits, and something of appearance, but the level of detail is wildly variable, and it's rarely sufficient that I would feel confident in identifying a bird based on the description. Sometimes the author attempts to convey what the bird's songs and calls sound like, but it's hopeless to give meaningful information on this through the medium of text, though it's clear when the author thinks it's particularly important for a bird that you know what it sounds like, and is really earnestly trying to help you out. Too bad the Merlin app didn't exist in 1889!

And it makes some very odd choices about how to organise its information. For example: its discussion of the different orders and families to which birds belong is.....in the section on chipping sparrows, more than 60 pages into the book. Then the classifications are mentioned on and off, inconsistently, until they're summarized as a whole in the section on thrushes at page 195. What the heck! It makes it clear that the expected use of the book is to read it front to back, rather than just to pick it up as a reference to figure out a particular bird you're seeing. Though the back does have some....mildly useful appendices for looking up birds by specific characteristic.

But the nesting habits and behaviour descriptions are actually nice to have (even if they're couched in flowery victorian nature-writing language) because modern field guides don't seem to tend to include that information, just details on appearance and a brief suggestion of habitat, with only occasional additional info. Modern field guides want to fit as many birds as possible into as pocket-sized a book as possible, and so they keep their text very short, and I do think this is too bad!

I also loved getting the insights into some of the old or more regional names for some of the birds, instead of just the official name you get in modern field guides! "Bee martin" for kingbird! "Chippy" for chipping sparrow! "Crow blackbird" for grackle! "Yellow hammer" and a whole collection of other options for the northern flicker! (in fact I had to go look this one up in Merlin using the description given for the yellow hammer to determine for sure which bird was being referred to, because "northern flicker" isn't among any of the names given for the bird in this book!)

It also has fun little bits of sass (for example, when it talks about the chipping sparrow's song, it says the bird has a "cheerful perseverance that would grace a better cause," lol) but sometimes in its efforts to personify the birds it's pretty mean. The author clearly doesn't think highly of flycatchers for example, and I felt very indignant. "All the disagreeable qualities of the flycatchers seem to centre in this bird," it says about the kingbird, and I'm just like HOW RUDE. HOW DARE YOU. YOU'RE SO WRONG.

At any rate I'm very glad that this book was written at the time it was for the purpose it was, and it was an enjoyable look into a different era of birding, despite its foibles!

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.

Okay this was such a cool book to discover! Etheria (more commonly spelled Egeria today) was a Christian woman who in the (probably) 4th century went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and wrote a document about her travels for her community of fellow Christian women back home. This is that document, translated, and with extensive commentary from 1918. Etheria's writing is the earliest surviving text outlining a Christian pilgrimage in detail. It exists only in fragmentary form but enough exists to give some pretty specific information!

I really enjoyed the beginning commentary, even though the librivox entry for this book describes it as "a bit scholarly and dry". I found the information interesting, and I was delighted by the passive aggressive academic shots fired at the people the commentator thinks are wrong.

The actual text of Etheria's letter I found a bit more dry, as she spends a lot of time just listing places she went and things she saw and doesn't give much description, commentary, or reflections upon any of it. On the other hand, taking into account cultural changes in the last 1600 years or so, it was really funny to me how much similarity I could see between this and accounts I have had cause to read from modern Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Some things don't change, apparently! (something that has changed: referring to just everyone as "holy": holy monks, holy Moses, Holy Thecla, Holy Job.....)

The last few chapters are taken up entirely with Etheria listing in minute detail the specifics of the worship practices in Jerusalem, with particular focus on Lent and Easter. This to me felt like just a lot of repetition of almost the same thing over and over again, but it honestly became kind of meditative after a while and I didn't actually get bored of it, weirdly enough. Not a single piece of information from the whole section stayed in my head for longer than a moment though.

Also I enjoyed the various signs of humanity in the volunteer Librivox reader - it was obvious sometimes that he found a particular bit kind of ridiculous to have to read, and he needed a real run up to try to attack the various non-English words, phrases, names, and place-names that appear in this book. And overall he was a clear and competent reader, easy and pleasant to listen to, though he talked fast enough that I had to keep my focus sharp to follow!

Glad to have stumbled across this in my vague wanderings through the librivox archive.

It's been a while since I've read a 19th century woman's travelogue but I have returned again to this strangely compelling genre! Although, for a book that promises "many lands" in its title, the author tells you of remarkably few lands.

I read this book by listening to the Librivox recording of it, and I can highly recommend that as a way of reading this particular book, because the volunteer reader gave so much charm to Mary Seacole's voice.

Anyway! Seacole is most well known for having been a nurse in the Crimean War, like Florence Nightingale except less famous because Seacole was creole and Nightingale was white. Something like half this book is about Seacole's time in the Crimea, with the rest being....basically a prologue to that part.

Throughout the whole book it was SO obvious to me as a reader that the book had an agenda to push to its readers, that agenda basically being "I'm a good nurse who helped a lot of people and DIDN'T go to the Crimea just to make money off the war no matter what anyone says" and then I got to the conclusion which then made it suddenly explicit that this book was part of efforts from various officers etc to raise money to support Seacole, who was living in poverty post-war. HUH.

Seacole makes it clear in this book that she attempted pretty dang hard to like, sign up to be an official nurse to the army, but she was summarily rejected (seems to be because she's not white!) and so the only way for her to reasonably go overseas to help the ill and injured soldiers (who, for the record, DEFINITELY needed decent nursing care, there's a reason Nightingale is so famous for her nursing reforms, the medical standards were appalling) was for her to set up a business at the camp.

So all in all the book was a fascinating look from one very particular perspective at Seacole's life, and although it isn't either a comprehensive memoir OR really a travelogue, it was a worthwhile read for the kind of book it is.

Also! Her small comments here and there about racism are fascinating. She has an extremely poor opinion of Americans due to how racist Americans all are to black people, which is really refreshing to read in a 19th century book. And she clearly experiences some fairly nasty racism at times. But also she's, uh, kiiiinda racist herself. Her opinions of the indigenous peoples of central america are Not Great. And also there's a person who she refers to solely as "Jew Johnny". And so forth. People are complicated and contain multitudes!

I was also fascinated by the apparently-important distinction between looting and taking souvenirs from a battlefield. Apparently the latter is TOTALLY FINE for respectable people to engage in but the former is appalling. And like. Taking souvenirs can include cutting a button off the uniform of a dead man, so.... Where is the line drawn between the two? Unknown! Is Seacole's opinion standard for the time? I'm not quite sure, but given that she talks about it openly in a book that she intends to raise public opinion of her, it seems likely. But it's weird. I want to know more about this tbh.

The first indication I had that Pfeiffer might be more interesting than some of the other 19th century women travel writers I've listened to is when she first mentioned being in second class berths on her river steamship as she headed away from her home in Vienna. She was clearly not wealthy, unlike the majority of such writers!

But as I got farther, I was also impressed with Pfeiffer's matter-of-fact approach to describing all she sees and thinks about things. She is not afraid to state her mind, whether it's that she thinks more or less highly of things than the general opinion in Europe at the time. She tells you if a famed sight turns out to be nothing much to look at, and she also tells you if the people of a different race or nationality are actually - gasp - decent people!

Oh, she's still absolutely a white colonialist European about things, but like.....a notable improvement in this respect on other 19th century white women I've read, and I was pleasantly surprised. More often than not she actually seems to judge people and people-groups based on her personal experiences with them rather than solely based on received stereotypes! This should not be as revolutionary as it is.

She is kind of weird about finding it necessary to state the relative beauty of the women at each location she visits, which gets uncomfortable. From her comments about comparing her opinion to that of others, this seems to be something that's, like, a Thing in general amongst European travellers of the era? But that doesn't stop it being weird.

She semi-regularly gives updates about the temperatures she experienced in various locations, which I was fascinated by as it introduced me to a temperature scale I'd never heard of before - the Réaumur scale. The Réaumur scale sets freezing at 0 and the boiling point of water at 80 instead of 100, so it's juuuuuuuust similar enough to Celsius that you think you understand it. Unlike Fahrenheit temps, when it's obviously off enough from what sounds reasonable that I'm reminded I need to translate in my head. But when, for example, she refers to 35 degree weather as hot I'm like, yup, sounds right, hot but manageable. But no, 35 degrees Réaumur is FORTY-FOUR DEGREES Celsius! And the hottest temperature she ever records is 43 Réaumur which is just like....do I even want to know how hot that is?

(My fave fact about the Réaumur scale, learned from further curious googling, is that although its use has fallen by the wayside in almost all respects, it's still used specifically for cheese production in Italy and Switzerland, and candy-making in the Netherlands. Why those things in particular and nothing else??)

At any rate, I was impressed with Pfeiffer's personal qualities of bravery and willingness to endure hardship. Her travels sound honestly exhausting and overwhelming: she regularly has terrible sleeping conditions and little food, her overland journeys by horse or camel keep totally unreasonable hours in order to make the distance necessary, she experiences the abovementioned 43 Réaumur temperature weather, she tours a sometimes totally unreasonable number of things in a single day, and she sometimes cannot speak the language of anyone around her. (She's trilingual! But that only goes so far when all the languages you know are european ones.) I absolutely would not have been able to endure the things she did for the sake of her journey, but she found it worth all the trials.

Pfeiffer set off on the journey detailed in this book in 1842 as as a woman travelling alone. She felt the danger of the situation keenly enough that she was well aware there was a strong likelihood she would die on her travels and never make it home. And she did not have a lot of money, and wasn't upper-class with the privileges that affords either. But she felt strongly enough about her desire to see more of the world that she set off regardless.

This is only the first of several extensive trips Pfeiffer took, and according to the internet she eventually died of malaria contracted while travelling in Madagascar. But while it's a sad way to go, I'm honestly glad that she died of something directly related to her travels - travel seems to have truly been her passion in life, so at least it wasn't something else mundane that took her away from it. She knew from the start that travelling abroad may lead to her death, and she was clearly okay with that.

I'm excited to read more of her travels!

(But also: Does anyone have recommendations of 19th century travelogues written by women of colour? I really enjoy the genre of 19th century women's travelogues, but the colonialist point of view gets exhausting.)

Does exactly what it says on the tin. A non-fiction account by a young British woman in the late 19th century who travels to what was then Burmah (currently usually called Myanmar) for a half-year visit to her sister and brother-in-law who are living there. And what's this! A 19th century travel writer with a sense of humour! I was all astonishment.

Here's an excerpt from Ellis's introduction to give you a taste of her general style and humour:

Towards the close of my visit to Burmah I was dining one night at a friend's house in Rangoon, when my neighbour [...] asked me if it was my intention to write a book. At my prompt reply in the negative he seemed astonished, and asked, what then did I intend to do with my life? I had never looked at the matter in that light before, and felt depressed. It has always been my ambition to do at Rome as the Romans do, and if, as my questioner clearly intimated, it was the custom for every casual visitor to the Land of Pagodas either to write a book or to "do something with his life," my duty seemed clear. I had no desire at all to undertake either of the tasks, but as there was apparently no third course open to me, I decided to choose the safer of the two, and write a book.

The book is full of Ellis's irreverent musings on the various things she sees and experiences, and she by no means spares herself. The passage in which she describes her first ever journey by horseback in her life is pretty funny and not particularly flattering!

Of course, she is also a 19th century white british traveller so there's a certain amount of the racism (and classism) you'd expect from such a source, especially from someone trying to be funny. It's most pronounced in the chapter called "The Burmese," in which, among other things, she spends a great deal of time discussing the deficiencies of Burmese servants. And I mean, she did spend the entire previous chapter detailing the ridiculousness of the local Europeans, but it's still....not great. Sigh.

Being who I am, I of course googled the author when I was shortly into this book. And I was sad to see that she dies young, in childbirth. This is part of the problem with reading about real historical people - you can find out what happens to them after the events of the book, and it's not always a happy ending.

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 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!

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.)

The memoir of a black man born a slave in the 1800's who escaped to freedom as a young man. A short but compelling read. Though I kept on finding myself wishing for more details about certain aspects of things, but also aware that Isaac Mason and his family deserve their privacy on subjects he doesn't want to share about. (eg his wife, and his relationship with her! We don't even find out her name, much less her opinion on any of the events that occur.)

I was most interested by the last chapter, when Mason journeys to Haiti at the encouragement of James Redpath who was soliciting black people to immigrate to Haiti with promises of opportunities for wealth. Mason was intrigued and went, but when he got there he thought the whole scheme was a terrible idea - extreme heat, disease, and hurricane winds all making it challenging to get ahead for the newcomers to Haiti. He was scornful of Redpath's paying the way for many poor black people to move to Haiti because these people then did not have the resources to pay their own way home after discovering what the situation in Haiti was like, and were stuck there. Mason had the resources to return home but many didn't, and according to Mason many of the immigrants died.

This is Ernest Shackleton's memoir of an expedition he led to Antarctica in the early 20th century. As the book title more or less indicates.

The expedition's intention was that this would be the first complete overland crossing of Antarctica from one side to the other. This was definitely not achieved. The part of the expedition that was planning to do the overland crossing never even made landfall! And yet everyone still got to spend multiple years enduring remarkable hardship in the unforgiving weather of Antarctica with not enough gear. Good times.

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Ages and ages ago, @hernaniste on tumblr made a post offering to share a copy of her thesis with anyone interested. The thesis is about Les Miserables and religion and it is GREAT, hot damn. What a delightful piece of academic literature to read. I don't have anything intelligent or insightful to say in response, but if you are a person at all interested in the intersection of those topics, highly recommended! It has some excellent insights, and I now know a lot more about perspectives on christianity in revolutionary-era France than I did before. And also dang I just love Les Mis forever and how it's endlessly accessible for new ways to engage with it because there's just so much going on.

I'm not naming the thesis here because hernaniste didn't in her post but if you're interested I'm guessing you can probably still message her and ask for a copy!

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/259189.html

Time (...past time) for the latest edition of abandoned books! Here's the books I started in the year 2015 and failed to finish for various reasons, with commentary.

1. Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits, by Robin McKinley & Peter Dickinson
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2. Beat to Quarters (aka The Happy Return), by C.S. Forester
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3. Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope
( Read more... )

4. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
( Read more... )

5. Fanny Hill
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6. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Laurence, by John E. Mack
( Read more... )

7. Zahrah the Windseeker, by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
( Read more... )

8. Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy Sayers
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9. Miss Marjoribanks, by Mrs Oliphant
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10. Our Journey to Sinai: A Visit to the Monastery of St Catarina, by Agnes Bensly
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11. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, by Kate Bernstein and S. Bear Bergman
( Read more... )

12. The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, by Simon Winchester
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Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/254691.html

This book is a very solid 3/5. Just the right amount of interesting that I was engaged whenever I listened to it, but not so engaging I was tempted to listen to it in times other than when walking places or doing the dishes. Perfect audiobook choice.

It's a nonfiction book written by a woman about her experiences traveling/living in Alaska around 1900 for 18 months. It is, shall we say, very much of its era. For example: I was amazed at how casually racist she could be about the native peoples while at the same time having a great deal of respect and caring for a number of native individuals. But overall I was pretty impressed by May, though I never grew particularly fond of her. Being a woman in gold-rush Alaska at that time was clearly not easy or comfortable, and she worked HARD, and seemed to be overall very pleased with her experiences despite various difficulties.

I was glad this book was rather more personal than the last 19th century woman's travel memoir I read (the one about the woman who went to Australia). But again I am deeply curious about aspects of the author's life that were elided over. May is a married woman, but the reason for her traveling for such long periods of time without her husband was never explained, and whenever she talked about her "dear ones" at home it always seemed to be in reference to her family of origin (her mother in particular) and never her husband. So I'd be interested to know more about their relationship - why she doesn't seem interested in talking about him much, and why he's okay with her being so independent, and all that. She talks about this for like one sentence in the introduction and that's ALL. Also also: May mentions in her introduction that there are aspects of her experiences that were far greater trials that she doesn't write about, and I'm definitely interested to know what these were.

(the other thing I want to know: DAMMIT MAY YOU CAN'T TELL THE STORY ABOUT THE CAPTAIN WHO WAS LOST IN A SNOWSTORM AND NOT LET THE READER KNOW WHETHER THE FOUR NATIVE PEOPLE WHO WERE TRAVELING WITH HIM ALSO MADE IT OUT OKAY.)

Unrelated to the book itself, but I just had to share: I got the audiobook from Librivox, and when I started listening to it I started helplessly giggling right away, because the reader sounded SO EXACTLY in intonation like a tv/radio announcer type person and it was just so incongruous in an audiobook narrator! (I got over it, and actually quite appreciated the quality of the reader - she's definitely one of the better Librivox readers I've listened to - but it was very disconcerting at first!)

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/244708.html

This book wasn't QUITE what I was expecting it to be. It's a nonfiction book written by a woman in the 1850's about her time in Australia, and I was expecting it to be something of a personal travelogue. And I mean it was very partly that, but mostly it was written as a source of information for people in England who were considering going to Australia themselves, so it was very focused on details of geography and economy and so forth, and not at all focused on her personal life.

The most extreme example of how completely Clacy neglects to talk about her personal life is that in one of the last chapters when she is to set sail for England again she mentions offhand in a single sentence that the reason for her travel back is that she is to be married and then the trip home will be the wedding-trip. So APPARENTLY she meets a guy while in Australia, falls in love, is engaged, and gets married, and we don't hear a THING about any of this. Gosh.

Ah well, for what it was, the book was not bad. Though I rather think it would be of more interest to people who are familiar with current Australia and can make comparisons, or people who are familiar with pre-decimalization British currency so that they can make any sense whatsoever of all the details of costs that Clacy gives.

The book was extremely Victorian, right down to a heartstring-tugging orphan girl. Also, hilariously, in an early chapter she is explaining things that make it difficult to sleep her first night in Australia and the paragraph goes as follows:

Dogs (Melbourne is full of them) kept up an incessant barking; revolvers were cracking in all directions until daybreak, giving one a pleasant idea of the state of society; and last, not least, of these annoyances was one unmentionable to ears polite, which would alone have sufficed to drive sleep away from poor wearied me.

I AM SO CURIOUS WHAT THE UNMENTIONABLE ANNOYANCE WAS. And also why she felt the need to mention that this annoyance existed when she had no intention of disclosing the details. I would think it would have something to do with sex, except that her accommodations for the night are a tiny building where all the gentlemen of her party are sharing one room, and she shares the bedroom (and bed) of the mistress of the house. So there's no rough Melbournians in the building to be having shocking and noisy sex.

It's also Victorian in its opinions of race, so, you know, there's that. There seems to me actually more casual racism in this book than in the confederate civil war diary I recently read!

Clacy includes a lot of anecdotes/stories of other people; I'm not sure how much to actually believe all of them, especially the ones she hears of from other people instead of seeing for herself. But there's one story of a woman she meets that I absolutely LOVE. The woman in question spends a bunch of time crossdressing and it is great. I would be very interested in a whole book about Harriette's life because she sounds like a rather more interesting person than the author of this book.

(If you want to read just Harriette's story, it's here, the first part of chapter nine on project gutenberg)

The book as a whole was remarkably well-balanced on the subject of whether or not one should make the trip to Australia. It includes good factual details of what to expect, and makes it clear that you can't just assume you'll strike it rich, and that you'll have to work hard, and deal with some fairly rough and dangerous circumstances, but also that things aren't hopeless and for a certain type of person the trip may be worthwhile.

All in all, though the book wasn't everything I hoped it to be, it was still an interesting and worthwhile read.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/242746.html

This book is a real diary written by a young woman between 1862-1865 (with most of the entries being in 1862-3), talking about her experiences in the US Civil War. Sarah kept her diary as a place to write all the thoughts and feelings that it wouldn't be appropriate for her as a lady to ever speak out loud. And it is fascinating.

Oh, it can get kind of tedious at times - a certain amount of repetition of sentiment, some occasional unclarity that makes it hard to follow exact events, and a huge cast of characters it can be hard to keep straight and who she doesn't always bother to properly introduce/explain. But overall Sarah writes very well, and as a look into the thoughts of a Southern girl living through the war, it is very compelling.

( Read more... )

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/242062.html

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.)

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/238074.html

For a while there I was doing pretty well at giving each book thought its own post, buuuut I have a backlog again so here have a bunch.

( Journey to the River Sea, by Eva Ibbotson )

( The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, by Tom Reiss )

( Handbook for Dragon Slayers, by Merrie Haskell )

( Growing Pains, by Emily Carr )