A Fan's Playground

Once again, time to give a try to an excessively-long 19th century novel! I was genuinely unsure, going into this one, whether I would like it or not, but I DO like a) stories about ships and b) people enthusiastically sharing facts about the natural world, so I figured I would at least give it a try.

I was pretty dubious by about 150 pages in; I was just finding myself so bored! But I figured I would at least wait it out until the book actually took us to sea, because that might change things.

And it did!

It turns out that the key is that the first 150 pages seem like they're trying to be an ordinary sort of narrative but are just bad at that, but by the time you get to sea and are just constantly inundated by Whale Facts and Whale Opinions, it settles more into what kind of book it actually is, and then I can vibe with it.

The thing about this book is that it is....hm. Expansive. In all ways. Its sentences are expansive, its vocabulary is expansive, its overall length is expansive (obviously), and it expands every moment it can into further ruminating about whales; and the whales it discusses are also, of course, expansive.

I think it's mirroring what the author sees as the monumental nature of whales, thus creating a book as monumental as its subject. And you know what, I think it kind of works! It's weird; it's a deeply weird book, not quite like any other book I've read, but once you get into the right mindset and allow the Discourse Upon Whales to flow over you, I think it really does do a great job of capturing the feel it's going for.

One aspect of this is that the characters within the book don't ever feel quite like specific individual people to me, but more like representatives of archetypes, to allow them to better fit into the monumental nature of the work. This isn't what I usually am interested in in character-work, but again, it works for what this book is doing.

There are plenty of specifics one can discuss about the book (Ishmael/Queequeg: GAY. Melville's whale facts: not always actually factual. Captain Ahab: really bad at being a captain. etc.) but what I was most strongly left with when I finished the book wasn't any of the details of the book, but the overall vibe.

Though I was also surprised by how much the reading of this book made me actually feel so agonizingly bad for all these murdered whales, given that the book is, overall, firmly pro-whaling.

Anyway. I doubt I am likely to reread the book again in the future, but I AM glad I gave it a go! Definitely an interesting piece of literature.

Omg this is so funny it's like an Andy Weir novel except the Exciting Cutting-Edge Science Things it's about are....electricity, the mysteries of ocean life, and the classification of species. Because those were new and exciting at the time Verne was writing! I get easily bored with the kinds of modern scifi novels that have merely a vague trapping of plot and character from which to hang lengthy scientific exposition, but when it's from over 150 years ago, the vibes are entirely changed, and I am here for it, lol. I mean, it's still boring and I still skimmed over a not-insignificant amount of the lists of sea creatures and their classification, but I am charmed by it instead of irritated by it?

Anyway, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is from the perspective of a gentleman scientist who is on a mission to help kill an enormous and destructive sea monster, but that monster turns out to instead be a technologically advanced submarine, and the pov character, along with his trusty servant Conseil, and also the harpooner Ned Land who struck the submarine, are captured by the captain of the submarine and are told they will never be allowed to leave again, so that the secrets of captain and ship will not be revealed.

Then the rest of the book is rapturous descriptions of scientific marvels as they travel around the world -- the 20,000 leagues of the title is the distance they travel around the globe, for the record, not the depth beneath the ocean they reach, which was a surprise to me as that's not how I'd interpreted the title.

Throughout, there are hints given of Captain Nemo's tragic past that has led him to reject the world of land-dwellers entirely and desire some sort of unspecified revenge for the unspecified tragedies of his past. But it's a noble revenge and a noble rejection by a thoroughly admirable scientific man, of course.

There are many very funny elements to the book that are definitely not intended as funny, mostly due to incongruity which my modern perspective discerns. Like the way the book is simultaneously like, "oh no it's bad to hunt the black whales, the cruel whale industry is soon going to wipe them out, what a tragedy; BUT those mean nasty sperm whales deserve to die in a complete massacre." Or some of the particularly outlandish scientific errors that the author didn't know enough to avoid. (The bends? What are the bends? We don't know her.) Or the way it sometimes feels the need to make it clear how COOL and VALUABLE an experience is by talking about how much money something they see would be worth if it was sold, despite the otherwise prevalent viewpoint that the important thing is the scientific knowledge gained. The narrative just can't help itself about making it clear that it's also CAPITALISTICALLY worthwhile to engage in scientific discovery.

Be ready for some racism if you read this book; it's about educated white Victorian-era men being world travellers so of course there are "savages" encountered at one point and other stuff like that. Unfortunate, since this is ostensibly a book about people who have entirely cut themselves off from the world of the people on land, and it STILL managed to insert this stuff.

It's also subtly classist in a way where it's not even aware enough to notice that it has any opinions about class, but just these little hints Ned Land and Conseil are not the pov character's peers and thus not really company the way Captain Nemo can be. And Ned Land and Conseil are both just entirely composed of a one-note stereotype each, with no dimension. I mean, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed both of them! But the treatment of their characters as compared to Nemo is obvious. (It's also very funny that the narrative keeps on referring to Ned by the epithet "the Canadian" as if that's the most important thing about him!)

When I reached the end of the book though, I was outraged to discover that we DON'T ACTUALLY GET TO LEARN ANY OF CAPTAIN NEMO'S SECRETS. We learn that his family is all dead, and that he wanted revenge against a particular ship, but that is the extent of the information we learn. No further details about any of the rest of the context that was alluded to exist. And NOTHING about why the rest of his crew also chose to abandon the world to live in the submarine full-time, or about where the language they all speak with each other originated, or what the crew think of these additional passengers who Nemo took on board, or any other context about any of the actually interesting plot elements. No, it was far more important to dedicate page time to fish lists.

Anyway now I want fanfic because surely SOMEONE out there has taken it upon themselves to write more about the characters Verne created!

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.

( Read more... )

My! Cousin! Rachel! My gosh what a BOOK. Recommended to me by lirazel in the comments to my post on Rebecca, for which I'm very grateful! I'd never even heard of this one before.

Let me start with what's obviously the most important thing, which is that du Maurier has learned about more birds in the years since she wrote Rebecca :P Nicely done, du Maurier, keep up the good work!

Okay but actually. Brace yourself for too many words, because I have a LOT to say about this book.

So, as with Rebecca, this is a book involving an unreliable narrator, an old estate by the sea that looms large in the lives of the lead characters, unhealthy relationships, and mysterious threats. Well: it's a gothic, of course it does! Gothics might not be a genre I gravitate to, but apparently when they're well done I'm THERE because both du Mauriers I've read now have been highly worthwhile experiences. Maybe du Maurier is just magic or something.

My Cousin Rachel's narrator-protagonist is Philip, a rich young man who has been raised by his much older cousin Ambrose in a context with basically zero women around, because Ambrose is a raging misogynist. And everyone's always talking about how much Philip is like Ambrose!

Anyway Ambrose fucks off to Italy for health reasons, and while there he meets a woman (the titular Rachel), is captivated by her, marries her, sends some paranoid letters home to Philip, and then dies of what the doctors diagnose as a brain tumour.

Philip, understandably given his background, is VERY SUSPICIOUS of Rachel and hates her immediately -- until Rachel appears in person in his life, and the reality of what she's like changes his tune completely. She's small and beautiful and kind and gentle! Obviously he was wrong to suspect her of anything!

Rachel is a fascinating figure, for certain, and there's much that's mysterious about her. She doesn't say much about her past, but what little you hear, it's clear she's been through a lot of trauma, and is doing her best to live her life and move on from it but is still deeply affected by it.

( spoiler time! extensively so! )

Recently I attempted to read Middlemarch, one of those 19th century novels that I always kind of figured that one day I would read and enjoy, as it seems the kind of 19th century novel that's entirely up my alley.

However! Turns out I gave up on it by 20% of the way in. Not because it's a bad book, but because....I just wasn't enjoying myself.

Here's the thing. The author, George Eliot, is evidently a clear-minded person with great powers to observe and depict the fullness of the complexities and foibles of humans. In the parts of the books I read, there were conversations that struck me as being impressively reflective of reality. But Eliot doesn't seem to like people. I don't need characters in books to all be paragons or something, but if the author can't give me reason to want to care about people in all their flaws, then what's the point in hanging out with her characters for 800 pages?

I think Middlemarch is very probably a brilliant book, and also, no thank you, I'm not going to bother reading the rest of it.

A part of the Swallows & Amazons series of kids books about sailing in the lake district on holidays. This one features the Amazons (Peggy and Nancy) and the Scarabs (Dick and Dorothea). I've never been as fond of the Scarabs as of the Swallows or the Amazons, but the excitement of the Great Aunt adds a great deal to this book so I still really enjoy it. And really any book that prominently features Nancy Blackett is a good time! I love Nancy so much, she's really the stand-out character in the whole series.

And I enjoyed how multiple times it was pointed out that the Great-Aunt and Nancy actually have a great deal in common (forceful personalities!) despite them having approximately opposite opinions on how girls ought to behave.

Not a good starting place for the series if you're not already familiar with it, as a large part of the point is to contrast with the way things usually are for the kids, but a fun book to read when you already know and love them.

This is a book of housekeeping advice from 1917 and it's really funny to read! It has a little frame story of all the advice being given in letters from the author to a young relative of hers who's just setting up a new household. Jane Prince has VOLUMINOUS advice for her dear Penelope and lets her know in detail everything Penelope needs to do to have a respectable and economical household situation. If Penelope were real and I were Penelope I would feel pretty talked down to! But of course the fictional Penelope seems (at least from what Prince says) to be genuinely grateful for all advice.

I was particularly amused by the idea that economies might be practiced in the matter of what you purchase for your meals or what clothing you wear, but OBVIOUSLY you must have at least one servant, if only a maid-of-all-work who cooks for you as well. Going servantless isn't even an option to be considered.

It's interesting overall, actually, to have such a careful accounting of what's considered to be normal and expected household arrangements for an American household of a certain class in that era. So much of it is completely alien to my experience of life! But the bit about budgeting is actually advice that (with modern updates) would not be unexpected on a finance blog today.

I found myself pleasantly surprised by the focus in the book on making sure you respect your maids' time off and have conversations with them about what their needs and preferences are. I mean, it's all framed from the perspective of how if you keep your maids happy then you'll get better work out of them, but it explicitly acknowledges that maids are real people with real feelings who want to have fun and visit with their friends, and that this is legitimate for them to want.

Of course this is a book by a white woman with a lot of focus on the appropriate behaviour of servants, so it's not surprising to me (though it is unfortunate) that there is one moment of explicit racism. Prince talks at one point about a new black servant she was hiring, and describes her natural hairstyle and brightly coloured clothing negatively despite her being clean and carefully put together, and then says how much better this black woman looked after her hair was "smoothed out" and she was wearing clothing that the author considered appropriate. I guess this is another window into what was normal in the author's social circles....... And something that has not changed enough in the century since it was written.

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.

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.

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.