sophia_sol: photo of a 19th century ivory carving of a fat bird (Default)
Apparently after finishing The Best of Robert Service I then decided to just read ALL the other Service on my shelf in just a couple days. Okay then.

Songs of a Sourdough, by Robert W Service
A little too much leaning on just a couple themes, which gets repetitive in places, but also contains a couple of my favourite poems.

Ballads of a Cheechako, by Robert W Service
As a collection, reasonably formed, though of course I still don't like all the poems in it. My first introduction to a rather long narrative poem about a guy who thinks he's found the source of the northern lights, and it's delightful.

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, by Robert W Service
A somewhat lower proportion of poems I actually like in this one. Oh well.

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, by Robert W Service
These are poems written about WWI, in which Service was a stretcher-bearer and ambulance-driver. And....the vast majority of the poems are uncomfortably pro-war, to me. Sigh.

Ballads of a Bohemian, by Robert W Service
This is a book Service wrote after he became Very Rich from his earlier books and moved to Paris, and the whole book is from the pov of a....a version of him who's a very poor Parisian bohemian writing poetry and attempting to sell it to get by. He includes little first-person narrative interludes between the poems, from this persona, about his bohemian-writer life. The persona kinda rubs me the wrong way, and a lot of the poetry's not to my taste either.

Bar-Room Ballads, by Robert W Service
Nothing much to say about this one. I think reading this many books of Service's poetry in quick succession was getting to me.

EDIT: Oh I suppose I could link to the single poem I actually refer to specifically, it is out of copyright and all. Here you go: Ballad of the Northern Lights.
sophia_sol: photo of a 19th century ivory carving of a fat bird (Default)
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? )
sophia_sol: photo of a 19th century ivory carving of a fat bird (Default)
The contents of "Mike and Psmith" have been published both as the second half of the novel known as "Mike" and on their own as a standalone novel. I began "Mike" and then remembered that the first half is just a whole bunch of cricketing and I simply cannot care that much about cricket, especially since we have Mike without his Most Important Person.

So I abandoned that and decided to just reread "Mike and Psmith" instead. Much better. Still too much cricketing, and Psmith is not quite as main a character yet as one might hope, but contains some thoroughly enjoyable elements. Mainly seeing Psmith interact with the world, and seeing Mike and Psmith interact with each other. (I love Mike and Psmith a great deal!) But DEAR GOD the cricket is still interminable. If I recall correctly the next two books are a great improvement. We'll see if my brief re-spiked interest in the Psmith books carries me on.
sophia_sol: Hamlet, as played by David Tennant, reading a book (Hamlet: Hamlet reading)
The thing about being internetless for a while is that I find myself reading a lot more profic... so I have a few posts about books to make! I'll start with the two books I have the most to say about:

Freckles, and A Girl of the Limberlost )

Okay so in conclusion both books are amazing but I love Freckles more but I want fic about two minor characters in A Girl of the Limberlost the most! The end!

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