cahn

Via selenak <3 This book is a novelistic look primarily at the women (specifically the wives and lovers) associated with the most famous Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats). It is well-written and compelling, extremely relevant to my interests, and also part #12345 or so of an ongoing series of "Reasons why I, especially as a woman, am glad I did not live hundreds of years ago" (which... I guess... is probably a good thing for me to keep in mind, these days...) and, as sort of a corollary to that, an implicit stirring polemic in favor of no-fault divorce and antibiotics. (Neither of which existed at the time, of course, but gosh, no-fault divorce and antibiotics would have made SO many people's lives so much better in this book!) Also against bloodletting :PP

Our best-beloved high school Brit Lit teacher, Dr. M, told us all kinds of stories about these people. He was, I think, a proponent of the "teach the kids literature and literary history through sensationalistic gossip" mode that I found in salon many years later -- and it works! Even decades after Dr. M's class, I came in knowing enough that the names and many of the love-affairs (especially the most sensationalistic ones) were familiar, though of course I didn't know very many details. Even (especially?) Byron; though we never read any Byron in class, he was certainly a very sensational figure. (I think Dr. M's plan was that we would go off and read Byron on our own -- the same way that he announced, when we did the Canterbury Tales, that he was forbidden to teach us "The Miller's Tale" because of it being too R-rated, and we all promptly hared off and read it outside of class -- although I found Byron enough not to my taste that I never read very much of him even with that.)

What I was struck by most about this book was just how trapped the women are by... everything, by societal expectations, societal disapproval, family situations, the constant spectre of sickness and death; all the women were more-or-less (sometimes less) sympathetic but were placed in situations where they were either miserable or making other people miserable or both. (I can't quite say that about the men -- there were a couple of men that were not very sympathetic -- but at the same time you could see them all being trapped too.) But I didn't get the impression that the author was trying to make a point about that in particular, or at least not any more than any other point; I think this was just how it was.

A few notes about some of the women POV characters:

Augusta Byron (Leigh) - I knew enough to draw in a breath when her half-brother George was mentioned, even before the reveal of her last name :P Anyway, she is awesome, my favorite -- a truly nice character but never boring, and you can see why she and Byron got along so well; their bantering conversations in the book are really some of my favorite bits. Definitely one of the characters where I was Put Out that her life was as miserable as it was :P Lord Byron himself was charming and dark and you could both see why everyone fell in love with him and also that it must have been awful to have been his wife or lover (though in Augusta's case, mostly because of the societal issues).

Mary (Godwin/Wollstonecraft) Shelley - Intellectual and intense, the Mary POV sections were perhaps the most compelling for me, and also could be frustrating, in the way that when you empathize with a character, you don't want the character to do the stupid things that you know you would do (or maybe actually did as a young person) in her place :P I felt like she had a lot of extremely understandable strong feelings! And often you could see how the strong feelings were acting against her best interests! Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the other hand, was... well... there's an xkcd about guys like him :P I also really enjoyed her scenes with Byron, of all people -- very platonic, no attraction, and that's actually very refreshing, to me as well as to the characters.

Caroline Lamb - these were my least favorite sections. I remembered from Dr. M that she had some struggles with mental illness, and Morgan makes her manic behavior quite as sympathetic as possible -- but it still wasn't all that fun to read for me. William Lamb was less of a presence in the book but seemed, well, passive and patriarchical but mostly pretty reasonable, especially in comparison to Byron and Shelley. Not that this is saying a whole lot!

Annabella Millbank (Byron) - Byron's long-suffering wife. Annabella is clearly -- in fact textually -- even less of a reliable narrator than the others. I found the style of her sections really interesting -- they're distant and mannered and very distinct from the other characters' POV, and really point up how she fabricates her own story that may or may not (often does not) match up to reality, but certainly matches up to her own interests. And at the same time Byron was just terrible to her! But one can see how she is almost optimally ill-suited to him! selenak told me about how she was absolutely horrible to their daughter, Ada Lovelace, and that is certainly consistent with the way her character is delineated here.

Fanny Brawne - I think part of why Fanny was here was just as a contrast to the other characters. (Keats doesn't interact particularly strongly with Byron and Shelley.) She seems to be the only one, out of all of them, whose issues don't arise out of an intensely conflicted adolescence, whether it was because of her circumstances (Mary -- I haven't mentioned her father, William Godwin, but he was a piece of work in the novel, one of those guys who can totally twist everything to "rationally" argue how it benefits him; the type is familiar) or because of her personality (Caroline). She is the only one where it seems like she actually maybe had fun. (Well, Augusta may have had fun in her childhood -- but the way the chapters are laid out, the awful parts of her life get a lot more documentation.) Of course one knows it all has to go wrong, because Keats and Brawne, but after reading about everyone else it's almost a relief to just be dealing with death instead of death plus a whole ton of dysfunction. (Of course, there are hints that if he had lived, perhaps this love story too would also have devolved into dysfunction. But maybe it wouldn't have. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!)

But, in conclusion: no-fault divorce for Harriet Shelley and Annabella Byron, please and thank you, and hey, I'll take it for Mary Shelley too, and alllllll the antibiotics and NO bloodletting for not just Keats and Byron but also all the babies and small children who died in this book >:(

Also, I did a little reading about the next generation and they all seem rather interesting too; I want the sequel :PP

E is at church camp and A just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures from the library and has been reading it all evening, so I finally had time to write this up!

This is what I've actually been reading over the last six months/year and why I've been even slower than usual about reading everything else (although I did tell A. I had to take turns with the Hugo novels). For E this was mostly stuff she read for school that she wanted me to read so I could help her with her papers, while for A. this has been books he really likes and wants to... well, he doesn't want to talk to me about them really, he more wants to ask me questions about what parts I liked and whether I thought X was funny and so on.
( American Born Chinese, All American Boys, Frankly in Love, Raisin in the Sun, Keeper of the Lost Cities: 2-9.5, all of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Olympus/etc. series )

I am still working on Magnus Chase, and as I mentioned we just got the latest Percy Jackson: Senior Year Adventures (a much more low-key series) from the library, so I do have a few more to go...

Middle-grade graphic novel about eleven-year-old Avery Lee, one of seven children, as she navigates sibling conflicts (she really wants her own room, but instead her older brother gets his own room and her baby brother moves into the room she already shares with her sister), friendships (one of her best friends seems to be drifting away a bit), and family conflicts (there is the possibility they might move, which she really doesn't want to do). My 9-year-old niece brought this home from the book fair while we were visiting them, and I picked it up.

I really loved this book. I only had the one sibling, but I know a lot of people who have quite a few kids in their families, and this rang true to me in terms of both the good and the bad of having a large family. Avery is a realistic and sweet kid -- she gets into fights with her big brother where both of them are at fault and exchange harsh words (and apologize later), she loves art and wants her own room so that she can do her art without her younger siblings getting into it, she helps out her younger siblings and gets exasperated with them in equal measure.

Also, it's not made a big deal of (I don't think it's ever stated explicitly), but the Lees are Korean-American. And also the mom is in the process of becoming the major breadwinner (it's her job search that is driving the plot about the possible move) but it's also not a big deal, which I also loved.

I also read Allergic by the same authors because my niece happened to have that one around too, which I liked a lot as well but not as much as Squished, which I thought was richer both in story and art.

troisoiseaux recced these two books and... then I read them right through, because both of them were quite compelling! They also make a good pair to chew on -- they're both concerned with journeys through life that have a large component involving high school/college during the 1990's.

I Have Some Questions for You (Makkai) 3+/5. This was a book that was doing a lot of things and by and large doing them well, although it didn't necessarily offer answers to everything (rightly so, since some of the questions it asked don't have good answers).

It's a book narrated by a podcaster, Bodie, who returns for a visit (in the 2018-ish time frame) to her old prep school, Granby, to teach a two-week mini-class in podcasting (and another in film studies, but that one is more ambience-related than plot-related). One of the students in the class decides to make a podcast regarding the girl who was killed while the podcaster was in school there.

( Fictionalized true crime in the age of MeToo. )

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow (Zevin) 3+/5. Follows two friends and professional (platonic) partners, Sam and Sadie, through adulthood (and childhood, mostly through flashbacks), making video games together, hurting each other, and being there for each other. There is also a major spoiler/content warning that I was vaguely warned for beforehand and which I'm glad I was vaguely spoiled for.

The most important character who's not the two friends gets killed, awfully, in a shooting, about 2/3 of the way through the book.

( I found this more enjoyable and less profound than the Makkai. )

seekingferret read this and I had previously kept bumping into it at the library on the "New Books" shelf, so here we are.

At the beginning of the book, Frida, an incredibly sleep-deprived, divorced mom, leaves her one-year-old child Harriet at home, unattended, while she goes to Starbucks and what was supposed to be a short stop at work but which balloons into two and a half hours; her neighbors report the abandoned Harriet to the police. As a result, she's sentenced to go to a governmental "School for Good Mothers" for a year if she wants custody of her child back.

Me: I'm gonna be judgmental about this, you're supposed to take your kid with you!
My brain: cahn, hey, remember when E was first born and you were in a haze of miserable sleep deprivation and everything was incredibly difficult and you HAD a supportive spouse and also your mom and your mother-in-law helping out?
Me: Well --
My brain: Remember how you had no idea how single mothers did it and they should all get medals?
Me: Yes --
My brain: Remember that? And how you suddenly understood how sleep-deprived hormone-crazy mothers could do horrible things because... even though you didn't and weren't seriously tempted to, you weren't all that far from it yourself even with all that support: close enough that you could totally see how it would happen?
My brain: And hey, while I'm at it, also remember how when E and A were toddlers how you couldn't even go to the bathroom without them following you around and how crazy-making it was, and how relieved you were that you could go to work?
Me: Look, brain, you know and I know that I'm being judgmental here as a defense mechanism, because it was awfully miserable and also I don't want to think about how in that kind of situation I might do that too.
My brain: OK, cool. Just so we're all clear on that.

The book is very interested in is the judgements and societal expectations about what makes a good mother, and how reasonable those might or might not be. Everyone in the book is constantly judging everyone else's parenting -- this is most obvious in the explicitly judgmental way the government and the school explicitly evaluate Frida and the other inmates, but also in the way Frida and the other characters judge both their own and everyone else's parenting, including Frida's judgments of how her husband's new wife Susanna parents Harriet, and Susanna's judgments of how Frida parents.

(I don't think it was a coincidence that Chan used an inciting incident for Frida that was something that people, including myself, are likely to be judgmental about!)

Also, there is a sort of cool precision about the way Chan, with a completely straight face, absolutely skewers using techniques for short-term governmental metric-improvement that you are absolutely not supposed to use in good parenting (or pedagogy, but of course it's the parenting lens that's important here; but you could absolutely imagine that there's probably a parallel School for Good Teachers going on somewhere in the background...). At the School, they use punishments and rewards a lot (and inconsistently at that!), they use shame, they use zero-sum competition between the mothers as to who is the "best," only rewarding the "best" one. (I may have gasped aloud when they did that.)

I really wondered how Chan was going to end the book -- and once I read the ending, I must say that it ended the way I now see it had to inevitably end. Gosh.

I can't say I recommend this book; seekingferret said in his review that "this is one of those really good books that I am hesitant to recommend anyone read because it is so harrowing" and, well, yeah. Same. But if you like dystopian examination of parenting and judgment and the racial/cultural components of same and the systematic destruction that this kind of judgment brings about (I like that sort of thing) this is rather compelling. (I will say that also basically everyone is pretty unlikeable, as you might expect from a book that is about all the ways mothers judge other mothers. I still got through it because it was so compelling, but I could see it being a dealbreaker for others.)

I had to work a bunch in the last couple of months, and then I used some time to put a bunch of books littering the house back on bookshelves, so between those two things I read and reread several very easy-to-read books.

-Honey and Me (Drazin) - rec from seekingferret who cited lannamichael's excellent post (discusses all aspects of the book, but this is not the kind of book where you really need to worry about spoilers) which got me to read it. It's a middle-grade book about Orthodox Jewish bas mitzvah girls, and is one of those books where plot is not really a thing, there is a bit of character through-line but it's deliciously like all those books I would read as a kid that just... followed kids around through what happened in their lives and what was going on with their families and friends and themselves, without there having to be an elaborate through-plot. I LOVED IT, as someone who has a religion that reasonably permeates a lot of my life (and even more for people who are more orthodox about it than I am) even if it isn't Orthodox Judaism, I felt that the book did a good job of speaking to me and offering up characters who were extremely relatable and understandable through my own lens which is of course very different but has commonalities. Content note: an important minor character dies during the book, which was apparently based on someone in Drazin's life who died under similar circumstances. (I was glad to be spoiled for this, as it does a bit come out of nowhere.) I really want my kids to read this, though it's hard to get them to read anything that isn't SF or fantasy, so we'll see.

-Small Admissions (Poeppel) -- rec from Ask a Manager. Young woman getting over an emotional experience falls into a job working in admissions for a prestigious NYC private school. ...Okay, I have a weakness for prep school books, and even more for prep school admissions books, and this one I really enjoyed. It's frothy and fun, but also does have a sense of compassion for all the characters, many of whom are a bit more complex than one might expect. (And some of whom are exactly as one might expect.) Unsurprisingly, I really liked the parts (mostly found-document-style, told via emails and admissions notes and so on) that dealt with the different students and admissions drama, and how those played out over the course of the book.
I could have done without nearly as much of the drama with the main character's friends -- I was there mostly for the admissions drama -- but I can see how it fit into the book.

-The ABC Murders (Christie) - Poirot gets sent mocking letters by an adversary who turns out to be killing based on the alphabet. I had never read this one and read it now due to rachelmanija's Christie read, and for some reason it took me a looooong time to get through. I don't know why, because I enjoyed it.

-Tara Road (Binchy) - Binchy is a great comfort read for me, and I enjoyed this. It's a bit like all her other books -- the too-handsome, untrustworthy boy, the good-hearted girl who has a group of friends who surround her, the characters who come together and understand one another better, the foreshadowing that is explained by the end. Nice and easy reading.

Rereads:

-Uncharted Territory (Willis) -- The explorer team of Finriddy and Carson, on an alien world, becomes a bit destabilized when a visitor "loaner" temporarily joins their team. A fast read (it's more of a novella, maybe even a novelette), but gosh, this one has really not aged well. I mean, I was never really that excited about it to begin with, so there was no extreme emotional response swamping out my ability to see that, mm, the whole playing the indigenous-alien stereotypes and gender stereotypes for laughs is kind of icky rather than funny.

Also, a large part of the book arc depends on a play on words at the climax that I absolutely Did Not get in high school and I did, finally, get it thirty years later, so I guess progress in my reading abilities, yay? (It's a really obvious play on words, I'm just... really slow.)

-The Pandora Principle (Clowes) - Star Trek (TOS). Saavik's childhood on Hellguard becomes relevant when a Romulan attack threatens the Federation... Now this one I have an extreme emotional response to, which means I love it so much that I have no idea if it really holds up or not. I mean, I can see that a) several of the plot McGuffins are rather nonsensical, both scientifically and politically (although the one at the end is a clever punchline and I love it anyway), and b) Spock is a bit of a Gary Stu parent, who even though he angsts about saying the right thing, generally does, in fact, say the right thing. But I don't mind either of those. Spock as a put-upon parent is still greeeeat, and Saavik is awesome. I don't know whether Saavik as a trauma survivor would be something that passes muster (I'd be super interested to know what others think), but I loved it then and I love it now, especially the small everyday triumphs she has to fight so hard for but that she does fight and win. And I also absolutely adore what I couldn't articulate when I first read it: that Spock and Saavik code for a very neurodiverse parent-child pair (huh, I guess there's also Bobby and Obo coding as a differently neurodiverse parent-child pair, that's interesting, and I would be 100% not surprised to find out that Clowes has experience with ND children) who find their own way even when it's not necessarily the neurotypical-culturally-approved way that anyone else (either Earth or Vulcan) would have prescribed for them.

I love this book so much. Every few years or so I look up Carolyn Clowes' name to see whether she's written anything else, because I would buy it in a heartbeat, but she hasn't, and I suppose she must be getting up in years now. But this is certainly a good single book to have written!

(And if you can't tell from the writeup, yeah, content notes for... well, the writing style is upbeat but a lot (a LOT) of dark things happen. Death, some on-screen; violence; extreme physical child abuse and trauma; strongly implied rape (NOT of children) but nothing spelled out.)

(In this post I do discuss the endings of the books, because, come on. They're fluffy romances, you know what's going to happen.)

The Love Hypothesis (Hazelwood) - 3+/5 - A RL friend (who is undiagnosed but pretty definitely on the spectrum, as is her daughter) read The Rosie Project on my recommendation, and the library (because she'd read that) then recommended to her The Love Hypothesis, which she then recommended back to me with the caveat that it was not as charming as Rosie. She was right about that, but it's still a fluffy cute romance. Olive, a grad student at Stanford, because she has watched too many romance movies and decides she needs to convince her best friend Anh that she's not hung up on the boy Anh likes, ends up fake-kissing and fake-dating Adam Carlsen, the young hotshot professor in her department. (Adam is, natch, wildly attractive, though widely regarded as a lab tyrant.)

I'm sure you can take it from there. Aside from the inevitable, there's also misunderstandings and poor communication (okay, maybe that's inevitable too), impostor syndrome, and over-the-top sexual harassment (not from Adam, who of course is awesome about it all). Also hot sex and a happy ending!

I ended the book thinking I wanted to say to Olive, idk, I'm not sure if it's good for your impostor syndrome for you, a grad student who are unsure of your abilities, to date the world-class hotshot professor in your same field, even if your department is OK with it if you're not his student (she's not). I really think you could have a hard time of this in the long run! Buuuuut I guess that's beyond the scope of this book.

A Civil Contract (Heyer) - 4/5 - Another Adam, Viscount Adam Lynton, finds after his father's untimely death that his father has many debts and that he might have to sell the ancestral home. He reluctantly finds it's his duty to marry a plain, common, and very rich girl, Jenny, instead of the beautiful high society girl Julia whom he is in love with.

Okay, so, there are things I didn't love. I kind of disliked that part of Jenny's appeal is that she practically waits hand and foot on Adam, though I did like that being a good housewife was something she enjoyed, and I certainly liked that Adam was always very courteous to her. And I loved Adam's sister Lydia and found his long-suffering mother, who will tell you All About how long-suffering she is, hilarious. All told, I really loved this book, and people who enjoyed Perilous Gard for its discussions of drainage and water-meadows (*cough*calling melannen and sophia_sol!) will love Adam's excitement over agriculture and estate management -- in fact, this book has a lot more discussion of drainage and other estate management matters than Gard does :)

And then I got to the ending and while Adam, as you would expect, eventually realizes that Julia is not All That, I really, REALLY wanted Jenny's dream ending where he falls in love with her and I Did Not Get It. (Or at least in lust! Canonically they have sex -- she has his baby during the book.) I am Put Out that Heyer did not oblige me. Had she only obliged me, I would love this book as much as Cotillion. Since she did not, this is only my second favorite Heyer of those I've read.

(Why isn't A Civil Campaign about Miles having to make an arranged marriage? That would be really quite interesting! Also, I would totally read that fic. Okay, I guess Aral would never. But still!)

Hmm. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book, which I read for a book club. It's about an academic astrobiologist father Theo and his nine-year-old son Robin, set in the near-and-only-kicked-up-one-notch-dystopian-compared-to-reality future. The wife/mom Alyssa has recently died, which is a major dynamic in the book. The son is cognitively brilliant and emotionally challenged (presumably exacerbated by his mother's death), so you can see the appeal for me, and there were a lot of times reading it where I flinched away from feeling like our family was kind of seen. Eventually Robin starts a kind of experimental therapeutic treatment that involves using neurofeedback based on the (much more mature and centered) emotional responses of, interestingly, his own dead mother. (This sounds kind of awful when I say it like that, but it's really quite well done in the book -- although yes, there is a sort of weird quasi-incestual subtext to it that was clearly intentional.)

It's a gorgeously written book, as one might expect from Powers (I've read another book of his, but I can't remember which one now), and the experimental treatment given to Robin sound amazing and I would sign E up for it in a moment if it existed, but there were a couple of things that just really bugged me. First, this whole bit was driven by Theo not wanting to medicate his son, and saying things like "if eight million people are on medication, doesn't that mean that something is wrong with the system?" and I'm like... maybe? Or it could mean that evolution is kind of crap? (This reminded me of the time when I felt super inadequate that my body wasn't able to provide my child with enough food for the first week of her life. How could I possibly use formula?? Before formula people coped! My sister pointed out that, well, actually, before formula a lot more babies died.) And -- of course being against medication is a view that a lot of people hold, so it's not off-the-wall that Theo thinks that too; but it's hard for me to tell whether this was an author-endorsed stance or not. (Theo's views on politics, mind you, are very clearly author-endorsed, which leads me to suspect that this might be too.) Either way, I just... really had a strong visceral negative reaction as to how Theo keeps going on and on as to how he couldn't possibly give his child any medication at all, especially as I know multiple cases where medication really really helped people. (To be fair, someone in reading group was from a place where apparently kids were over-medicated, and also someone else pointed out that in the book the school system was all but forcing medication on the parent. So this is at least somewhat a kneejerk reaction on my part, but, well, there it is.)

The other thing was the ending, starting with the part where the social workers are all, "Are you abusing your child??" ( Major spoiler. On the other hand, it's the kind of thing I might have liked to know going in. )Not, of course, that it would be at all tidy in real life, of course, I'm not saying that at all, but I did feel like for the book it was a cop-out ending that didn't engage with all the hard questions I guess I wanted it to engage in.

Since you guys have been amazing at book recs, do you know about books (fiction or memoir) about parenting kids with needs like giftedness, emotional sensitivity, ASD, ADHD, etc.? (The parent who organizes book club would prefer books about the parenting rather than about the kids, but it's not necessary.) She brought up the book The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, also The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger which sounds rather awesomely popcorn-y (which means I'll probably read it if I can get it from the library, and won't if I can't).

So I had this Goethe-shaped hole in, well, my literacy in general, but in particular in my experience of Faust, despite having seen the Gounod opera a couple of times at this point and having read other Faust treatments (about which more later). selenak pointed me to this translation for stage, abridged but which does have both parts. It took me a while to get into it (not its fault, I'm pretty sure, but mine; reading paper books has been all over the place for me, sometimes really quick and sometimes really slow), but once I got hooked, I was riveted.

This translation plays around with rhyme but doesn't end-rhyme every couplet, choosing instead to sometimes play with internal rhyme. I suspect that this is a little less accurate in terms of meaning and in sheer sound, but it's never boring to read. And it's really funny, especially Mephistopheles -- his sardonic wit practically leaps off the page. (He really does steal the show.) He makes fun of everything!

( Goethe, Gounod, a tiny bit of Marlowe, and Dorothy Sayers. )