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highlyeccentricCurrently Reading: Partway through lots of things, but not really actively reading anything. Unless you count the ENORMOUS pile of Old English textbooks I'm perusing for class. Some of the part-read things include Carpentaria; The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window; and the Lundy Bancroft book.
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msjackmonroe's new cookbook, a bunch of OE textbooks, and Aelfric's life of St Edmund. Also Foxglove Summer.
Catch-up reviews:
Barbara Baynton, Between Two Worlds by Penne Hackforth-Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a fascinating biography of a woman whose name should really be listed every time Patterson, Lawson et al are rattled off. I loved the attention to the way class differentials shaped her life, particularly.
What bugged me was the excessive use of her fiction to fill in gaps in her known life. The author is a descendant, and had interviewed many family members, and in most cases the *practical* details filled in from fiction make sense. What bugged me was that Hackforth-Jones wrote about Baynton's personal feelings with the same authority, even as she acknowledged cases where the fictional character was hardly a self-insert. For instance: it is not good practice to say that Baynton *was* afraid of theft and worse from swagmen simply because she wrote a harrowing short story about a country wife raped and murdered by a swagman, and in that story vividly depicted such fears. It is *possible* she had exactly those fears, but it is also possible that she did not feel them, or did not feel them so strongly, and elaborated from other sources.
There were however some excellent victories of documentary history here- for instance, the chain of deductions (from ship's papers, town records, and Baynton's own known lies), the figuring out that Baynton's mother had boarded a ship from Scotland with her husband, and arrived in the Upper Hunter region with another man who proceeded to live under said husband's name.
Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
This was a terrible book. Do not read this book.
It's *funny*, in places, but it's not executed with skill at anything except sitcom. Notably, the transition between Catherine and Sylvia's POVs is fudged, there's too much telling rather than showing of Catherine's motivations, and actually it's kinda gross - for a story about a woman in an abusive relationship - to have *so little* from her POV.
Also a story about a horrible abusive drug-addict husband-murdering lesbian who tears a woman away from her nice family. Icky. There are ways to tell that story but this is not it, and ending with the nice heteronormative family members restoring their power over the (comatose!) mother and shaming the partner who *they always knew* was bad for her... nope nope all the nope. Do not read this book.
Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a *delightful* book. I have never read a book from the POV of a dementia sufferer and this was remarkably well done. And super cute.
The actual detective plot is a bit shaky in the denoument, but that's OK, the book is adorable enough to get away with it. Excellent plane reading.
Up Next: In theory I should finish something first?
Recently finished:
Catch-up reviews:
Barbara Baynton, Between Two Worlds by Penne Hackforth-JonesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a fascinating biography of a woman whose name should really be listed every time Patterson, Lawson et al are rattled off. I loved the attention to the way class differentials shaped her life, particularly.
What bugged me was the excessive use of her fiction to fill in gaps in her known life. The author is a descendant, and had interviewed many family members, and in most cases the *practical* details filled in from fiction make sense. What bugged me was that Hackforth-Jones wrote about Baynton's personal feelings with the same authority, even as she acknowledged cases where the fictional character was hardly a self-insert. For instance: it is not good practice to say that Baynton *was* afraid of theft and worse from swagmen simply because she wrote a harrowing short story about a country wife raped and murdered by a swagman, and in that story vividly depicted such fears. It is *possible* she had exactly those fears, but it is also possible that she did not feel them, or did not feel them so strongly, and elaborated from other sources.
There were however some excellent victories of documentary history here- for instance, the chain of deductions (from ship's papers, town records, and Baynton's own known lies), the figuring out that Baynton's mother had boarded a ship from Scotland with her husband, and arrived in the Upper Hunter region with another man who proceeded to live under said husband's name.
Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn FrenchMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
This was a terrible book. Do not read this book.
It's *funny*, in places, but it's not executed with skill at anything except sitcom. Notably, the transition between Catherine and Sylvia's POVs is fudged, there's too much telling rather than showing of Catherine's motivations, and actually it's kinda gross - for a story about a woman in an abusive relationship - to have *so little* from her POV.
Also a story about a horrible abusive drug-addict husband-murdering lesbian who tears a woman away from her nice family. Icky. There are ways to tell that story but this is not it, and ending with the nice heteronormative family members restoring their power over the (comatose!) mother and shaming the partner who *they always knew* was bad for her... nope nope all the nope. Do not read this book.
Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma HealeyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a *delightful* book. I have never read a book from the POV of a dementia sufferer and this was remarkably well done. And super cute.
The actual detective plot is a bit shaky in the denoument, but that's OK, the book is adorable enough to get away with it. Excellent plane reading.
Up Next: In theory I should finish something first?