Reading

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

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Wednesday Reading Meme on Tuesday

I’m posting Wednesday Reading Meme a day early this week, as tomorrow I am heading out on my Massachusetts trip! Not planning to take my computer with me so probably will not post until I return, bearing news of a Katherine Hepburn film festival, fancy tea at the Boston Public Library, and (if all goes well) a visit to a maple sugaring operation.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Eliza Orne White’s I, the Autobiography of a Cat, a charming book from 1941, with adorable illustrations by Clarke Hutton (one features a cat batting at an ink pen; cats never change). A cat tells us about his life with a lovely old lady in her beautiful home, where our cat accompanies her on her daily walks around the veranda. (She is blind so uses the veranda rail as a guide, and he walks ahead so she can stroke him from time to time.) Delightful. Always happy to read another book in cat POV. My main contemporary source is Japanese works in translation, but there was clearly a boom in this sort of thing in mid-century American children’s publishing.

I also finished E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods, which perhaps suffered very slightly because I didn’t read The Treasure Seekers first (mostly because I spent the entire book wondering “Who is Albert and why are the Bastables staying with his uncle?”) but overall a pleasant read about children getting up to shenanigans in Edwardian England. Loved the bit where the children decide to walk to Canterbury like the pilgrims of old.

What I’m Reading Now

Zipping through Sarah Tolmie’s The Fourth Island, which is a delight! There is a fourth (magical) island of Aran, where lost people wash up from time to time, and the locals help them build houses and fit into the local community. A little bit Dinotopia although without the dinosaurs.

What I Plan to Read Next

Plotting my trip reading! I have four books on my Kindle: Patricia C. Wrede’s Caught in Crystal, Andrea K. Host’s Stray, George Gissing’s New Grub Street, and Kaje Harper’s Nor Iron Bars a Cage.

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Book Review: Hornblower and the Hotspur

We begin Hornblower and the Hotspur with Horatio Hornblower standing at the altar with his blushing bride Maria, desperately informing himself that they’re not married just yet! There’s still time to run for it! Only he can’t bring himself to commit the cruel act of leaving her at the altar, so instead he stands there like a lump and gets married.

This is one of the most inexplicable marriages I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It appears that Maria confessed her love for Hornblower and Hornblower was unable to think of any response except “Will you marry me?”, despite the fact that he doesn’t love her, in fact doesn’t think he should ever marry, and lives in dread of passing his temperament on to his children. (I should note that he is in no way honor bound to her before the wedding: she’s not pregnant with his child and he didn't seduce her. He didn't even flirt with her! He just existed in her general vicinity and she fell for him.)

He then spends the rest of the book asking himself “What would a good husband do?” and then enacting the part of a good husband, in much the way that he sometimes enacts the part of a good captain.

littlerhymes and I discussed many possible explanations for Hornblower’s behavior, none of which were entirely satisfactory, but to be fair, what WOULD be a satisfactory explanation?

1. Hornblower is a deeply closeted gay man who is marrying Maria for reasons of social pressure. However, there seem to be plenty of bachelors in the Navy, so it’s unclear how much social pressure he would actually be experiencing, especially since he seems to have no family clamoring for grandchildren/an heir.

(Whether or not he’s gay, there is alas little evidence here that he sees Bush as more than an excellent lieutenant, although Bush is clearly still nuts about Hornblower. The bit where Hornblower fails to mention his own act of heroism in a letter to the Gazette and Bush is like “It isn’t RIGHT, sir.” And also the bit where Bush is tells Hornblower he’s worried about Hornblower’s health and Hornblower is like who cares about this SACK of MEAT that is my BODY.)

2. Hornblower is SO deeply repressed that he can’t cope with the fact that he is experiencing the weakness of having a human emotion (“love”), but actually does love Maria on some level. He keeps feeling surprising upswellings of tenderness for her. Also, he castigates himself severely every time he DOES experience an emotion (or also human weaknesses like “sleepiness” or “hunger”), which I feel has probably damaged his ability to recognize emotions at all.

But even if he loves her, he clearly doesn’t have a lot of respect for her. Might love her purely in the sense of feeling an animal attraction, and also gratitude for the fact that someone cares about him? He muses at one point that it’s strange to be going to sea with someone on land who gives a damn about him.

3. Hornblower doesn’t think that he deserves nice things, so he marries Maria to make sure that he will have a wife who is ill-suited to him, as he deserves.

Oh, also there are some sea battles and stuff. Hornblower is sent with the fleet to capture some Spanish ships carrying a fortune and then has to hare off chasing another ship at the opportune moment so he doesn’t get a share of the massive amount of prize money. But then the Crown takes the money anyway so he actually would have gotten nothing even if he had been there.

I’m pretty sure these Spanish treasure ships formed the basis for a similar incident near the end of Post Captain, only you better believe Jack Aubrey was on hand to win his part of the prize money. I finished Post Captain confident than Jack could pay off his debts and marry Sophie, but now it looks like maybe he won’t be getting the money after all…?

We will find out in HMS Surprise, but not for about a week, as I am setting off on a trip to Massachusetts on Wednesday!

littlerhymes and I will resume our sailing voyages once I return.

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biggles,
fics

Fic: Umbrellas

Late last year I saw a prompt on tumblr for EvS PTSD fic, and I wrote most of this, and then when I came back to it to write the ending, it took off at an entirely unexpected tangent due to me making the mistake of doing some research about film history. So here it is: Biggles, EvS, trauma and Bond Girls.

Title: Umbrellas
Content: trauma, hurt/comfort, Biggles's opinion of James Bond, 1900 words
Summary: One of Biggles's dinners with von Stalhein goes a little off-script.

( Umbrellas )

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spies, romance and mystery

A Perfect Spy (BBC 1987)
An adaptation of the Le Carré book, and unusually for Le Carré I could follow what was going on the whole time. It helps that it wasn't particularly twisty as plots go, and it was really a psychological exploration of Magnus Pym, where he comes from and how his relationship with his father made him into a perfect spy and then into a double agent, rather than complicated spy shenanigans as such. And it did this very well, with a slow steady journey through Magnus's life from start to end. Also it was devastatingly slashy: Axel and Magnus were just absurdly in love with each other and the show absolutely leaned into this far more than I would have expected for something made in 1987. Poppy and Sir Magnus, my poor heart. I shall have to read the book.

The German Secret Service, Walter Nicolai
This was a fascinating piece of history. Walter Nicolai was the head of German military intelligence during World War I, and he published this book in 1924 about his work. And it's an intensely, hilariously biased narrative, also full of Nicolai's fairly predictable prejudices. The way Nicolai tells it, WW1 was just not playing fair and the virtuous, noble, honourable Germans had everyone else ganging up on them in a very mean way for no reason at all and when Germans wanted to do things honourably and properly they had to contend with everyone else cheating and making unfair kinds of war with trenches and blockades which cruelly prevented the Germans from doing what they were good at and winning outright. But along with all that is a really comprehensive overview of the entire German intelligence system and also the various Entente Powers' intelligence systems and how they interacted. Nicolai lays out the different theatres of the intelligence aspects of WW1 in Europe - he doesn't go into the wider world elements - and discusses the differences between the Russian, British, French, Belgian and American intelligence networks and what they focused on and where they operated, and the measures he took to counter them. He focuses more on this than on how the German system was operating, for all that it claims to be a book about the German secret service it's more a book about catching enemy spies than about what German spies were up to, though he does talk a lot about how difficult it was to get spies out of Germany anyway when there were hostile countries on all sides. But I spent a lot of time laughing at how he kept turning absolutely everything into a propaganda argument for how much better Germans are than everyone else, even things like the significant number of Germans who were induced to spy on their own country he makes into a virtue by carefully explaining that these German traitors were utterly faithful to their new masters, loyal and reliable and provided really valuable intel and didn't ask for large sums of payment, and so as well as being the best at everything else, they were also the best double agents!

A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson
Harriet Morton runs away from her oppressive bigoted father and miserly aunt to join a ballet company going on tour up the Amazon river to the newly prosperous Brazilian city of Manaus. Like all the other Ibbotsons I've read, once I'd started this it whisked me along to the end without really drawing breath, it's a delightful experience to read. The characters are gorgeous, the romance is lovely, the descriptions of Harriet blossoming in her new life are a joy and the whole thing was a tremendous ride. I did find the various misunderstandings a trifle contrived, Ibbotson is quite fond of the sort of misunderstandings that cause total disaster for the characters but could have been averted with ten seconds of conversation - though she did lampshade it a bit with the Romeo and Juliet feather motif - but I loved the characters and narrative voice and the storytelling overall so much that I just rolled my eyes at those parts and carried on happily anyway.

Magic Flutes, Eva Ibbotson
In the aftermath of WW1, an Austrian princess is working backstage at the opera while her elderly aunts arrange the sale of their castle to a fantastically wealthy English industrialist, who wants to impress the woman he still loves despite the fact that she previously turned him down for being too poor and unknown. Lots of fun here, with the opera company being fantastically, hilariously and vividly described, the elderly aunts are an utter joy, and of course everyone nearly ends up married to the wrong person before a bit of subterfuge sorts it all out.

A Song for Summer, Eva Ibbotson
This one was particularly good. Ellen, raised by three determined suffragettes, unfortunately enjoys cooking more than attempting to train in a profession, so she swaps university for cooking college and then takes a job as matron of an experimental school in Austria in 1938. Here she takes on a deeply chaotic school full of troubled children whose wealthy parents don't want them around, with all of Ibbotson's usual fantastic characters, and also the mysterious groundsman Marek who is pruning trees and looking after animals in between disappearing on mysterious jobs into Nazi Germany, and refusing to participate in any music whatsoever. I won't spoil the plot, but Ibbotson doesn't follow the strict romance novel rules of the other books quite so much here and I really liked how it all worked out.

Death On Ice, R.O. Thorpe
A fun contemporary murder mystery with a Golden Age vibe. Our heroes are twins, both marine biologists, who are going on a joint luxury cruise/scientific expedition to the Arctic, when one of their shipmates turns up messily dead. The Arctic luxury cruise ship recreates all the best things about a traditional country house murder mystery, with the structured formality, enforced interaction and fancy settings, and this very much had the country house mystery feel to it. The plot was a bit involved in places, but the story overall was great fun, the characters were well drawn and I did not figure out whodunnit before the reveal - though unfortunately I also did not have the 'oh, OF COURSE' sense you get in a really well constructed murder mystery. Still, I'd definitely read another of this series, and I believe there is one, so that's all to the good.

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Wednesday Reading Meme

A wild episode of Books I’ve Abandoned appears! I kept on slogging through Maeve Binchy’s A Few of the Girls on the grounds that it’s a short story collection and therefore might eventually cough up a story I like, but finally decided it was just too many downer stories about people in bad friendships and bad marriages and bad adulterous relationships.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Getting my St. Patrick’s Day on with Eve Bunting’s St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning, which I actually picked up on account of the illustrator, Jan Brett. This was one of Brett’s earliest books and the publishers clearly gave her a very limited palette to work with, just black and white and yellow and green (and a yellow saturated to the point of orange for the Irish flag). She does the best with what she has, but how fortunate for us all she has more colors to work with in her later books!

But her characteristic attention to detail is still visible here: the stone walls in the green fields, the multitude of toothsome sweets in the Mrs. Simms’ Half-Way-Up Sweetshop, the sleepy boy and his sleepy dog curled up in the rocking chair once they’ve walked all the way up Acorn Mountain and all the way back in their very own St. Patrick’s Day parade.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods, and am happy to report I find the Bastables much less stressful than the children in The Phoenix and the Carpet, possibly because the Bastables don’t have a magic carpet that might just strand them in Outer Mongolia. Capable of getting up to plenty of mischief without magical aid however! They are about to fill a lock to float a barge, under the impression that this will be a good deed, but I strongly suspect that the barge is simply going to float away downstream.

What I Plan to Read Next

My coworker lent me John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis.

I'm back. I, uh, brought a thing.

tl;dr: I, uh, had a "bad cold" that turned out to be pneumonia that landed me briefly in hospital and took a while to properly recover from. I'm fine now though, honestly, back to factory settings.

Anyway, I wrote a Pluribus fic for an exchange that's proving quite popular amongst the sort of people who enjoy being punched in the face. Previous summaries I considered were Literally no one consented to this and Helen haunts the narrative, and also Carol.

Dilaudid (Pluribus; Carol/Zosia, Carol/Helen; 2k)

7. Zosia is a honey trap. Don’t fall for it.

[A Few Moments Later]

13. Zosia is a honey trap. Don’t fall for it AGAIN.

Or,

Carol Sturka and the difference between real and real enough.

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Recent reading

I have been overdoing it again (there are too many good things to do!) and am not feeling brilliantly up to writing complex book reviews, but we'll see what I can manage:

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (1955). I was browsing shelves at the (tiny local) library a few days ago and realised that they've been keeping the books I reserve from other libraries around the county, rather than sending them back where they started: almost every vaguely old book there, if it wasn't a very well-known classic, was something I'd ordered and read in the last year. This was the one exception I could find, so I picked it up. It's about Caribbean immigrants in post-war London, beginning with Moses, a Trinidadian who's been in Britain for some years already and now observes the arrival of more and various other Caribbeans. The narrative follows each of these people for a little while, exploring their personalities, how they get on in London and how they experience the sometimes hostile reactions of white Brits to their presence. It's written in a blend of standard English with Caribbean dialect (apparently Selvon tried to write in standard English at first but it just wouldn't work; I can see that this works a lot better), and the general mood is partly grim humour and partly what I'd call 'various' or 'it's all really complicated, isn't it'. It's very good, if not the most enjoyable book ever.

Mrs Overtheway's Remembrances by Juliana Horatia Ewing (1869). I picked this one up hoping for something about the early nineteenth century as seen from the perspective of the late nineteenth century, which is one of my favourite themes in Victorian fiction, but it's not really that, though the premise sounds like it might be. A lonely child amuses herself by watching the comings and goings of the old woman who lives across the street; eventually they get to know each other properly and Mrs Overtheway tells young Ida some stories about her early life. But the stories are really just stories that could have been contemporary rather than even incidental historical commentary, and I didn't find them all that interesting as stories; that was disappointing, but at least Ewing's skill at writing child POVs and her love of plants and gardening, fully on display in this book, were good.

The Blood of the Martyrs by Naomi Mitchison (1939). This book is about the early Christians in Emperor Nero's Rome, it's six hundred pages long, it is exactly like what the title sounds like it's going to be like and it is compelling in the way where I really mean that word. Mitchison is so endlessly worth reading.

King of Dust: Adventures in Forgotten Sculpture by Alex Woodcock (2019). First of all, please admire the beautiful cover design. The author's career approached the subject of this book, Romanesque architecture in medieval churches in the southwest of England, from multiple directions: he completed a PhD in the study of it, then trained as a stonemason and spent several years employed in that capacity at Exeter Cathedral. The book isn't a memoir telling that story; instead Woodcock describes his visits to various notable pieces of church architecture around Cornwall, Devon and Dorset, interspersing the descriptions with out-of-order and incomplete bits of his own biography where relevant, and also with the history of the study and appreciation of the Romanesque and some thoughts about the meaning and significance of both the style and stone-carving in general. It's a thoughtfully-constructed and well-written book, and I liked it very much despite knowing almost nothing about the subject.

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Six Sentence Sunday

A bit more of this and this. Shane's POV this time:

Shane sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and turned away from the glass before he could be tempted to touch his neckcloth again. The small sword hanging at his side slapped against his thigh at the sudden movement, and Shane sighed again.

The court sword had belonged to his grandfather and was an elegant little thing, with its faceted and burnished hilt, and swirl of gold along the narrow blade, but a world away from the substantial and trusty sabre that Shane had carried into battle with him not so very long ago. He wondered if the sword had seen action - gentlemen had dueled with just such weapons in his grandfather's day - but even if it had, he could not view it as anything but a beautiful, gilded toy. It was at one with the rest of his get-up this morning, formal court dress in strict adherence to the regulations laid down by the Lord Chamberlain. While his court suit had a certain military style to it, with its long-tailed blue coat and high standing collar, no true officer's uniform had ever been so lavishly embroidered, or paired with old-fashioned knee breeches of velvet, silk stockings and shiny-buckled shoes.

He felt ridiculous.

~*~

And yes, it continues to be

Samirant's fault.