Let's talk a bit about some books I read early this year (some are also waiting for a longer blog post too).
I'm loathe to publicly call out bad books, but I will say, one book not represented here is one I paid good money for, and hated. Everything about it says I should have loved it; a well-loved author, genre and subject a lovely mishmash that should have worked for me, and yet less than a third of the way into the book I had to stop. I haven't hated a book like this in a long time. All the reasons why I should have loved it made the pain of it being bad all the more painful.
Three Men in A Boat
I am gently shocked I didn't write a blog post about this book previously; this was actually my second read through. Published in 1889, it's a humour book which holds up ridiculously well for something which is 135 years old. I first discovered it after it was mentioned/tied gently into Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, so it's likely my first read through of Three Men in a Boat was roughly 2018.
In theory it is the story of three young men taking a break from their lives to take a vacation by boat up the river Thames, and it is that; however, a good chunk of the book however is humorous digressions. One of which is very prescient reads on our contemporary character:
To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers. Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?
Others instead poke fun at the manner and mores of the day; visit the Project Gutenberg ebook, and read from "Have you ever been in a house where there are a couple courting?".
Or perhaps if you're in for the fantastic story of a ripe cheese, read from "For other breakfast things, George suggested eggs and bacon".
Persuasion
When I got sick recently, I discovered all I wanted was Austen. So we watched Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice , Mansfield Park (Grim) and I read Persuasion. First time reading it, though I was familiar with the story beats, having watched an adaption last year.
Persuasion is an interesting book; tension wise, it is a slow burn, building to its crescendo only in the final chapters. It's a good love story, told well, in a world that feels lived in.
I was struck however by the characters. Last year I read Middlemarch (which I apparently never wrote about?? Something I find gently shocking considering how highly I now regard it!), and what I find having read the two near each other is how much more alive the characters in Middlemarch feel -- their emotions more clear, their strains more communicated.
I am very happy I read Persuasion, but I think I preferred Pride and Prejudice when I read it a few years ago.
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
This was just a very cozy story of found family in a gentle magical world just behind the veil of our own. It was warm and fuzzy (with a small amount of sex, including one ??? moment for me), and it was just the right thing for a cold winters day.