Things I've been reading
Aug. 11th, 2021 10:11 amMy backlog of half-written blog posts is getting out of control, so I'm ceding defeat on the standalone reviews I wanted to write. Here instead is a big ol' pile of thoughts about the books I've read lately. They're all very good books! Can't vouch for the quality of the thoughts.
Enemies to Lovers by Aster Glenn Gray /![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer
You guys, this was SO DAMN GOOD. Megan and Sarah are two passionate fans ofCaptain America: The Winter Soldier Made-Up Woobietastic Foeyay Cold War Thriller Show who hit it off with scorching chemistry irl, only to learn that they belong to rival fandom factions and that Sarah has said some very mean things about Megan's WIP on tumblr. Anyone who's ever been in a fandom with a Designated Woobie will be able to relate to their struggle, but it's even funnier if you're familiar with c. 2014-15 CATWS/Stucky fandom politics. Oh, the Woobie Winter Soldier Wars. How many promising young lives were lost in those terrible days? Historians are still counting.
I particularly enjoyed the one-sidedness of the enmity, and how Megan has been stewing away in wounded rage about the WIP review while Sarah barely even remembers writing it. It feels very true to the easy way feelings get hurt on social media, and to the countless rivers of blood that have flowed over when, where, how or even if it's okay to share critical thoughts about fanworks. The novella strikes a really skilful balance of capturing fandom discourse without wagging a finger at any one side or taking too strong a didactic stance (and the author is fannish, so the cheeky bits of mockery read very clearly as affectionate).
The sex was steamy, and the tropes were riotously fun: handcuffed together! Hatesex! Only one bed! I was totally sold on Megan and Sarah's sexual chemistry, and the literal way they brought their fandom fight into the bedroom (with lots of banter, teasing and for-the-lulz-except-we're-secretly-getting-off-on-it roleplay) was equal parts funny and hot.
Here it is on the Amazon store. Only a couple of bucks, and VERY recommended.
The Australian Housewives' Manual (1883)
I've had this sweet little book on my shelves for a while now, bought on a whim from a clearance table at a local indie bookshop. It's a facsimile of the original, complete with all the illustrated ads for tea and cocoa and china that the publisher inserted; the whole is viewable via the National Library of Australia, if anyone else wants to see it in all its glory.
The author, who identifies herself only as 'an old housekeeper', writes to an audience of young working-class women embarking on married life. Gender roles aside, it's an extremely practical book and I wish I'd had something similar to work from when I first moved out of home. There are minutely detailed room-by-room lists of all the furniture and essential equipment you need to set up a comfortable house, including advice on which things you can bargain hunt for vs which things shouldn't be scrimped on. There's guidance on how to maintain a frugal weekly grocery budget, with all staples accounted for and a little bit of discretionary money set aside for luxuries and seasonal treats. There are tips on how to pretty up your living space for next to no money, and how to get the maximum use out of various household scraps. (Some of the food safety stuff made my delicate 21st century stomach a bit queasy, but these were pre-refrigeration days, and clearly the consumption of three-day-old room temperature leftovers didn't bring about the end of our species.)
There's also, naturally, a lot of fussing about the ethics of wifehood and the paramount importance of treating your husband like a king. The blurb encourages readers to point and laugh at the antiquated social norms, but what I found most striking from reading the whole book instead of just the deliberately provocative pull-quotes was the sense of professional pride the author aimed to inspire in her audience. She treats 'housewife' as a career path, and an important one; she equates the wife's frugality to the husband's earnings, tallying up the exact amount of money she can save for the household (and so 'add' to their resources) through rigorous budgeting. Even the most explicitly chauvinistic advice about personal conduct - keep high standards of dress and grooming; always be cheerful; defer to your husband's whims; anticipate his every need; hide your own grievances while pandering to his - felt surprisingly less dated when I replaced the word 'husband' with 'boss'. I've been a PA. I've enjoyed being a PA. The role was a disempowered and frequently frustrating one, but I saw it as dignified, valuable work, and took as much pride in my people skills as in my knowledge of office filing systems.
Don't get me wrong, I'm deeply glad to live in a time and place where I'm not my husband's subordinate. I just found this book an interesting window into the mindset of women who didn't necessarily see themselves as oppressed parties, but as skilled, hard-working people who had the power to contribute meaningfully to the happiness of their families. I think sometimes the stories women of days past would have told about themselves get lost in our modern narrative where the focus is (rightly, but simplistically) on the progress we've made since their time.
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
When I left our heroine Emily several months ago, I knew her only as the weeping, fainting puddle of a character whose fate interested me far less than the general aesthetic of the world she occupied. I know better now. It took me a while to pick the book back up after slogging my way through the boring first chapters, but once it hits its stride, it's absolutely gripping. And Emily, weepiness notwithstanding, is a BAMF.
After her father dies, and with her mother already long dead, Emily gets consigned to the guardianship of a favourite contender for World's Worst Aunt. Madame Cheron is a narcissistic widow who gets flattered into a second marriage with Montoni, a wastrel who passes himself off (unconvincingly, but Madame Cheron is highly motivated for ego's sake not to suspect him) as a wealthy nobleman. His plan is to take advantage of her inherited estates; hers is to live the high life on his dollar, having already squirrelled her inheritance away where no husband can access it. Montoni's thin veneer of decency survives exactly as long as it takes him to realise she won't give up her assets, at which point he embarks on a series of increasingly brutal schemes to cash in on his investment by other means, which range from selling Emily's hand in marriage to imprisoning both aunt and niece both in an isolated Gothic castle where he can more easily coerce extort Madame Cheron.
Small caveats to my otherwise wholehearted recommendation: There's some fun spookiness along the way, but Ann Radcliffe's big thing is finding rational explanations for seemingly supernatural events, so the hauntings and apparitions sadly amount to nothing by the end - or, rather, they amount to a string of coincidences so unlikely that a supernatural explanation would have strained my credulity less. I also can't in good conscience recommend that anyone attempt the poetry. Just skip ahead. It's all wildly unrelated to the plot, so you won't miss anything.
But anyway, Emily: beneath the fainting exterior, she's made of tempered moral steel. She knows her principles and adheres to them at any cost - admittedly those principles include things like 'women should be meek at all times' and 'my virginity is literally more important than my life', but her courage is impossible not to admire. She spends most of the novel terrified half out of her mind but determined to do the right thing anyway. She takes to its extreme the philosophy that her own behaviour is all she can control, and that no amount of wrongdoing by anyone else is enough to justify either a retaliatory or self-protective lapse of her own.
Hands down my favourite scene - caveat lector from here on, if you're averse to spoilers from 1794 - comes towards the end of the novel, when Emily has escaped Montoni's evil clutches and found her way back to Valancourt, her true love and intended husband. While she spent her year of torment sustaining herself on thoughts of his love and goodness, it emerges that he spent the same time rolling with a bad crowd and gambling his way into ruinous debt to distract himself from the pain of her absence. Cue a stone cold Georgian smackdown not quite equal to Lizzie's rejection of Darcy, but similarly satisfying in its own quieter way. In the face of Emily's refusal to marry a man of corrupted morals, Valancourt loses his shit completely and starts berating her that if she really loved him, she'd stick around to clean up his mess:
There's never so much as a hint of a narratorial whisper that Valancourt's fuck-ups should be Emily's problem. The lovers do reconcile, of course, but the onus is all on Valancourt to prove himself worthy of a second chance. After a novel's worth of watching Emily get menaced by a brute of a man who sincerely believes women are his for the using, it's hard to describe how good it felt to see her stand strong despite her own heartbreak and refuse to settle for anyone less than a moral equal.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
I enjoyed Udolpho so much that I'd hardly turned the last page before I was rushing to its most famous satire. Technically this is a reread, but it's been so long that I'd almost completely forgotten what happened. Anyway, Northanger Abbey is infinitely funnier read back to back with a straight-faced gothic novel - the saga of the linen chest, and the mystery of the laundry list in the cabinet (resolved, naturally, by an impressively unlikely coincidence of which Radcliffe herself would be proud), were particularly hilarious.
After the theatrics of Montoni, the much more mundane villainy of General Tilney and the Thorpes had something of a Dolores Umbridge effect: if anything I found their behaviour more personally aggravating, I guess because I've never met anyone who kept their own medieval fortress full of damsels in distress, but things like romantic infidelity and financial greed are closer to home. At least the Thorpes ended the novel in well-deserved disgrace, but I'd have loved to see the General get his comeuppance.
(Emily would be ashamed of me. Schadenfreude is a sentiment unbecoming of the female heart, which in its proper state of tender virtue must inevitably be moved to tears by the sight of another soul's suffering, however well deserved.)
Enemies to Lovers by Aster Glenn Gray /
osprey_archer You guys, this was SO DAMN GOOD. Megan and Sarah are two passionate fans of
I particularly enjoyed the one-sidedness of the enmity, and how Megan has been stewing away in wounded rage about the WIP review while Sarah barely even remembers writing it. It feels very true to the easy way feelings get hurt on social media, and to the countless rivers of blood that have flowed over when, where, how or even if it's okay to share critical thoughts about fanworks. The novella strikes a really skilful balance of capturing fandom discourse without wagging a finger at any one side or taking too strong a didactic stance (and the author is fannish, so the cheeky bits of mockery read very clearly as affectionate).
The sex was steamy, and the tropes were riotously fun: handcuffed together! Hatesex! Only one bed! I was totally sold on Megan and Sarah's sexual chemistry, and the literal way they brought their fandom fight into the bedroom (with lots of banter, teasing and for-the-lulz-except-we're-secretly-getting-off-on-it roleplay) was equal parts funny and hot.
Here it is on the Amazon store. Only a couple of bucks, and VERY recommended.
The Australian Housewives' Manual (1883)
I've had this sweet little book on my shelves for a while now, bought on a whim from a clearance table at a local indie bookshop. It's a facsimile of the original, complete with all the illustrated ads for tea and cocoa and china that the publisher inserted; the whole is viewable via the National Library of Australia, if anyone else wants to see it in all its glory.
The author, who identifies herself only as 'an old housekeeper', writes to an audience of young working-class women embarking on married life. Gender roles aside, it's an extremely practical book and I wish I'd had something similar to work from when I first moved out of home. There are minutely detailed room-by-room lists of all the furniture and essential equipment you need to set up a comfortable house, including advice on which things you can bargain hunt for vs which things shouldn't be scrimped on. There's guidance on how to maintain a frugal weekly grocery budget, with all staples accounted for and a little bit of discretionary money set aside for luxuries and seasonal treats. There are tips on how to pretty up your living space for next to no money, and how to get the maximum use out of various household scraps. (Some of the food safety stuff made my delicate 21st century stomach a bit queasy, but these were pre-refrigeration days, and clearly the consumption of three-day-old room temperature leftovers didn't bring about the end of our species.)
There's also, naturally, a lot of fussing about the ethics of wifehood and the paramount importance of treating your husband like a king. The blurb encourages readers to point and laugh at the antiquated social norms, but what I found most striking from reading the whole book instead of just the deliberately provocative pull-quotes was the sense of professional pride the author aimed to inspire in her audience. She treats 'housewife' as a career path, and an important one; she equates the wife's frugality to the husband's earnings, tallying up the exact amount of money she can save for the household (and so 'add' to their resources) through rigorous budgeting. Even the most explicitly chauvinistic advice about personal conduct - keep high standards of dress and grooming; always be cheerful; defer to your husband's whims; anticipate his every need; hide your own grievances while pandering to his - felt surprisingly less dated when I replaced the word 'husband' with 'boss'. I've been a PA. I've enjoyed being a PA. The role was a disempowered and frequently frustrating one, but I saw it as dignified, valuable work, and took as much pride in my people skills as in my knowledge of office filing systems.
Don't get me wrong, I'm deeply glad to live in a time and place where I'm not my husband's subordinate. I just found this book an interesting window into the mindset of women who didn't necessarily see themselves as oppressed parties, but as skilled, hard-working people who had the power to contribute meaningfully to the happiness of their families. I think sometimes the stories women of days past would have told about themselves get lost in our modern narrative where the focus is (rightly, but simplistically) on the progress we've made since their time.
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
When I left our heroine Emily several months ago, I knew her only as the weeping, fainting puddle of a character whose fate interested me far less than the general aesthetic of the world she occupied. I know better now. It took me a while to pick the book back up after slogging my way through the boring first chapters, but once it hits its stride, it's absolutely gripping. And Emily, weepiness notwithstanding, is a BAMF.
After her father dies, and with her mother already long dead, Emily gets consigned to the guardianship of a favourite contender for World's Worst Aunt. Madame Cheron is a narcissistic widow who gets flattered into a second marriage with Montoni, a wastrel who passes himself off (unconvincingly, but Madame Cheron is highly motivated for ego's sake not to suspect him) as a wealthy nobleman. His plan is to take advantage of her inherited estates; hers is to live the high life on his dollar, having already squirrelled her inheritance away where no husband can access it. Montoni's thin veneer of decency survives exactly as long as it takes him to realise she won't give up her assets, at which point he embarks on a series of increasingly brutal schemes to cash in on his investment by other means, which range from selling Emily's hand in marriage to imprisoning both aunt and niece both in an isolated Gothic castle where he can more easily coerce extort Madame Cheron.
Small caveats to my otherwise wholehearted recommendation: There's some fun spookiness along the way, but Ann Radcliffe's big thing is finding rational explanations for seemingly supernatural events, so the hauntings and apparitions sadly amount to nothing by the end - or, rather, they amount to a string of coincidences so unlikely that a supernatural explanation would have strained my credulity less. I also can't in good conscience recommend that anyone attempt the poetry. Just skip ahead. It's all wildly unrelated to the plot, so you won't miss anything.
But anyway, Emily: beneath the fainting exterior, she's made of tempered moral steel. She knows her principles and adheres to them at any cost - admittedly those principles include things like 'women should be meek at all times' and 'my virginity is literally more important than my life', but her courage is impossible not to admire. She spends most of the novel terrified half out of her mind but determined to do the right thing anyway. She takes to its extreme the philosophy that her own behaviour is all she can control, and that no amount of wrongdoing by anyone else is enough to justify either a retaliatory or self-protective lapse of her own.
Hands down my favourite scene - caveat lector from here on, if you're averse to spoilers from 1794 - comes towards the end of the novel, when Emily has escaped Montoni's evil clutches and found her way back to Valancourt, her true love and intended husband. While she spent her year of torment sustaining herself on thoughts of his love and goodness, it emerges that he spent the same time rolling with a bad crowd and gambling his way into ruinous debt to distract himself from the pain of her absence. Cue a stone cold Georgian smackdown not quite equal to Lizzie's rejection of Darcy, but similarly satisfying in its own quieter way. In the face of Emily's refusal to marry a man of corrupted morals, Valancourt loses his shit completely and starts berating her that if she really loved him, she'd stick around to clean up his mess:
''Tis true, I am fallen -- fallen from my own esteem! but could you, Emily, so soon, so suddenly resign, if you had not before ceased to love me [...] Would you not otherwise be willing to hope for my reformation [...] No, Emily -- no -- you would not do this, if you still loved me. You would find your own happiness in saving mine.'
'There are too many probabilities against that hope,' said Emily, 'to justify me in trusting the comfort of my whole life to it. May I not also ask, whether you could wish me to do this, if you really loved me?'
'There are too many probabilities against that hope,' said Emily, 'to justify me in trusting the comfort of my whole life to it. May I not also ask, whether you could wish me to do this, if you really loved me?'
There's never so much as a hint of a narratorial whisper that Valancourt's fuck-ups should be Emily's problem. The lovers do reconcile, of course, but the onus is all on Valancourt to prove himself worthy of a second chance. After a novel's worth of watching Emily get menaced by a brute of a man who sincerely believes women are his for the using, it's hard to describe how good it felt to see her stand strong despite her own heartbreak and refuse to settle for anyone less than a moral equal.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
I enjoyed Udolpho so much that I'd hardly turned the last page before I was rushing to its most famous satire. Technically this is a reread, but it's been so long that I'd almost completely forgotten what happened. Anyway, Northanger Abbey is infinitely funnier read back to back with a straight-faced gothic novel - the saga of the linen chest, and the mystery of the laundry list in the cabinet (resolved, naturally, by an impressively unlikely coincidence of which Radcliffe herself would be proud), were particularly hilarious.
After the theatrics of Montoni, the much more mundane villainy of General Tilney and the Thorpes had something of a Dolores Umbridge effect: if anything I found their behaviour more personally aggravating, I guess because I've never met anyone who kept their own medieval fortress full of damsels in distress, but things like romantic infidelity and financial greed are closer to home. At least the Thorpes ended the novel in well-deserved disgrace, but I'd have loved to see the General get his comeuppance.
(Emily would be ashamed of me. Schadenfreude is a sentiment unbecoming of the female heart, which in its proper state of tender virtue must inevitably be moved to tears by the sight of another soul's suffering, however well deserved.)
