Recent reading

[oursin]

I have decided that as I am logging what I read both on Vox and on my Facebook as a matter of record, I'm just going to write in these posts about books I have some thoughts about or things to say, even if it's only to recommend them.

Nonfic

Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door (2001) - someone, I think mamculuna recommended this to me after I'd read The Buddha from Brooklyn - it's a similar sort of story about a Buddhist community going pearshaped. For some reason I find this fascinating. I don't think I've ever read a mystery involving murder in a Buddhist community (though various other religious communities mainstream and fringe), but after reading this book I was beginning to wonder why not, because although it seems pretty counter-intuitive, in practice clearly things can go really really wrong and dysfunctional.

Selina Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918-1950. This has been getting rave reviews in academic journals and I can see why. It's an excellent study of young women and employment and its role in the family economy and issues around change and new workplace opportunities and so on. It's perhaps a little on the dry side, although Todd does use memoirs and oral history quite a bit, and perhaps, as Brighton C commented when we were discussing it the other week, a bit The Book of the Thesis, but it's all great stuff.

Angela John, Evelyn Sharp: Rebel Woman, 1869-1955 (2009). I think I posted a link to a review of this a few weeks ago, and it's a pretty good study of a neglected woman activist and writer of the early twentieth century. Perhaps the very diversity of her interests and activities has, as so often, led to this neglect. It's a bit of half a duology - John has already written a biography of Sharp's long-term lover and eventual (once his first wife had died) husband the war-correspondent Henry W Nevinson, and I haven't read that (yet). One thing I would perhaps have liked more of was her relationships with other women - she seems to have been v pally with Mary Neal even though she was Cecil Sharp's sister, and had numerous friends of the younger generation of feminists including ones such as Winifred Holtby and Naomi Mitchison whose papers I know survive.

I already posted, somewhat briefly, on Margaret Dalham's Mere Man (1911).

Mysteries, thrillers, etc

Barbara Vine, The Birthday Present (2008). My response to the Vine books varies enormously: this one I liked, although I wouldn't rate it as highly as Asta's/Anna's Book or The Chimney-Sweeper's Boy. In fact though I really enjoyed this while I was reading it, the details have rather faded since I did.

Elizabeth Wilson, War Damage (2009). Alas, I gave up on this one. I think very highly of Wilson's work on social and cultural history, but I found this disappointing. The idea of a group of vaguely bohemian fairly middle class people in London just after the Second World War was unusual, however, I just couldn't get interested in any of the characters, who were too much assemblages of particular attributes, or indeed in who dun wot.

I read a rave review of the works of French crime-writer Fred Vargas and was incited to purchase a couple just to see what they're like. So far I've read The Three Evangelists (1995 - English translation 2006), which I think was a) her first and b) about which I have read strictures on the quality of the translation, so not sure it is entirely representative. I thought that, having historian protagonists, it might be more like, allowing for cultural differences etc, more like Sara Caudwell than it turned out to be. I will however delve further.

Also several things that were forgettable or well on in existing series, several picked up in Murder One's closing sale: Gloria White's Ronnie Ventana mysteries, Gillian Roberts' Amanda Pepper - this, All's Well that Ends 2007 actually wound up the long-running and rather uneven series.

Sff

Jacqueline Carey, Naamah's Kiss (2009) and Santa Olivia (2009). The first was luscious self-indulgence, and the second was surprisingly compelling - I bounced pretty hard off Banewreaker (???) within the first few pages, so I was a bit iffy, but had picked up on people's positive comments so gave it a try. Great stuff, very different, except, perhaps, in being about physical intensity (though of a very different kind) and complex emotional involvements. A perhaps well-worn science-fictional trope of the enclosed community and a looming if vague menace (cf also the much-lamented Phyllis Gottlieb's 1964 Sunburst) but well-done.

SatyrPhil Brucato and Sandra Buskirk, Ravens in the Library (2009). I have mentioned before that I'm sometimes a bit iffy about short stories, but these held to a very high standard, as well as having resonances of theme throughout the volume. Glad I got this.

Litfic

I ♥ Greyladies. During the past few weeks I have enjoyed several of the novels they have reprinted:

Noel Streatfield writing as Susan Scarlett, Poppies for England (1947), Clothes-Pegs (1939), Murder While You Work (1944). Streatfield was dismissive of these works, which were written as 'potboilers' and serialised in women's magazines, seeing them as much less than her serious work and therefore using the Scarlett pseudonym, but they are really rather better than she gave them credit for. They have beautifully specific settings (a West End dress shop, a holiday camp just after World War II, a munitions factory) and social milieux (okay, I slightly cavil at the more upper class characters), take lower middle/working class characters seriously, and are damn good reads. Although each of these books has at least one romance in it, the romance doesn't seem the be-all and end-all of the story, and the heroes are not craggy-jawed masterful alpha males, but sympathetic, supportive, nurturing. Lovely: I hope Greyladies reprints more of these.

Josephine Elder, The Encircled Heart (1951) - another Greyladies find. Maybe my bulletproof kink turns out to be novels about women doctors in the pre-NHS era, because I loved that about it and the excitement (that an autobiographical talk incorporated in the volume suggests was the author's) about new medical developments: but it also had a marriage which, although it involved the whole career versus marriage issue, didn't demonise the husband - although he manifests hostility towards the demands of Marion's patients, we later see that this is pretty much a non-gendered reaction of non-medical spouses of doctors to the pressures upon them. And the ending, for 1951, is wonderful.