![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Oct. 16th, 2023
I happened to post over on the site formerly known as Twitter about Angela Thirkell - somebody posted an image of a painting of her, under her (first) married name (to the alcoholic gay domestic abuser) and I did 'better known as' quote-repost, and clearly there are a lot of covert Thirkell-fans out there.
But I was a bit took aback by somebody who claimed that the Barsetshire novels are 'a real-time cultural history of the UK from interwar to postwar periods', which is, my dearios, to boggle at, surely, and being somebody who is wont to wax pedantic and nitpick errors, I suggested that they covered a rather specific slice and that I could argue that there was a strong element of fantasy (Barsetshire as Thirkell-land/Trollope fanfic), but that one can enjoy them anyway. (One can surely enjoy e.g. Wodehouse without wanting it to be social realism?) and got a snarky response about 'Sorry for enjoying the books in a different way from you'. Huh? It wasn't about enjoyment, it was about classificatory accuracy, I say, sitting over here with South Riding.
Given, you know, I am an actual historian of the period in question and have read a lot of other writers ditto - and now, I want the cross-over in which the Provincial Lady goes to talk at one of the Women's Institutes in the Barsetshire area and comments in her diary.... (talking of snark).
And this sort of thing is why I do not do universal recommendations even to people with whom I have a significant community of tastes.
On reading more generally, apparently the yoof of today are being put off by the way it is taught with grammar drills and counting adverbs and what have you. I think back to the days of my own youth - well primary school - and annoying readers (there was one called Reading for Meaning, a title which still exists but the books seem entirely different) which gave you some text and then a set of tedious questions that you were supposed to answer on it, blah.
***
I have another bluesky invite code which I don't think anyone has dibsed in advance.