It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Finished Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot - teensy pedantic note that a girl who was a teenage WW2 evacuee was not going to have been called Doris after Doris Day.

I read a couple more nostalgic (I literally read these when I was still at school) Elswyth Thanes (also the ebooks are v cheap), This Was Tomorrow (1951) and Homing (1957), and apart from a couple of fortunately brief scenes in Williamsburg (I get the impression is being done up as Heritage Site with Rockefeller dough?) set in England/Europe just before and at beginning of WW2. Apart from the 2 idealistic Oxford Groupers (it's not actually named but it sounds very like) who want to shed love and light on the Nazis, nobody is for appeasement. So unlike e.g. Lanny Budd's first wife and her second (Brit aristo) husband.... There is also weird reincarnation theme going on.

Latest Literary Review.

Some while ago I was looking for my copy of The Goblin Emperor and it was not in any of the places I thought it plausibly might be and then I spotted it while dusting the bookshelves in a non-intuitive spot and have been re-reading that. Have also read the online short story Min Zemerin's Plan (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #1.5) (2022), which I hadn't come across before, and re-read The Orb of Cairado (The Chronicles of Osreth, #1.1) (2025). Does anyone know how I can get access to Lora Selezh (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #0.5), which was apparently a freebie for preorders of the Tor edition of Witness for the Dead???

On the go

Have started Dickon Edwards, Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1 (1997-2007) (2025) - possibly a dipper-inner rather than a read straight through, though sometimes diaries that one thinks this about grab one like the Ancient Mariner, I'm looking at you Mr Isherwood.

Up Next

As may seem predictable, I am on to a re-read of Katherine Addison's Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy.

I should probably also be turning my attention to Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs, for the Pilgrimage online book group discussion in early Jan.

Okay, am v depressed by all the ongoing hoohah around AI and the people using it rather than their own brains, quite aside from Evil Exploitation aspect -

- but on intellectual pollution, having been moaning inwardly, banging the floor with my ebony cane and beating my head on my antimacassar for a considerable while over the awful errors that appear in prose because the word is correctly spelt but it is THE WRONG BLOODY WORD.

That the person who created that text has not picked up on, sigh, groan.

Insert here a lament for the decline in copy-editing and proof-reading, which might have spotted this sort of thing and corrected it.

I am a little worried that we are now have generations who do not know what words actually mean, because spell-check has not said anything .

This is brought to you by having encountered the term 'itinerary' deployed for something that is not, as far as I can see, a journey, but the programme/timetable for a meeting. Perhaps there is some sense of a progression to be made???

(The mermaids signing, each to each: that is why I cannot hear them.)

Is anybody else have that thing where certain sites just Will Not with Firefox? The latest for me is that academia.edu won't let me log in, fortunately this is not particularly critical I suppose, but other sites are an online supermarket I have been ordering from for some years and a library I have been using since pretty much forever (and this well post-dates any of the annoying updates of their site). Various other more intermittent and occasional examples, grrrr.

Yet again, former workplace email is not letting me log in (it's barely a month since the last time this happened), and they are taking a particularly long time to resolve the issue. Moan whinge. I still do have people/journals/etc who have that email for me, even if those communications are increasingly infrequent. Also pissed off that they have starting purging old emails without actually informing people, or at least telling me. Ugh.

Am also being rather irked by whoever is running the social media account of an institution I know, and focusing on cool quirky stuff and failing to draw attention to major research collections, even when we have been having various awareness Days and Weeks which one would have thought would be ideal prompts to big stuff up.

(There was also the describing of certain images as 'post-war aesthetic' when I was 'those look entirely like 1930s municipal modernism if they're not literally the Pioneer Health Centre', being promoted as lovely examples for the Welfare State. I refrained from getting pedantic on their ass, go me.)

I was also, on a tangential subject, annoyed by a review of a book in Literary Review which describes Doris Lessing as abandoning her children, when I think what actually happened was she lost custody when she got divorced? (There was thread on Bluesky just now on Lack of Factchecking in Books These Days.)

I Can't Believe That I Forgot To Mention:

NAOMI MITCHISON!!!

Admittedly this was a time when, however much she was a heroine of mine, she was even more niche (or, I suppose, given her plethora of interests and activisms, niches) than she is now. It was at a reading in one of the smaller (in fact, very small) venues in the Royal Festival Hall complex, organised by the archivist of Mass Observation, so I guess this was about the time NM's MO diary was being published? Though she was actually reading her poetry. Early to mid 80s.

So after the reading I had some chat with my archivist mate on certain matters of mutual interest, and then, the initial rush to speak to NM having dispersed somewhat I ventured to go and say how much I was a fan, and did she ever think of reissuing her 1930s publisher-expurgated novel with the cuts restored? Alas, she said, doubted that the original text remained in its intact state. Also saw her (but not, as I recall, to speak to) at a JBS Haldane Centenary thing at the Science Museum some few years later.

Other rather niche writer of similar period I met - at least a bit niche/neglected at the time, her books are now having a revival - Celia Fremlin. Actually met her some time in the 90s because I was visiting her husband, who was involved in a progressive organisation of the 30s in which I was interested. She was interesting but a bit scary.

Plus, one day in the mid 80s I was attending a seminar at the academic department associated with My Former Workplace, and for some reason the polymathic Jonathan Miller ('theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician') was attending. I was able to correct a comment he made about Criysede in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde ending up with leprosy - that actually happens in Henryson's version of the tale, The Testament of Cresseid, wow, such pedant.

What I read

While pottering about the internet, I discovered that there were two posthumously published works by Desmond Cory, a prolific British thriller writer of the mid-C20th whom no-one else I know has ever read but whose works I have mostly quite enjoyed. There are clearly other fans out there, or possibly family members, who maintain a website, republish the early works, and have done these on Kindle.

One of them was the fourth volume in the late Professor Dobie series, The Shy Traffickers (2016), which are perhaps somewhat lighter in tone - even farcical? - than his earlier works and this also gets rather satirical about tabloid journalism. Had it actually gone through more formal publishing processes, a competent copy-editor might have picked up that it is not the British Medical Association but the General Medical Council which is responsible for striking doctors off the Register (medical historian pedantry).

On the Gulf (2012) is set in a fictional Gulf state c. I think the early 80s, with an cast of assorted locals and foreigners of miscellaneous origins and various agendas going on. Possibly put aside for further revision? Definitely on the grimmer side.

I then took a (somewhat) lighter turn by re-reading (first time in many years) Dorothy L Sayers, Busman's Honeymoon (1937), which remains excellent.

On the go

Still working my way through Lake of Souls: I am somehow not terribly warming up to these stories.

Currently working on the Rev Richard Coles, Murder Before Evensong (Canon Clement #1) (2022): this is set I think c. 1980s but the chronology seems a bit odd - how old are some of these people? if they remember the War that well? - and there is also a certain feeling that maybe he really wanted to be writing a cosy slightly B Pymish novel of village life and feuds over the church flowers and so on, and familial tensions, but then we get a really rather brutal murder actually in the church. There's also some weird pacing.

Up next

Probably that book I read from the library years ago that somebody mentioned in Books of My Life, and I was astonished that someone else had both read it and remembered it, so ordered a copy.

And no, this is not me getting my historian nitcomb out for some historical or historically-inflected fantasy work.

This is a novel set in what is apparently The Present Day, within a decade or so, in New York City about a reasonably affluent, educated, etc, middle-class couple, with one child with special education needs.

I can perhaps just about believe that the ditzy wife is using a diaphragm + gel for contraception, but honestly, I would not have thought that an entirely sound choice given that they do not seem to be aiming to increase the family. Given that she is a habitual over-sharer, I am a bit surprised she does not provide TMI on her contraceptive choices to some entirely inappropriate person in the course of the narrative.

Anyway, at one point she thinks she has fallen pregnant.

Perhaps my US readers can enlighten me - is it not possible to walk into a drugstore and purchase home pregnancy tests in your fair country? I can see that heading down the line this may indeed become an issue, but as at say 5-10 years ago?

At no point do Our Married Couple contemplate this. There is a whole lot of blahblah about how inconvenient that her gynaecologist has gone away for a short break so she cannot go in for a test there - and when she finally does it is a blood test (???).

There is a whole - I'm not sure one could call it exactly a subplot - a minor motif, around husband's very young secretary being very new to adulting and finding him a Fount of Wisdom on all sorts of bits of common worldly knowledge, but I can't help thinking that she might be a bit more sussed on this particular thing.

I suppose our protags are Gen X, rather than Millenials, but (IR Hystorianne, also a mate of mine has just writ The Definitive History of the Rise of the Pregnancy Test) the first home pregnancy test came out in the 70s. It was, we will concede, a good deal more faffsome than the current model.

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.

Am currently reading, or trying to read, book for review.

And apart from the fact that I am not sure that it is doing any very necessary work, or maybe that is just because it is working in a newish field adjacent to my own, on a topic that I have had a lot to do with over the years -

I feel myself being rather nitpicky with it, as in, looking at the bibliography and going 'Y No [X, Y, never mind Y no MEEEEEEE?]' who I would have thought had done significant pertinent work.

And there is the Thing that is entirely wrong about the Heated Debate around VD prophylaxis and the British Army, which admittedly is about a sentence but footnoted to someone who I fancy would not like it attrib to them.

And there is the comparison between a French woman novelist and Jane 'Austin', and while national character may have had a bearing, writing at opposite ends of the C19th and being in entirely different social milieux probably had quite a bit to do with their differences.

While there is that thing, that I have noticed in other works, which I put down to spell-checkers only noticing whether a word is correctly spelt, not if it is a word which actually makes sense in the context. Which gives the sense of the author having thrown words which sound vaguely like the word intended at the page, and is really rather annoying.

Are these things edited? Do they go out to external readers? Answer comes there none.

This is published by what purports to be the academic arm of a major publisher at eyewatering price.

What I read

Finished Metaphysical Animals and felt I was not really connecting with it - it was doing a bit the kind of biographical writing I tend to bounce off, combined with rather dense passages about the actual philosophical work these women were doing, and it all didn't quite mesh, somehow.

After reading this article, I went looking for the works of Shirley Hazzard, with a vague recollection that I might have read something of hers, back in the day, or did I only read a review or comments in some work of litcrit. Anyway, I downloaded People in Glass Houses: A Novel (1967), which is actually linked short stories set in what one deduces is the UN, but could be any huge international bureaucratic organisation, pretty much, and has the general air of dystopian satire. Very good and I think I might venture on more of her work.

Discovered that ebook of JD Robb, Desperation in Death (#55) (2022) had finally come down to a price equivalent, more or less, to old mass market paperback, and got that. Felt the beginning was somewhat setting up for a different kind of story we didn't get (a conflict very quickly resolved in favour of ACTION), but after that it was pacey if involving rather grim international criminal sex-trafficking. Yes, I do sometimes wish we would occasionally get Dallas dealing with the equivalent of a country-house murder mystery...

RF Kuang, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (2022), which was powerful and gripping in many ways, but, alas, had That Thing which is always going to niggle me and slightly throw me out of an AU/historical narrative in which the author has, in fact, Done A Lot Of Research on the central things they are concerned with, but there are nonetheless various contextual anomalies, anachronisms and inaccuracies. Given that this was pretty much meant to be England of the period with just That One Thing added in (i.e. the silver & translation magic and its knock-on effects for who got recruited to the Tower), there were things that didn't seem to me that could be handwaved as, 'it's AU' (I have muttered before about people having Oxford professors married prior to 1877). Particularly odd was the claim (made more than once) that opium was illegal in England while they were trying to push it on China, at a time when there might have been a stigma in going, like John Jasper in Edwin Drood, to a sinister opium den, but nonetheless opium preparations were the most commonly available analgesic and consumed by all classes, and opium poppies were cultivated on English soil. (Actual poisons were completely unregulated too.)

On the go

Still a bit bogged down in The Absentee - all these nasty people Lord C meets... and he is an awful prig.

Have started Louise McDonald, Clemence Dane: Forgotten Feminist Writer of the Interwar Years (2021), but yes, definitely research reading. Ditto on the go (research), Delafield, First Love/aka What is Love (1929), which is a bit of a downer.

Up next

No idea: I think I am up for some comfort re-reading, but I can't even think of what tickles my fancy in that direction, sigh.

What I read

I really became quite engrossed by Helen - o what a tangled web &C&C - reminded of Yonge and the fatal effects of 'want of openness' - rather good.

Then read Manning Coles, Alias Uncle Hugo (1952) - spy thriller, from rec somewhere on Twitter - okay but not particularly sold on the author, if I want to read spy shenanigans of that period I think I will dig up my collection of Desmond Corys.

Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801), which I had read before ages ago and did not remember much about. Including the period racism (which probably was not that bad for 1801??? comparatively?) and the perhaps rather gratuitous introduction of Jewish moneylender? Did vaguely remember that there was - I'm not sure one can call Harriott Freke precisely gender-queer - gender-problematic? in that she cross-dresses and behaves in deliberately non-feminine ways, but is also married (and apparently promotes husband's political career), has young protegee who she leads to ruin by letting her be led on by a male seducer, embroils her female friends in her sptireful pranks and quarrels - I daresay there is litcrit on this? - at one point Chevalier d'Eon is invoked as a point of comparison - but is a force of disruption as much as anything. Apart from those elements the main issue I had with the novel, which has its engrossing elements, was that of awkward pacing/structure: the Lady Delacour strand pretty much winds up and then there are swathes of pages to go sorting out the mystery of Clarence Hervey's young lady at Windsor and Belinda's courtship decisions between him and Vincent (Qu: would 'creole' at this period be a racialised category or merely mean somebody born of settler stock in the Caribbean?)

Annick Trent, Beck and Call (2021). Late Georgian m/m romance between 2 valets with blackmail issues in the mix. Quite low-key. Also while I thought the central stuff about life in service, reading clubs and fears around sedition seemed well-researched, niggly pedant ol' me had various little qualms over period usage - including 'blackmail', which it is difficult to trace being used in this particular sense earlier than mid-C19th (as opposed to levy to prevent cattle-raids), music-halls were not a thing for quite a while yet, and I don't think rifles were used to shoot game-birds.

On the go

Maria Edgeworth Patronage (1815), which is very long.

Up next

There is a new Literary Review

Still plodding on with book for review (Y U no cite meeeeeee?).

Have got what would appear a go-ahead to dive into some reading for proposed chapter - aaaargh! (means actually digging out buried books...)