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Reading Roundup, March 2024
Mar. 31st, 2024 01:31 pmI dabbled in a lot of things this month—that’s what spring break gets you! The trip to San Francisco was better than the reading I did during it, though. Ha.
Claudine - Riyoko Ikeda
An absolutely fantastic one-volume manga about Claudine/Claude, who struggles with gender identity and romances with women. I have to pause here and explain that the translation I read primarily uses Claudine and she/her pronouns to refer to the protagonist, though the character uses Claude and he/him pronouns to refer to himself on a couple of occasions. I’m going to stick to Claude and he/him, but I think it could go a few different ways depending on whether read in translation or the original Japanese, which translation, etc.—and the story was written in the 1970s, so terminology as a whole has obviously changed since then!
Claude is fucking gorgeous, and the story is well-worth reading for the art. He’s a tragic character—he always falls in love with girls and women he can’t fully have, either because societal forces separate them or because the women he loves pursue more conventional relationships with cis men. He dies by suicide at the end of the volume, which could feel contrived but landed as very apt for the story, IMO. It is a definite, self-contained work. I think it was important for the reader to see how Claude’s circumstances made him feel hopeless. I didn’t personally find this depressing, just tragic.
I loved so much of this, but two things in particular:
(1) Claude is admired and considered attractive, without qualification, by so many of his peers. Especially the girls! There are these delightful scenes of his time as a child/teenager when girls are fighting over his attention, or want him as a guest at their party, and so forth. Their crushes on him are treated as routine and normal and obvious, because he’s straightforwardly hot and compelling. Which, I cannot emphasize enough, he is. He is devastatingly sexy in all his appearances.
(2) One girl not-friend, Rosemarie, from his childhood continues to pine after him as they grow up. This especially sells the tragedy to me—if only we could control who we love! Claude and Rosemarie would be a wonderful couple. Rosemarie sees and values him exactly as he is. There’s this awful sense of missed connection, of the world’s alignment being just slightly off, and in a gentler life Claude and Rosemarie would have been together, either from childhood or when reunited as adults. It begs for fix-it fic.
And truly I’m underselling what magnitude of story gets packed into this one volume. It’s amazing. Definitely go read it; the scanlation is online here!
Jeremy - Hugh Walpole
The first of my DNF’ed travel novels. Jeremy is mentioned in this fascinating reflection from an author who grew up in those early-20th-c. boarding schools. He said that it and David Blaize were used as a sort of introduction to sexual or romantic liaisons between boys at school, and I went, well! I know David, of course, but I have yet to make the acquaintance of Jeremy!
Jeremy is the first of a trio of novels about the young life of Jeremy Cole, and although it was charming in its own right, it covers about a year in the lead-up to Jeremy leaving for school. I started doubting the pace would lead us to the school, skimmed ahead, and confirmed that fear. Boo. I’ll have to pick up with the second novel (after confirming it is indeed the school one). I’m really curious to know whether something mentioned alongside David Blaize could be as open about relationships between boys as David Blaize was. It just wasn’t in the scope of this book!
The Private Memories and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
The other of my DNF’ed travel novels. I tried this on a rec, knowing it was outside of my usual wheelhouse. And it did hold me for a good long while! The novel is told in two parts: the first is an outsider POV on the decline of a Scottish noble (? - I’m so sorry, I don’t know the appropriate terminology!) family. A very religious wife marries in, is appalled by her husband’s drinking and partying on their wedding night, and from then on holds a separate household. She has two sons: one by her husband, another probably by her reverend. The sons are raised apart, one murders the other but gets away with it for some time, the father dies of grief, etc. etc. It’s all very dramatic! There are mysterious circumstances surrounding the main death and the outsider isn’t sure how to explain them! Scottish politics!
The second part, told from the perspective of the murderous brother, reveals that the explanation for the mysterious/improbable elements of the tale is that he was hanging around with Probably Literal Satan.
I tried, really, but that effectively killed my interest in the story. I haven’t ever been into stories about how Satan walks among us and leads people to sin or encourages their worst impulses, and I guess this one was less tolerable because I hadn’t anticipated it. I was thinking that the answer for the supernatural-seeming elements might be like… a body-double? Disguise? Tricks of the mind, or natural phenomena? Or even just left unexplained and for the reader to speculate on. Not Literal Satan. I find Christianity the least-interesting direction for a story about dissolution into despair to go. At least make me muddle through the social forces of Scottish politics or something, you know?
The Man Who Went Too Far - E. F. Benson
I had not read one of Benson’s ghost stories before this! Which seems like an oversight, especially as it’s a detail he built so thoroughly into the David Blaize world. This one showed up in the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bitesizedfandomsex tagset so, well. It was good! The atmosphere is suitably ethereal in that Victwardian-era ‘preoccupation with the horrors of the natural world’ way, such that you can really get into the idea of an old-world god lurking around country forests, preying on the Englishmen who think they can comprehend him.
I like this genre of ‘ghost’ story more than the actual ghost ones I’ve read, and much more than the ‘satan wanders the earth’ type, thought one would think there’s an equivalence between different sorts of deities. I dunno! This did lead me to searching up academic articles about Benson’s story, and there’s an MA thesis going into various Victorian and Edwardian Pan appearances in literature. (I then caught one in my next book!) But it explains something, at least to me and at least emotionally, about the appearance of Bacchus in Narnia… he’d been wandering in and out of British books for decades by then. Why not Narnia, that wildest of fantasy worlds?
Anyway, I hope the nominator shows up to request this one! I thoroughly enjoyed it.
A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
Look, I was afraid of this coming across to me as unbearably het, and it did. That’s the short review.
Lucy is my least-favorite Forster protagonist. I don’t rely on his books to always compel me through their protagonists—Maurice is a great example of that—but Lucy is just. All of this novel. It’s really all Lucy in a way that I’d forgotten he could do, having most recently read Where Angels Fear to Tread which balanced a few characters. And with credit to this being the intention, she’s flawed—but I struggled to empathize with her through those flaws.
I asked myself why: her self-repression is not dissimilar from what I go wild for in someone like Clive Durham, and yet reading this was almost a chore. Maybe it does just come down to her being a straight woman. All that repression is in service of attraction to a man. Maybe with more context to the ways in which that would have bucked social norms of the era I might relate to it better. But as it stands, it mostly felt like Lucy spent the book stepping on her own toes and then looking for someone else to blame, or at least some way to disown her own choices leading to it.
I think that, had Cecil (the man she does not marry) or Freddy (her brother) been given more page-time, I might have liked them. They are sketched as potentially-interesting types of Forster men. They don’t have it, though, and any potential slashing of them lives entirely in the realm of thought exercise.
The character I came out of the novel most intrigued by was Mr. Beebe, Lucy’s local reverend. Forster uses him to provide an outside perspective on the romance between Lucy and the unsuitable, awkward George Emerson when Lucy’s perspective threatens to become too intolerable. It is, I think, supposed to be an unselfconscious perspective—older religious man, but a sensible one, with no real part to play in the drama of young people—and for that reason an interesting queerness creeps into him. He hits me as asexual, but not as a matter of religious piety, and it’s a curious view to dwell in for a novel which is supposed to be about the passions of romance! I think I clicked with him because that’s how I felt about the Lucy/George romance, as well: completely flat. There’s a Christopher Isherwood quote about himself that always occurs to me when thinking about these old books—Isherwood, reflecting in the 70s, calls his early novels sexless. He says he was too afraid to acknowledge the real attractions undercutting his semi-autobiographical narratives, that between male characters. And idk, I’m likely projecting too much of my dissatisfaction into my reading here, but I did feel like ARwaV was sexless. It might have been adapted (film, theatre, etc.) not to be! I don’t know. But I’ve read Forster writing eroticism, and I don’t think this was it. The asexuality of Mr. Beebe observing the proceedings felt the most authentic perspective of all, and that’s a queer one.
Forster’s writing remains my favorite, as always. I couldn’t enjoy the plot in this one, but that didn’t stop me from highlighting so many lovely subtle lines of his writing. Just one, to illustrate something I think he does so well:
There’s probably some term for this type of contrast, where a word is used alongside an action which should really be the opposite of its meaning, and the reader is meant to pick up on something about a character because of it. Forster does so much work to characterize people through their contradictions and mundane bad behaviors, and it’s a delight. He’s a fantastic observer of humanity.
To-Date Ranking of Forster Novels:
(1) ✨The Longest Journey✨
(2) Where Angels Fear to Tread
(3) Maurice*
(4) A Room with a View
*Contains my favorite Forster character, Clive Durham
Back next month with probably just a reflection on my Middlemarch reading group experience, which finishes late April!
Claudine - Riyoko Ikeda
An absolutely fantastic one-volume manga about Claudine/Claude, who struggles with gender identity and romances with women. I have to pause here and explain that the translation I read primarily uses Claudine and she/her pronouns to refer to the protagonist, though the character uses Claude and he/him pronouns to refer to himself on a couple of occasions. I’m going to stick to Claude and he/him, but I think it could go a few different ways depending on whether read in translation or the original Japanese, which translation, etc.—and the story was written in the 1970s, so terminology as a whole has obviously changed since then!
Spoilers for the end
Claude is fucking gorgeous, and the story is well-worth reading for the art. He’s a tragic character—he always falls in love with girls and women he can’t fully have, either because societal forces separate them or because the women he loves pursue more conventional relationships with cis men. He dies by suicide at the end of the volume, which could feel contrived but landed as very apt for the story, IMO. It is a definite, self-contained work. I think it was important for the reader to see how Claude’s circumstances made him feel hopeless. I didn’t personally find this depressing, just tragic.
I loved so much of this, but two things in particular:
(1) Claude is admired and considered attractive, without qualification, by so many of his peers. Especially the girls! There are these delightful scenes of his time as a child/teenager when girls are fighting over his attention, or want him as a guest at their party, and so forth. Their crushes on him are treated as routine and normal and obvious, because he’s straightforwardly hot and compelling. Which, I cannot emphasize enough, he is. He is devastatingly sexy in all his appearances.
(2) One girl not-friend, Rosemarie, from his childhood continues to pine after him as they grow up. This especially sells the tragedy to me—if only we could control who we love! Claude and Rosemarie would be a wonderful couple. Rosemarie sees and values him exactly as he is. There’s this awful sense of missed connection, of the world’s alignment being just slightly off, and in a gentler life Claude and Rosemarie would have been together, either from childhood or when reunited as adults. It begs for fix-it fic.
And truly I’m underselling what magnitude of story gets packed into this one volume. It’s amazing. Definitely go read it; the scanlation is online here!
Jeremy - Hugh Walpole
The first of my DNF’ed travel novels. Jeremy is mentioned in this fascinating reflection from an author who grew up in those early-20th-c. boarding schools. He said that it and David Blaize were used as a sort of introduction to sexual or romantic liaisons between boys at school, and I went, well! I know David, of course, but I have yet to make the acquaintance of Jeremy!
Jeremy is the first of a trio of novels about the young life of Jeremy Cole, and although it was charming in its own right, it covers about a year in the lead-up to Jeremy leaving for school. I started doubting the pace would lead us to the school, skimmed ahead, and confirmed that fear. Boo. I’ll have to pick up with the second novel (after confirming it is indeed the school one). I’m really curious to know whether something mentioned alongside David Blaize could be as open about relationships between boys as David Blaize was. It just wasn’t in the scope of this book!
The Private Memories and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg
The other of my DNF’ed travel novels. I tried this on a rec, knowing it was outside of my usual wheelhouse. And it did hold me for a good long while! The novel is told in two parts: the first is an outsider POV on the decline of a Scottish noble (? - I’m so sorry, I don’t know the appropriate terminology!) family. A very religious wife marries in, is appalled by her husband’s drinking and partying on their wedding night, and from then on holds a separate household. She has two sons: one by her husband, another probably by her reverend. The sons are raised apart, one murders the other but gets away with it for some time, the father dies of grief, etc. etc. It’s all very dramatic! There are mysterious circumstances surrounding the main death and the outsider isn’t sure how to explain them! Scottish politics!
Then we get into the second part… spoilers for the twist
The second part, told from the perspective of the murderous brother, reveals that the explanation for the mysterious/improbable elements of the tale is that he was hanging around with Probably Literal Satan.
I tried, really, but that effectively killed my interest in the story. I haven’t ever been into stories about how Satan walks among us and leads people to sin or encourages their worst impulses, and I guess this one was less tolerable because I hadn’t anticipated it. I was thinking that the answer for the supernatural-seeming elements might be like… a body-double? Disguise? Tricks of the mind, or natural phenomena? Or even just left unexplained and for the reader to speculate on. Not Literal Satan. I find Christianity the least-interesting direction for a story about dissolution into despair to go. At least make me muddle through the social forces of Scottish politics or something, you know?
The Man Who Went Too Far - E. F. Benson
I had not read one of Benson’s ghost stories before this! Which seems like an oversight, especially as it’s a detail he built so thoroughly into the David Blaize world. This one showed up in the
bitesizedfandomsex tagset so, well. It was good! The atmosphere is suitably ethereal in that Victwardian-era ‘preoccupation with the horrors of the natural world’ way, such that you can really get into the idea of an old-world god lurking around country forests, preying on the Englishmen who think they can comprehend him. I like this genre of ‘ghost’ story more than the actual ghost ones I’ve read, and much more than the ‘satan wanders the earth’ type, thought one would think there’s an equivalence between different sorts of deities. I dunno! This did lead me to searching up academic articles about Benson’s story, and there’s an MA thesis going into various Victorian and Edwardian Pan appearances in literature. (I then caught one in my next book!) But it explains something, at least to me and at least emotionally, about the appearance of Bacchus in Narnia… he’d been wandering in and out of British books for decades by then. Why not Narnia, that wildest of fantasy worlds?
Anyway, I hope the nominator shows up to request this one! I thoroughly enjoyed it.
A Room with a View - E. M. Forster
Look, I was afraid of this coming across to me as unbearably het, and it did. That’s the short review.
Longer review
Lucy is my least-favorite Forster protagonist. I don’t rely on his books to always compel me through their protagonists—Maurice is a great example of that—but Lucy is just. All of this novel. It’s really all Lucy in a way that I’d forgotten he could do, having most recently read Where Angels Fear to Tread which balanced a few characters. And with credit to this being the intention, she’s flawed—but I struggled to empathize with her through those flaws.
I asked myself why: her self-repression is not dissimilar from what I go wild for in someone like Clive Durham, and yet reading this was almost a chore. Maybe it does just come down to her being a straight woman. All that repression is in service of attraction to a man. Maybe with more context to the ways in which that would have bucked social norms of the era I might relate to it better. But as it stands, it mostly felt like Lucy spent the book stepping on her own toes and then looking for someone else to blame, or at least some way to disown her own choices leading to it.
I think that, had Cecil (the man she does not marry) or Freddy (her brother) been given more page-time, I might have liked them. They are sketched as potentially-interesting types of Forster men. They don’t have it, though, and any potential slashing of them lives entirely in the realm of thought exercise.
The character I came out of the novel most intrigued by was Mr. Beebe, Lucy’s local reverend. Forster uses him to provide an outside perspective on the romance between Lucy and the unsuitable, awkward George Emerson when Lucy’s perspective threatens to become too intolerable. It is, I think, supposed to be an unselfconscious perspective—older religious man, but a sensible one, with no real part to play in the drama of young people—and for that reason an interesting queerness creeps into him. He hits me as asexual, but not as a matter of religious piety, and it’s a curious view to dwell in for a novel which is supposed to be about the passions of romance! I think I clicked with him because that’s how I felt about the Lucy/George romance, as well: completely flat. There’s a Christopher Isherwood quote about himself that always occurs to me when thinking about these old books—Isherwood, reflecting in the 70s, calls his early novels sexless. He says he was too afraid to acknowledge the real attractions undercutting his semi-autobiographical narratives, that between male characters. And idk, I’m likely projecting too much of my dissatisfaction into my reading here, but I did feel like ARwaV was sexless. It might have been adapted (film, theatre, etc.) not to be! I don’t know. But I’ve read Forster writing eroticism, and I don’t think this was it. The asexuality of Mr. Beebe observing the proceedings felt the most authentic perspective of all, and that’s a queer one.
Forster’s writing remains my favorite, as always. I couldn’t enjoy the plot in this one, but that didn’t stop me from highlighting so many lovely subtle lines of his writing. Just one, to illustrate something I think he does so well:
It was a blustering day, and the wind had taken and broken the
dahlias. Mrs. Honeychurch, who looked cross, was tying them up, while Miss
Bartlett, unsuitably dressed, impeded her with offers of assistance.
There’s probably some term for this type of contrast, where a word is used alongside an action which should really be the opposite of its meaning, and the reader is meant to pick up on something about a character because of it. Forster does so much work to characterize people through their contradictions and mundane bad behaviors, and it’s a delight. He’s a fantastic observer of humanity.
To-Date Ranking of Forster Novels:
(1) ✨The Longest Journey✨
(2) Where Angels Fear to Tread
(3) Maurice*
(4) A Room with a View
*Contains my favorite Forster character, Clive Durham
Back next month with probably just a reflection on my Middlemarch reading group experience, which finishes late April!
