Reading Roundup, August 2024
Aug. 24th, 2024 04:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI read a lot this month! And most of it after I finished my vacation. I can’t explain this, even given how short most of these are. I guess I was just in a reading mood.
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
I knew this book would feel different from Forster’s other novels—it was written a decade after Maurice, the last of them, and after so many changes in Forster’s personal circumstances. I suppose that’s why I gravitated towards it last.
This book is told in three parts, and I must admit I found two of the three boring. The first, the opening, is very slow and long—over a quarter of the book. I reflected on the comparatively grabbing start of Howards End as I read it. HE throws the reader into the middle of two sisters’ established relationship, a relationship which drives the novel. It is risky, but compelling to my tastes. Passage commits to the work of establishing four main characters, all of whom are relative or total strangers to each other, and does so ponderously. Their early intercourse is limited. They are mostly separated and trapped in interactions with secondary characters whose role in the story is to reinforce division (between Indians and the British). Explicitly so! The overriding theme of the novel is cultural division. I don’t suggest that Forster wrote this opening unintentionally, but that he wrote it for an audience I am not: white Brits in the 1920s who have not personally encountered India or many Indians, and who need some persuasion and scene-setting.
The second part was characteristic compelling Forster. It is here that he handles the famous subject of the novel, a false assault accusation against an Indian man by a white woman. The incident’s events are told carefully. Forster leaves no doubt as to Dr. Aziz’s innocence, and his faults (genial lying or exaggeration for the sake of agreeability) are clearly explained. A reader cannot doubt him. Nor does Forster ask us to hate his accuser, Miss Quested, whose shock is manipulated by other Brits to their own political ends—and as mentioned, these characters have already been set up as divisive, partisan, and racist. I was biting my nails through the arrest and trial, worried for poor Aziz, and I celebrated with the narrative when he was freed by Miss Quested retracting her accusation.
But then came the third part, the shortest by far, where we must confront the lesson of the novel: there can be no lasting friendship across racial lines under British Imperialism. As a moral lesson, I get it. And I am impressed—Forster’s youthful anti-imperialist stance was only fortified by his service in India, something he shows his own characters as unable to achieve. As a narrative resolution, though, it is expectedly dreary.
I find this book challenging to recommend. So much of its context is foreign to me, and I’m guessing a reader more informed about this era of British and Indian history would pick up many things I did not. However, I do not want to under-appreciate its reflection of Forster’s values, and I would certainly want to rank it higher than A Room With a View in consideration of that. I can’t say it’s anywhere near my favorite—perhaps that makes my prior comment hypocritical. I am glad to have read it. I may need to separately reflect on the Forster Novel Reading Experience and my journey through it. I can’t believe that I’ve finished them!
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
I’ve heard that this book is commonly assigned reading for high school students in the US. It was not for me, but I can see why it would be—the omnipresence of WWII and all of the ways it shows up in the narrative would be great for teaching literary devices—but I can also see why it is no longer as favored. The other omnipresent theme is homoeroticism, and I’m not sure that the context of a modern high school is equipped to handle the discomfort of reading portrayals of romantic friendship. Perversely, it would be easier to engage with that at a time when you could issue a flat denial—they’re not gay—than at a time when you must discuss the possibility that they are.
Gene and Finny are not boys that I like. There’s something intolerable in their athleticism. It may be the Americanness of it, that I can relate their boyish admiration for sport to familiar cultural touchstones. I didn’t struggle to enjoy the book despite that. Gene’s first-person narration is beautiful. Knowles has a knack for writing non-sequitur observations which throw the emotions of his dialogue into sharp relief. Gene is always noticing something about the world around him, rather than telling you how he feels. I suppose that was why I fell a little bit in love with him, though he is in so many ways a pushover and a bad friend and generally unlikable. I relate to his avoidance. Looking inward is painful, and people might not forgive you when you own up to your mistakes!
Finny won me over in his last possible moment, when Gene visits him in the infirmary after his second fall. The boys reconcile, and in that reconciliation, Finny is straight with Gene for the first time in the novel. He talks about how he needed his conspiracy theories to help him emotionally process—or, well, not—his disability and the fact that he could never serve in the war.
I don’t like relationships built on loyalty tests and fraught with power dynamics, generally. This has been a notable pain point for me in past fandoms. Finny/Gene was that throughout the whole novel. But this glimpse of a Finny who can acknowledge what he has been doing, and how it was a reaction to his own pain, gives me an angle on the character. I can see how I would make my way to a Finny who did not need cruel games, or to a Finny/Gene where those cruelties were intentional and wanted by both parties. They have a very kinky dynamic, honestly, but it needs time to develop without so many other teen boys around.
Overall this was a gorgeous novel and a fast read. It gets added to my pile of midcentury novels about boys in adolescence as a tapestry for examining greater social/political shifts. It is an extremely worthy addition.
I also wrote a fic for this after finishing:
A Good Sport, ~3k. Sports Men by Haruomi Hosono was the soundtrack.
Mike and Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse
I put this one off for a good long while. Do you ever encounter that sort of mental resistance, of knowing that a piece of beloved media will not land for you and so you don’t want to consume it and confirm that knowledge? I’m not letting anyone down by not connecting with a book, but as tied to broader English boarding school fandom as this one is, I still felt that unreasonable disappointment.
The book itself is good. Wodehouse is a great, clever writer and I break no new ground by observing that. I described this to my spouse as the school novel I would recommend to someone with no real interest in the genre, but who wanted to be able to say that they’d read a well-written example of it. This novel was amusing and easy to read and required fairly little context to pick up and enjoy. I can’t fault it from that perspective at all.
But from a fannish perspective, I found Mike and Psmith and Mike/Psmith significantly less compelling than David/Frank or others I have enjoyed. What can I say? I like the sentiment of those very earnest morality tales and how they fall into, intentionally or not, such moving depictions of love or rivalry between boys.
Mike is our POV character and the sportsy type, not motivated by schoolwork. In deference to this we get almost no classroom scenes, and no real mention of academic labor. He is disappointed to change schools so close to the end of his time at them, and to miss being made captain of the cricket team at his old one. Chance allows him to meet Psmith, born Smith but affecting a silent leading P, who has similarly undergone a late-in-schooling transfer from Eton. They are quick to become friends and cement that friendship through hijinks, an easy acceptance of the other’s flaws, and a shared appreciation for cricket.
When people love this book, they seem to love Psmith. His affected personality and manner of speaking are extremely distinctive. He is memorable in a way that most characters are not. Unfortunately I found this larger-than-life quality to be narratively distancing, more than it was amusing to me, and so he generally fell flat in my reading. Again, a bit of sincerity or a sobering moment would not have gone amiss. I’ve been told to follow this up with Psmith in the City, but I think I will pass on more of the series and stick to enjoying exchange fic when it shows up, as fans fill in the sentiment that I find myself missing.
Owen Wingrave, Henry James
I spied this in the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ficinabox tagset and was intrigued.
Have you ever put yourself through James’ prose? I can now say that I have. This short story was a ghost story, which I didn’t know from the outset. James’ prose, combined with the slow build towards the ghostly elements, left me wondering what exactly I was reading for a good 75% of the piece. I should have guessed it would be a ghost story, all of these Victwardian short stories seem to be, and so that one’s on me.
Anyway, a character dies in that classically abrupt “a ghost did it” way that all these stories go, and that’s the end. My conclusion is that Henry James should not have written, and least of all ghost stories.
The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story, Isabel Quigly
This was mentioned in a Tumblr post and, as it was available for two-week lending on the Internet Archive, of course I snapped it up. Quigly covers the progression of the genre through specific exemplar authors, and so I skipped and skimmed as needed. She is also extremely opinionated in her evaluation of the literary merits of these books, and sometimes I had to skim out of sheer disagreement.
The most enjoyable part was seeing the familiarity of all the names and titles. She covers Tom Brown, per the title, but also books by Farrar, Talbot Baines Reed, Hugh Walpole, E. F. Benson, Wodehouse, Alec Waugh, and then also authors I haven’t read. But so so many that I have! Piecing this history together on my own over the past two years yielded a nearly identical reading list and set of classics. I love that this genre has been kept alive for its nostalgia and queer appeal both.
I wouldn’t say that Quigly goes in with any special depth beyond the initial chapter on Tom Brown, and I took this mostly as confirmatory reading, with a small side effect of recommending a few new titles to consider. (Wish me luck on my interlibrary loan request for a book which was only printed twice, in 1930/1931.) I also must critique her disinterest and, frankly, poor eye for queerness in school stories. She mentions it where relevant, but it often gets a much shorter treatment than other aspects of the stories, and she falls back on biographical details of the author and citations to other critiques to deliver her commentary on homosexuality. As this is my main interest in the genre, I found it disappointing.
For my girls’ school story friends, I’ll note that she spends just one chapter on Angela Brazil and nothing else. For Quigly, the school story is very much the domain of boys.
This did make me incredibly fond of Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s again. (Quigly doesn’t comment on its potential queer reading at all, though.) I adore Loman and Greenfield beyond all measure, and it was delightful to see them and Talbot Baines Reed recognized for their contributions to the genre, when current fandom tends towards later comers. Interestingly, Quigly calls Benson quite forgotten. I believe the reissue softcovers by Peter Burton (under Millivres Books, a gay men’s imprint) postdate this book. Which is another point in my favor for the importance of recognizing the queerness of these novels and of the genre as a whole—it was a gay man who rescued David Blaize from passing totally into obscurity!
A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
I knew this book would feel different from Forster’s other novels—it was written a decade after Maurice, the last of them, and after so many changes in Forster’s personal circumstances. I suppose that’s why I gravitated towards it last.
This book is told in three parts, and I must admit I found two of the three boring. The first, the opening, is very slow and long—over a quarter of the book. I reflected on the comparatively grabbing start of Howards End as I read it. HE throws the reader into the middle of two sisters’ established relationship, a relationship which drives the novel. It is risky, but compelling to my tastes. Passage commits to the work of establishing four main characters, all of whom are relative or total strangers to each other, and does so ponderously. Their early intercourse is limited. They are mostly separated and trapped in interactions with secondary characters whose role in the story is to reinforce division (between Indians and the British). Explicitly so! The overriding theme of the novel is cultural division. I don’t suggest that Forster wrote this opening unintentionally, but that he wrote it for an audience I am not: white Brits in the 1920s who have not personally encountered India or many Indians, and who need some persuasion and scene-setting.
The second part was characteristic compelling Forster. It is here that he handles the famous subject of the novel, a false assault accusation against an Indian man by a white woman. The incident’s events are told carefully. Forster leaves no doubt as to Dr. Aziz’s innocence, and his faults (genial lying or exaggeration for the sake of agreeability) are clearly explained. A reader cannot doubt him. Nor does Forster ask us to hate his accuser, Miss Quested, whose shock is manipulated by other Brits to their own political ends—and as mentioned, these characters have already been set up as divisive, partisan, and racist. I was biting my nails through the arrest and trial, worried for poor Aziz, and I celebrated with the narrative when he was freed by Miss Quested retracting her accusation.
But then came the third part, the shortest by far, where we must confront the lesson of the novel: there can be no lasting friendship across racial lines under British Imperialism. As a moral lesson, I get it. And I am impressed—Forster’s youthful anti-imperialist stance was only fortified by his service in India, something he shows his own characters as unable to achieve. As a narrative resolution, though, it is expectedly dreary.
I find this book challenging to recommend. So much of its context is foreign to me, and I’m guessing a reader more informed about this era of British and Indian history would pick up many things I did not. However, I do not want to under-appreciate its reflection of Forster’s values, and I would certainly want to rank it higher than A Room With a View in consideration of that. I can’t say it’s anywhere near my favorite—perhaps that makes my prior comment hypocritical. I am glad to have read it. I may need to separately reflect on the Forster Novel Reading Experience and my journey through it. I can’t believe that I’ve finished them!
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
I’ve heard that this book is commonly assigned reading for high school students in the US. It was not for me, but I can see why it would be—the omnipresence of WWII and all of the ways it shows up in the narrative would be great for teaching literary devices—but I can also see why it is no longer as favored. The other omnipresent theme is homoeroticism, and I’m not sure that the context of a modern high school is equipped to handle the discomfort of reading portrayals of romantic friendship. Perversely, it would be easier to engage with that at a time when you could issue a flat denial—they’re not gay—than at a time when you must discuss the possibility that they are.
Gene and Finny are not boys that I like. There’s something intolerable in their athleticism. It may be the Americanness of it, that I can relate their boyish admiration for sport to familiar cultural touchstones. I didn’t struggle to enjoy the book despite that. Gene’s first-person narration is beautiful. Knowles has a knack for writing non-sequitur observations which throw the emotions of his dialogue into sharp relief. Gene is always noticing something about the world around him, rather than telling you how he feels. I suppose that was why I fell a little bit in love with him, though he is in so many ways a pushover and a bad friend and generally unlikable. I relate to his avoidance. Looking inward is painful, and people might not forgive you when you own up to your mistakes!
Finny won me over in his last possible moment, when Gene visits him in the infirmary after his second fall. The boys reconcile, and in that reconciliation, Finny is straight with Gene for the first time in the novel. He talks about how he needed his conspiracy theories to help him emotionally process—or, well, not—his disability and the fact that he could never serve in the war.
I don’t like relationships built on loyalty tests and fraught with power dynamics, generally. This has been a notable pain point for me in past fandoms. Finny/Gene was that throughout the whole novel. But this glimpse of a Finny who can acknowledge what he has been doing, and how it was a reaction to his own pain, gives me an angle on the character. I can see how I would make my way to a Finny who did not need cruel games, or to a Finny/Gene where those cruelties were intentional and wanted by both parties. They have a very kinky dynamic, honestly, but it needs time to develop without so many other teen boys around.
Overall this was a gorgeous novel and a fast read. It gets added to my pile of midcentury novels about boys in adolescence as a tapestry for examining greater social/political shifts. It is an extremely worthy addition.
I also wrote a fic for this after finishing:
A Good Sport, ~3k. Sports Men by Haruomi Hosono was the soundtrack.
Mike and Psmith, P. G. Wodehouse
I put this one off for a good long while. Do you ever encounter that sort of mental resistance, of knowing that a piece of beloved media will not land for you and so you don’t want to consume it and confirm that knowledge? I’m not letting anyone down by not connecting with a book, but as tied to broader English boarding school fandom as this one is, I still felt that unreasonable disappointment.
The book itself is good. Wodehouse is a great, clever writer and I break no new ground by observing that. I described this to my spouse as the school novel I would recommend to someone with no real interest in the genre, but who wanted to be able to say that they’d read a well-written example of it. This novel was amusing and easy to read and required fairly little context to pick up and enjoy. I can’t fault it from that perspective at all.
But from a fannish perspective, I found Mike and Psmith and Mike/Psmith significantly less compelling than David/Frank or others I have enjoyed. What can I say? I like the sentiment of those very earnest morality tales and how they fall into, intentionally or not, such moving depictions of love or rivalry between boys.
Mike is our POV character and the sportsy type, not motivated by schoolwork. In deference to this we get almost no classroom scenes, and no real mention of academic labor. He is disappointed to change schools so close to the end of his time at them, and to miss being made captain of the cricket team at his old one. Chance allows him to meet Psmith, born Smith but affecting a silent leading P, who has similarly undergone a late-in-schooling transfer from Eton. They are quick to become friends and cement that friendship through hijinks, an easy acceptance of the other’s flaws, and a shared appreciation for cricket.
When people love this book, they seem to love Psmith. His affected personality and manner of speaking are extremely distinctive. He is memorable in a way that most characters are not. Unfortunately I found this larger-than-life quality to be narratively distancing, more than it was amusing to me, and so he generally fell flat in my reading. Again, a bit of sincerity or a sobering moment would not have gone amiss. I’ve been told to follow this up with Psmith in the City, but I think I will pass on more of the series and stick to enjoying exchange fic when it shows up, as fans fill in the sentiment that I find myself missing.
Owen Wingrave, Henry James
I spied this in the
ficinabox tagset and was intrigued.Have you ever put yourself through James’ prose? I can now say that I have. This short story was a ghost story, which I didn’t know from the outset. James’ prose, combined with the slow build towards the ghostly elements, left me wondering what exactly I was reading for a good 75% of the piece. I should have guessed it would be a ghost story, all of these Victwardian short stories seem to be, and so that one’s on me.
Anyway, a character dies in that classically abrupt “a ghost did it” way that all these stories go, and that’s the end. My conclusion is that Henry James should not have written, and least of all ghost stories.
The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story, Isabel Quigly
This was mentioned in a Tumblr post and, as it was available for two-week lending on the Internet Archive, of course I snapped it up. Quigly covers the progression of the genre through specific exemplar authors, and so I skipped and skimmed as needed. She is also extremely opinionated in her evaluation of the literary merits of these books, and sometimes I had to skim out of sheer disagreement.
The most enjoyable part was seeing the familiarity of all the names and titles. She covers Tom Brown, per the title, but also books by Farrar, Talbot Baines Reed, Hugh Walpole, E. F. Benson, Wodehouse, Alec Waugh, and then also authors I haven’t read. But so so many that I have! Piecing this history together on my own over the past two years yielded a nearly identical reading list and set of classics. I love that this genre has been kept alive for its nostalgia and queer appeal both.
I wouldn’t say that Quigly goes in with any special depth beyond the initial chapter on Tom Brown, and I took this mostly as confirmatory reading, with a small side effect of recommending a few new titles to consider. (Wish me luck on my interlibrary loan request for a book which was only printed twice, in 1930/1931.) I also must critique her disinterest and, frankly, poor eye for queerness in school stories. She mentions it where relevant, but it often gets a much shorter treatment than other aspects of the stories, and she falls back on biographical details of the author and citations to other critiques to deliver her commentary on homosexuality. As this is my main interest in the genre, I found it disappointing.
For my girls’ school story friends, I’ll note that she spends just one chapter on Angela Brazil and nothing else. For Quigly, the school story is very much the domain of boys.
This did make me incredibly fond of Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s again. (Quigly doesn’t comment on its potential queer reading at all, though.) I adore Loman and Greenfield beyond all measure, and it was delightful to see them and Talbot Baines Reed recognized for their contributions to the genre, when current fandom tends towards later comers. Interestingly, Quigly calls Benson quite forgotten. I believe the reissue softcovers by Peter Burton (under Millivres Books, a gay men’s imprint) postdate this book. Which is another point in my favor for the importance of recognizing the queerness of these novels and of the genre as a whole—it was a gay man who rescued David Blaize from passing totally into obscurity!
no subject
Date: 2024-08-24 10:35 pm (UTC)And I did find the ending unsatisfying, even though - as you say - the clear anti-imperialist sentiment is refreshing for a book of that era!
Edited to add: the only Henry James I've read is The Turn of the Screw and basically I just felt like a dunce for really not getting why anyone raves about it /o\ I've no desire to read any more.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-25 06:02 pm (UTC)Re: Henry James, I have an acquaintance who is a James scholar and even he’s self-effacing about James’ prose, so take heart! 😂
no subject
Date: 2024-08-25 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-25 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-25 05:38 pm (UTC)Do you ever encounter that sort of mental resistance, of knowing that a piece of beloved media will not land for you and so you don’t want to consume it and confirm that knowledge?
Funnily enough, I think this is how I also feel about Psmith. I love the Jeeves books, but my few attempts to read Wodehouse's other stuff have never really worked, and somehow I think his take on the school story is unlikely to appeal much to me either.
I have read one Henry James book and agree with your opinion.
For my girls’ school story friends, I’ll note that she spends just one chapter on Angela Brazil and nothing else.
I am judging her for this! I mean, if she'd wanted to write a book just about boys' school stories, fair enough, they're different things and it's fine only to be interested in one of them. Including girls' stories but only as a brief chapter feels more actively unfair.
Anyway, about the failure to acknowledge queerness, I suppose there's nothing about the school story chapter of The Charioteer? ('School-story elements in other books' could be an interesting thing to look at from this angle—there's Raffles, also...)
no subject
Date: 2024-08-25 06:14 pm (UTC)What else of Wodehouse, beyond Jeeves, have you tried? A nonny (I have my suspicions who, based on exchanges!) suggested I poke around with his earlier non-Mike/Psmith school books, so I might do that just for comparison. Supposedly they’re more typical of the formula. It’s so tough! People adore Psmith, and Wodehouse’s writing quality can’t be faulted, but it just wasn’t what I look for in my school stories.
Please do judge Quigly. I was pretty shocked she even bothered with the girls’ chapter, as she could easily have dropped it and amended the subtitle of the book to include ‘boys.’ I also claim no particular interest in girls’ school stories, so… I don’t claim expertise, either. Simple enough solution! Certainly better than trying to wrap up a rich literary tradition in a matter of a few pages.
Quigly doesn’t talk about The Charioteer, no. She doesn’t do much with those part-school stories, just one chapter on some war novels that have significant school portions in the first halves. I think you bring up a good point that it’s interesting ground, though, as TC was what got me into school stories, and I’ve also really loved Raffles fandom’s takes on the school element of their relationship! (And for a couple of fantastical examples, I find grounding and inspiration in the school experiences of Edmund Pevensie and Tom Riddle when I write those fandoms.) I still vaguely think that someday I should write up a ‘school story trope’ primer aimed at HP fans, but, eh. Effort.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-26 08:31 am (UTC)Ukridge and Something Fresh, one of the Blandings books. Nothing really wrong with either of them, they just didn't especially appeal somehow. I don't think I knew there were other school stories besides Psmith!
Aww, I love Raffles schooldays fic and speculation too. (I had considered trying to write such a fic at some point, but never found a chance... maybe one day.)
I still vaguely think that someday I should write up a ‘school story trope’ primer aimed at HP fans, but, eh. Effort.
Although I'm not a HP fan, I think that would be a very cool thing to do if you did ever decide to :D
no subject
Date: 2024-08-26 07:46 pm (UTC)Oh, you would write a lovely schoolday Raffles fic! Ah, if you ever do, I’ll be there with bells on. <3
And unrelatedly, am I correct in assuming you’re responsible for a recent rec of Barbara Pym? If so, that’s one of two recs to join my reading list ahead of Yuletide. If you do chat anywhere other than DW comms and ever want to talk more, let me know! I am consistently reminded that your tastes are impeccable. ;)
no subject
Date: 2024-08-27 06:16 pm (UTC)And unrelatedly, am I correct in assuming you’re responsible for a recent rec of Barbara Pym?
I think so. :D Oh, I love picking up fandoms for Yuletide—I must think which ones I want to try this year... (Small caveat: there is a fair amount of (Anglo-Catholic) church in A Glass of Blessings, just in case that's not to your taste. Not in a preachy way, but it's a major feature of the book.)
If you do chat anywhere other than DW comms and ever want to talk more, let me know! I am consistently reminded that your tastes are impeccable. ;)
Aww, thank you! You always have such thoughtful and interesting things to say about books. I would very much like to chat by email (regshoe@fastmail.com) or on Discord (same username), if either of those suits :)
no subject
Date: 2024-08-28 02:46 pm (UTC)I’ve sent a discord friend request! Let me know if email is more your speed, though; I like both.