Reading Roundup, August 2025
Aug. 27th, 2025 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoMy Father and Myself - J. R. Ackerley
Joe Ackerley was a literary editor and memoirist from the early 20th century. He lived as openly gay when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. And though he never had a steady long-term partner, he seems to have had many friendships and to have mentored young gay writers during his tenure working for the BBC. Mostly, this memoir is not about these parts of his life—mostly, this is the story of Ackerley coming to understand his sexuality, alongside a recollection of his relationship with his father, whose own past he only belatedly takes an interest in learning.
Ackerley’s memoir is short and easy to read, despite his foreword warning about irregularities in the timeline. He writes in flowing first person with long, punctuation-heavy sentences. But the book is short and fairly narrow, so it’s not a challenge to follow the personalities and events. As a memoir, I don’t want to review it for “plot,” but Ackerley is clearly invested in the construction of his “reveals.” I wasn’t really surprised by any of them (or truly convinced that most were reveals) but anyone who wishes to go in unspoiled should take care to read the introduction, by W. H. Auden, last. Make sure also to read the Appendix before that, which is not optional content.
The primary value that I got from this story was its capturing of gay life in 1910s-1930s England, especially the ‘20s and ‘30s. Ackerley is a man in the mold of so many others of that era (Auden, Forster, Isherwood, and so on) in preferring straight working-class men as sexual partners. He describes years of cruising sailors, guardsmen, policemen, and more, in pursuit of a lasting relationship which never comes—and by his own diagnosis cannot, given his neuroses, and, in a moment of brutal reflection, self-admitted boredom with the unintellectual young men which he tended to choose. It is gloomy, but not unendurably so. Ackerley, writing at the end of his life, describes himself as happy. And there are those biographical details from Auden’s introduction, again, promising us that he had many other types of fulfilling relationships. So on the whole we get a picture of a frustrated sexuality whose owner investigates that not as the result of the law or a lack of partners (he had hundreds), but as a result of his own psychology and all of its implications.
Here, I’ll pause and mention that Auden speculates on Ackerley’s desires in the introduction, which is both a bit crass and very Auden, and in this speculation he uses two delightful phrases to describe those preferred sex acts: ‘Plain-sewing’ and ‘Princeton-First-Year.’
Ackerley’s relationship with his father, who died in 1929 when Ackerley was in his early 30s, is the other central conceit. The book represents the effort to excavate his father’s personal history, which includes mistresses and sexual escapades and dodgy youthful connections. It doesn’t read as scandalously as it should, in my opinion—I think that’s down to Ackerley’s blasé narration, soothed doubtlessly by the decades between initial discovery and final compilation. Ackerley’s father was quite scandalous, and the book serves as a great reference for late-Victorian or Edwardian era children out of wedlock, infidelity, and suchlike. Most of what I get from it though is old grief about the passing of a parent. Ackerley’s father was rather good to him—this is not a story of abuse—and so it recounts missed opportunities in their relationship, which are all understandable but leave the narrator going, “and yet… .” I can’t blame him.
Chrestomanci Book One: Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones
The first book (publication order) in the Chrestomancy series tells the story of a young boy, Eric “Cat” Chant, as he experiences your fairly typical magical adventures: dead parents, a startling new world, tangles with other children, a mysterious and aloof magical mentor, and a final life-threatening confrontation over a magical macguffin. There is even a (baby) dragon and a castle, and being a children’s novel, it fits neatly into an afternoon’s read.
I didn’t quite enjoy it, but I’m not entirely sure why. I know what I didn’t like about it, but is this endemic to the series? Were my expectations wrong? Am I simply too old for the premise? It’s been almost the full month since I finished, and I’m only a little more settled on my answer now than when I first sat down to reflect on this book.
Jones’ story is noteworthy in its details, not its general character. For example, Cat’s sister Gwendolen: she is his remaining link to his birth family, and though she’s fairly callous and selfish, one might expect the message of “family matters” to come from a change of heart and maturing on her end. Nope! She’s the villain. The family message is still there, but in a more found family sense, depending on the value you place in estranged blood relations. This is certainly an inventive twist and one sees in it a response to many nasty siblings in earlier juvenile fiction, but it doesn’t effect any massive departures from the genre, to my read, because the values communicated to the reader remain fundamentally similar. And those shifts in an effective formula might have worked to keep the story fresh for me—I don’t take exception to them. Rather, I found the main cast, primarily of children, quite unlikeable, and so I struggled without that essential sympathy for the characters.
Cat is our POV character, generally. (The book is in third omniscient, but each straying is from Cat as the baseline.) He is a nine-lifed enchanter, which basically means that he’s got huge magical potential. The complicating factor is that he doesn’t know it. The crux of my dislike is in his passivity. The idea is that his sister Gwendolen is not magical but has been stealing his magic, up to and including his lives, for as long as he has been alive. He doesn’t know it and believes himself non-magical. Circumstances lead them to living at Chrestomanci’s castle, the Chrestomanci (Christopher Chant, estranged uncle of Cat and Gwendolen) being an adult nine-lifed enchanter who wants to train him. Chrestomanci also knows of Gwendolen’s deception and use of Cat’s magic. We then spend nearly the whole book with just parts of this information, with Gwendolen obviously concealing her evil plans, Cat refusing even the faintest curiosity about himself, and Chrestomancy being aloof and unforthcoming. I can see, again, an intentional cleverness here—there is always the question of why adults don’t solve the problems in children’s novels, and this one chooses to make its primary adult mistaken in his read of the situation, and gives Cat some unspoken trauma which slows his trust. Still, I found it dreadful, with Cat coming across as hideously stupid in his decision-making. And so: am I simply too old for this?
I can’t go back in time and read this as a child to compare, but I suspect that I would always have been upset by such a passive main character. It is one of my more recurrent complaints as a reader. There are seven of these books, and I cannot stomach any others about Cat, even if he matures, as this one spoiled him for me. I am vaguely interested in Christopher, and I know that two books focus on him, so I may read one or both of those standalone. This book had a really jarring moment of anti-Asian racism in it, but it is the oldest of the series, and a quick scan of reviews of the more recent entries doesn’t send up red flags for that recurring. The universe of the series is interesting and I do understand the appeal of this magic system—it seems like a compelling universe for worldbuilding, which is probably a main source of its enduring appeal.
Shyness and Dignity - Dag Solstad, tr. Sverre Lyngstad
Elias Rukla is a middle-aged literature instructor at a high school in Oslo. After a disappointing class period, he has an angry breakdown out front of the school. What follows is an accounting of his life, from his university education through his early career, marriage, and step-parenthood. Thus emerges the story of his listlessness and dissatisfaction in a job which never fulfills him and in a relationship with no emotional intimacy.
The remarkable quality of this novel is in its prose. Elias’ story is delivered as a breathless 150-page essay, and my best description of it is that every moment overstays its welcome. There are no chapters nor breaks of any sort, with eras flowing directly together. I read this over two days and had to simply decide to stop between them; a truer reading might be setting oneself up for a very long afternoon. The sentences likewise drag on, looping back on themselves to repeat a point with new phrasing. Elias rewrites and revises every thought to its death.
What we get in this neurotic focus is probably a meaningful commentary on Norwegian society in the 1990s, but I don’t have the context to pick up on that. What’s left for a naïve reader is Elias as a feckless, feeble man who nonetheless tangles himself in personal drama—his wife is Eva Linde, the ex-wife of an old university friend (Johan) who splits for America, leaving said wife and a young daughter behind. Elias marries Eva to serve as a self-acknowledged poor substitute for the missing Johan, though Eva and Elias neither love nor much seem to respect one another. This bland social marriage is seemingly good for the daughter, and I think both Elias and Eva had good intentions with it, but present-day Elias belabors the point of his faded attraction to his flabby late-forties wife in such detail that I lose sympathy for him, even in the face of her clear emotional withholding.
This was a recommendation from a friend with more esoteric tastes in prose than my own. I ultimately prefer a recognizable narrative style and did not appreciate what this novel was doing. There are some funny observations, like this excerpt about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain:
(And what a fun reminder of Spender’s The Temple!)
But these are few, and even they are drawn out to pages of repetition, so that the original humor is lost. I can’t think of any audience that I would recommend this to; I trust that if it is your interest, you’ll run across it from a more suitable source.
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
This is the second Ishiguro of my summer, and I am sorry to conclude that I don’t think I get along with him. This is an extremely well-told story of an English butler reflecting on his 30-year career in a distinguished house, Darlington Hall, from the vantage point of a short motoring vacation to see an old friend. Narrated in a Very Correct first person, the book does a great job of establishing the voice of the butler, Mr. Stevens. Ishiguro clearly understands the importance of perspective with unreliable narrators, something I remember from Never Let Me Go. Unfortunately, he so effectively set up the reasons to question Mr. Stevens that I could not bring myself to feel the sympathetic turn when that arrived.
I knew going in that the narration built towards some series of revelations, and the clues early on did not quite take a genius to unravel. Lord Darlington’s ruined post-World War 2 reputation, Stevens’ focus on the 1920s and 1930s, and then the first mention of a German visitor—yes, I anticipated the Nazis. Likewise, it was quick to comprehend the nature of Stevens’ repression. I appreciated coming in unspoiled to watch the build-up play out, because I think that’s the main apeal—the craft Ishiguro put into precisely when and how to dole out the next development, all of which were predictable precisely because the signs were present.
But prediction didn’t make Stevens’ many failings easier to digest. I want to pause and remark that I enjoy an unlikeable character—if they are interesting to me. If it is fun to dislike them. Stevens didn’t have that fun factor. I took an early disliking to him, when he first received the letter from former friend and colleague Miss Kenton and took it entirely upon himself to call her impending divorce a failure, in fact that all of those years of her life were a failure. This was not an endearing start. Throughout the rest of the novel, there is a pattern to Stevens’ bad decisions. The personal ones show him refusing his own capacity for emotion and choosing not to empathize with others, and include the death of his father and a dozen slights to Miss Kenton. The second category is political, a pattern of Stevens refusing to acknowledge Lord Darlington’s fascism and Nazi sympathizing, and include the firing of two Jewish maids and a damning confrontation with the family friend Mr. Cardinal.
(Incidentally, I liked the brief appearances of Mr. Cardinal, and when I googled him I found that he was played by a Maurice-era Hugh Grant in the movie. Lol.)
What struck me about both of these categories was Stevens’ active role in choosing a terrible outcome. He, his actions, are passive in each scenario—most usually, he simply gets on with being a butler. But remarkably all of the people around him are not passive, are in fact prompting him to reconsider, to choose something else. Take the death of his father, which illustrates this most clearly. Stevens Senior falls ill on day one, and the doctor consulted says plainly that this is a very serious illness. Stevens goes to see his father and asserts that he’s in good or improving health, despite Stevens Senior delivering a “last words” sort of speech. Day two, Stevens Senior has a stroke. The doctor is called, but delayed. Every senior member of staff attempts to rouse Stevens to see his father. The cook is crying over the sickbed. Stevens sees his father for two minutes, refuses further entreaties to spend the final moments with him, and at all points puts the work first. Yes, it defines his sense of “dignity,” a recurring idea he uses to illustrate his understanding of what makes a good butler. Yes, the narrative makes plain that Stevens is repressing his own suffering. I don’t see Stevens as an automaton or without feeling, and still this element of his character is unsympathetic to me, because so many people around him care deeply for him and repeatedly make the effort, and make the space, for him to choose something else—but he doesn’t. And what he does choose, largely, is to be brutally critical of Miss Kenton and to deny the horrific fascism of Lord Darlington.
So the book-ending spark of regret, while emotional, was not enough. I do feel for him, but most of what I feel is the sense of a deserved tragedy. Even that may imply too much sympathy. I don’t see how Miss Kenton loved him, or how Mr. Cardinal thought him a friend, and with the view of his character that we’ve been given, I personally have no energy for imagining the missing moments of connection in those relationships.
I can’t recommend either for or against this book—it’s a very carefully put together story, but by an author who doesn’t quite work for me.
Joe Ackerley was a literary editor and memoirist from the early 20th century. He lived as openly gay when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. And though he never had a steady long-term partner, he seems to have had many friendships and to have mentored young gay writers during his tenure working for the BBC. Mostly, this memoir is not about these parts of his life—mostly, this is the story of Ackerley coming to understand his sexuality, alongside a recollection of his relationship with his father, whose own past he only belatedly takes an interest in learning.
Ackerley’s memoir is short and easy to read, despite his foreword warning about irregularities in the timeline. He writes in flowing first person with long, punctuation-heavy sentences. But the book is short and fairly narrow, so it’s not a challenge to follow the personalities and events. As a memoir, I don’t want to review it for “plot,” but Ackerley is clearly invested in the construction of his “reveals.” I wasn’t really surprised by any of them (or truly convinced that most were reveals) but anyone who wishes to go in unspoiled should take care to read the introduction, by W. H. Auden, last. Make sure also to read the Appendix before that, which is not optional content.
The primary value that I got from this story was its capturing of gay life in 1910s-1930s England, especially the ‘20s and ‘30s. Ackerley is a man in the mold of so many others of that era (Auden, Forster, Isherwood, and so on) in preferring straight working-class men as sexual partners. He describes years of cruising sailors, guardsmen, policemen, and more, in pursuit of a lasting relationship which never comes—and by his own diagnosis cannot, given his neuroses, and, in a moment of brutal reflection, self-admitted boredom with the unintellectual young men which he tended to choose. It is gloomy, but not unendurably so. Ackerley, writing at the end of his life, describes himself as happy. And there are those biographical details from Auden’s introduction, again, promising us that he had many other types of fulfilling relationships. So on the whole we get a picture of a frustrated sexuality whose owner investigates that not as the result of the law or a lack of partners (he had hundreds), but as a result of his own psychology and all of its implications.
Here, I’ll pause and mention that Auden speculates on Ackerley’s desires in the introduction, which is both a bit crass and very Auden, and in this speculation he uses two delightful phrases to describe those preferred sex acts: ‘Plain-sewing’ and ‘Princeton-First-Year.’
Ackerley’s relationship with his father, who died in 1929 when Ackerley was in his early 30s, is the other central conceit. The book represents the effort to excavate his father’s personal history, which includes mistresses and sexual escapades and dodgy youthful connections. It doesn’t read as scandalously as it should, in my opinion—I think that’s down to Ackerley’s blasé narration, soothed doubtlessly by the decades between initial discovery and final compilation. Ackerley’s father was quite scandalous, and the book serves as a great reference for late-Victorian or Edwardian era children out of wedlock, infidelity, and suchlike. Most of what I get from it though is old grief about the passing of a parent. Ackerley’s father was rather good to him—this is not a story of abuse—and so it recounts missed opportunities in their relationship, which are all understandable but leave the narrator going, “and yet… .” I can’t blame him.
Chrestomanci Book One: Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones
The first book (publication order) in the Chrestomancy series tells the story of a young boy, Eric “Cat” Chant, as he experiences your fairly typical magical adventures: dead parents, a startling new world, tangles with other children, a mysterious and aloof magical mentor, and a final life-threatening confrontation over a magical macguffin. There is even a (baby) dragon and a castle, and being a children’s novel, it fits neatly into an afternoon’s read.
I didn’t quite enjoy it, but I’m not entirely sure why. I know what I didn’t like about it, but is this endemic to the series? Were my expectations wrong? Am I simply too old for the premise? It’s been almost the full month since I finished, and I’m only a little more settled on my answer now than when I first sat down to reflect on this book.
Jones’ story is noteworthy in its details, not its general character. For example, Cat’s sister Gwendolen: she is his remaining link to his birth family, and though she’s fairly callous and selfish, one might expect the message of “family matters” to come from a change of heart and maturing on her end. Nope! She’s the villain. The family message is still there, but in a more found family sense, depending on the value you place in estranged blood relations. This is certainly an inventive twist and one sees in it a response to many nasty siblings in earlier juvenile fiction, but it doesn’t effect any massive departures from the genre, to my read, because the values communicated to the reader remain fundamentally similar. And those shifts in an effective formula might have worked to keep the story fresh for me—I don’t take exception to them. Rather, I found the main cast, primarily of children, quite unlikeable, and so I struggled without that essential sympathy for the characters.
Cat is our POV character, generally. (The book is in third omniscient, but each straying is from Cat as the baseline.) He is a nine-lifed enchanter, which basically means that he’s got huge magical potential. The complicating factor is that he doesn’t know it. The crux of my dislike is in his passivity. The idea is that his sister Gwendolen is not magical but has been stealing his magic, up to and including his lives, for as long as he has been alive. He doesn’t know it and believes himself non-magical. Circumstances lead them to living at Chrestomanci’s castle, the Chrestomanci (Christopher Chant, estranged uncle of Cat and Gwendolen) being an adult nine-lifed enchanter who wants to train him. Chrestomanci also knows of Gwendolen’s deception and use of Cat’s magic. We then spend nearly the whole book with just parts of this information, with Gwendolen obviously concealing her evil plans, Cat refusing even the faintest curiosity about himself, and Chrestomancy being aloof and unforthcoming. I can see, again, an intentional cleverness here—there is always the question of why adults don’t solve the problems in children’s novels, and this one chooses to make its primary adult mistaken in his read of the situation, and gives Cat some unspoken trauma which slows his trust. Still, I found it dreadful, with Cat coming across as hideously stupid in his decision-making. And so: am I simply too old for this?
I can’t go back in time and read this as a child to compare, but I suspect that I would always have been upset by such a passive main character. It is one of my more recurrent complaints as a reader. There are seven of these books, and I cannot stomach any others about Cat, even if he matures, as this one spoiled him for me. I am vaguely interested in Christopher, and I know that two books focus on him, so I may read one or both of those standalone. This book had a really jarring moment of anti-Asian racism in it, but it is the oldest of the series, and a quick scan of reviews of the more recent entries doesn’t send up red flags for that recurring. The universe of the series is interesting and I do understand the appeal of this magic system—it seems like a compelling universe for worldbuilding, which is probably a main source of its enduring appeal.
Shyness and Dignity - Dag Solstad, tr. Sverre Lyngstad
Elias Rukla is a middle-aged literature instructor at a high school in Oslo. After a disappointing class period, he has an angry breakdown out front of the school. What follows is an accounting of his life, from his university education through his early career, marriage, and step-parenthood. Thus emerges the story of his listlessness and dissatisfaction in a job which never fulfills him and in a relationship with no emotional intimacy.
The remarkable quality of this novel is in its prose. Elias’ story is delivered as a breathless 150-page essay, and my best description of it is that every moment overstays its welcome. There are no chapters nor breaks of any sort, with eras flowing directly together. I read this over two days and had to simply decide to stop between them; a truer reading might be setting oneself up for a very long afternoon. The sentences likewise drag on, looping back on themselves to repeat a point with new phrasing. Elias rewrites and revises every thought to its death.
What we get in this neurotic focus is probably a meaningful commentary on Norwegian society in the 1990s, but I don’t have the context to pick up on that. What’s left for a naïve reader is Elias as a feckless, feeble man who nonetheless tangles himself in personal drama—his wife is Eva Linde, the ex-wife of an old university friend (Johan) who splits for America, leaving said wife and a young daughter behind. Elias marries Eva to serve as a self-acknowledged poor substitute for the missing Johan, though Eva and Elias neither love nor much seem to respect one another. This bland social marriage is seemingly good for the daughter, and I think both Elias and Eva had good intentions with it, but present-day Elias belabors the point of his faded attraction to his flabby late-forties wife in such detail that I lose sympathy for him, even in the face of her clear emotional withholding.
This was a recommendation from a friend with more esoteric tastes in prose than my own. I ultimately prefer a recognizable narrative style and did not appreciate what this novel was doing. There are some funny observations, like this excerpt about Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain:
One of his colleagues came into the teachers’ lounge just before the bell rang for the first class and said, I’m somewhat of a Hans Castorp today, I should probably have stayed under the eiderdown. A jolt shot through Elias Rukla. Had he heard correctly? Was the name of Hans Castorp mentioned, and in this free and easy way, in passing? Hans Castorp, the main character in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, referred to by a senior master at Fagerborg High School, and not by a German teacher, but actually by someone who taught mathematics!
(And what a fun reminder of Spender’s The Temple!)
But these are few, and even they are drawn out to pages of repetition, so that the original humor is lost. I can’t think of any audience that I would recommend this to; I trust that if it is your interest, you’ll run across it from a more suitable source.
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
This is the second Ishiguro of my summer, and I am sorry to conclude that I don’t think I get along with him. This is an extremely well-told story of an English butler reflecting on his 30-year career in a distinguished house, Darlington Hall, from the vantage point of a short motoring vacation to see an old friend. Narrated in a Very Correct first person, the book does a great job of establishing the voice of the butler, Mr. Stevens. Ishiguro clearly understands the importance of perspective with unreliable narrators, something I remember from Never Let Me Go. Unfortunately, he so effectively set up the reasons to question Mr. Stevens that I could not bring myself to feel the sympathetic turn when that arrived.
I knew going in that the narration built towards some series of revelations, and the clues early on did not quite take a genius to unravel. Lord Darlington’s ruined post-World War 2 reputation, Stevens’ focus on the 1920s and 1930s, and then the first mention of a German visitor—yes, I anticipated the Nazis. Likewise, it was quick to comprehend the nature of Stevens’ repression. I appreciated coming in unspoiled to watch the build-up play out, because I think that’s the main apeal—the craft Ishiguro put into precisely when and how to dole out the next development, all of which were predictable precisely because the signs were present.
But prediction didn’t make Stevens’ many failings easier to digest. I want to pause and remark that I enjoy an unlikeable character—if they are interesting to me. If it is fun to dislike them. Stevens didn’t have that fun factor. I took an early disliking to him, when he first received the letter from former friend and colleague Miss Kenton and took it entirely upon himself to call her impending divorce a failure, in fact that all of those years of her life were a failure. This was not an endearing start. Throughout the rest of the novel, there is a pattern to Stevens’ bad decisions. The personal ones show him refusing his own capacity for emotion and choosing not to empathize with others, and include the death of his father and a dozen slights to Miss Kenton. The second category is political, a pattern of Stevens refusing to acknowledge Lord Darlington’s fascism and Nazi sympathizing, and include the firing of two Jewish maids and a damning confrontation with the family friend Mr. Cardinal.
(Incidentally, I liked the brief appearances of Mr. Cardinal, and when I googled him I found that he was played by a Maurice-era Hugh Grant in the movie. Lol.)
What struck me about both of these categories was Stevens’ active role in choosing a terrible outcome. He, his actions, are passive in each scenario—most usually, he simply gets on with being a butler. But remarkably all of the people around him are not passive, are in fact prompting him to reconsider, to choose something else. Take the death of his father, which illustrates this most clearly. Stevens Senior falls ill on day one, and the doctor consulted says plainly that this is a very serious illness. Stevens goes to see his father and asserts that he’s in good or improving health, despite Stevens Senior delivering a “last words” sort of speech. Day two, Stevens Senior has a stroke. The doctor is called, but delayed. Every senior member of staff attempts to rouse Stevens to see his father. The cook is crying over the sickbed. Stevens sees his father for two minutes, refuses further entreaties to spend the final moments with him, and at all points puts the work first. Yes, it defines his sense of “dignity,” a recurring idea he uses to illustrate his understanding of what makes a good butler. Yes, the narrative makes plain that Stevens is repressing his own suffering. I don’t see Stevens as an automaton or without feeling, and still this element of his character is unsympathetic to me, because so many people around him care deeply for him and repeatedly make the effort, and make the space, for him to choose something else—but he doesn’t. And what he does choose, largely, is to be brutally critical of Miss Kenton and to deny the horrific fascism of Lord Darlington.
So the book-ending spark of regret, while emotional, was not enough. I do feel for him, but most of what I feel is the sense of a deserved tragedy. Even that may imply too much sympathy. I don’t see how Miss Kenton loved him, or how Mr. Cardinal thought him a friend, and with the view of his character that we’ve been given, I personally have no energy for imagining the missing moments of connection in those relationships.
I can’t recommend either for or against this book—it’s a very carefully put together story, but by an author who doesn’t quite work for me.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-28 02:02 pm (UTC)On RotD, I think my sympathy for Stevens was greatly influenced by the (to me, obvious) fact of his neurodivergence. But I read the book long enough ago that I don't think I can give much more detail than that.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-28 10:09 pm (UTC)RotD: extremely valid. I’m reading it from a Jewish perspective during a period in which both antisemitism and fascism are at notable highs, but I appreciate that it was written during a very different era and so has been read for decades without that baggage!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-29 03:30 pm (UTC)And yes, I'm sure RotD reads very differently now than when I read it 15-ish years ago, let alone in 1989.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 04:47 pm (UTC)Incredibly, I saw it in a Little Free Library last night! (I did not take it.) Who in my area is reading the obscure dog-breeding memoir??
no subject
Date: 2025-09-02 06:47 pm (UTC)