phantomtomato

I 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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