Reading Backlog #2
20 Jan 2024 05:56 pmI've been meaning to carry on catching up with my reading posts, so maybe one day I can do the regular ones again, or more probably, regular media-consuming ones. And then I looked and found the one catch up post I actually made was in March 2023, which is not a speedy rate at which to catch anything up. HAVE ANOTHER POST.
[ETA: I started drafting this post out on 4th Jan, so you can see I'm keeping up with the speedy part.]
(Last time, in March 2023, I had caught up as far as early 2020, when I fell into a Star Wars Prequel hole and wrote ridiculous amounts of fic and read a whole bunch of SW novels, where I mostly liked the Legends ones and resented the new canon ones, but not always.)
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, and while I am not at all at![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hamsterwoman's level of (what is it? frustration? love to hate? affectionate and deeply invested loathing? lol), these have proved to be fine but only sometimes for me - the second one, where it was more contained, really worked for me. This one didn't really. But I gave it a star and a smile in the margin in my Book Diary, which isn't bad, either! (I think therefore the disappointment is just because I hoped they would be so much more my thing than they've turned out to be, rather than me not liking them or anything. Just, easy to read, fine, I appreciate lots of the world-building, no great feelings, alas.)
Anyway, next up I read The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells, the first in the Raksura books, and I loved it! I had to swiftly follow it up with The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths (presumably with b'day cash), oh, and The Edge of Worlds and since have read through the rest at a slow rate of waiting (im)patiently for birthdays and Christmases and continued to love the world-building and characters and the whole thing, and, although sometimes I get exhausted when she gets all fast-paced, that is merely a compliment to her skill and testament to my general lack of everything.
Murder on the Flying Scotsman, The Black Ship and Heirs of the Body by Carola Dunn, which at this date is now making me all nostalgic for lack of Daisy, Murder Magnet Supreme, and the long-suffering Alec in my life for AGES. Anyway, Daisy went on a train and there was murder, she went out for dinner in the suburbs and there was murder and, um, I forget the plot of the last one, but there was definitely murder.
(I must re-read them. I just need to pick up more of the first few, which at the time I got from the library and now the library does not have them, and I am less good at getting to the library anyway.) Anyway, these are fun and well done cosy detective stories set in the 1920s, which I enjoyed a lot, and were easy-going enough to help me back into reading when I was so unwell.
Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens, which was great fun (a children's book mash-up of boarding schools and golden age murder), although I have STILL not stumbled over any of the sequels in charity shops; a grave injustice.
I also read a few more Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire books, which generally enjoyed, and some much more than others, and occasionaly where they suddebly mid-20th C attitudes at me in the middle of the souffle of delight (inevitable, but also ALAS) but at this stage I can't remember them individually without going to look at the and read the blurb to remind me which was which, as they sort of merge in my head rapidly. Although, unlike Wodehouse, I can remember which ones I read by reading the blurb, so I can do that if people want to know.
Then, for family history reasons, I took notes from Paupers and Pigkillers: The Diary of William Holland 1799-1818. William Holland was the vicar of a tiny Quantock parish called Overstowey, close to where I grew up and where a lot of my ancestors come from. He was sometimes, inevitably, much as you would expect from an 18th/19th C Vicar, but his diary entries were fascinating and never dull. He was Welsh and took a long time to adapt to the "stupid, slow" Somerset people (worse in every way than Welsh common people). He had opinions about all his fellow vicars, and a local Non-Conformist bigwig (Thomas Poole) was his Nemesis ("Satan himself cannot be more false and hypocritical") and he gets very gleeful if he feels he is one up on the Nemesis. He also got to correspond to an Earl about face-science and was involved in some coincidences that you wouldn't have put in a novel because it would have been too unrealistic, but rl can get away with these things.
His diary was written in multiple notebooks over the period and for whatever reason, only around every other one has survived, so there are a lot of gaps, and we also do not know what made him start writing a diary, because the first one is among the lost. The first entry we do have, though, is him being very disapproving of the Coleridge party who'd arrived at Nether Stowey, invited by the Nemesis himself: "Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs Coleridge who looked so like a friskey girl or something worse that I was not surprised that a Democratic Libertine should choose her for a wife."( More from William )
Anyway, in short, it's great stuff if you have ancestors from the Quantocks or are interested in that sort of thing generally.
I followed that up with note-taking from another diary by another Somerset vicar who lived around the same time, although not so near the places I was interested in - John Skinner's Journal of a Somerset Rector 1803-1834. This was also interesting, but a much harder read as became increasingly mentally ill and depressed as it continued, often alienating those around him with his paranoia, and eventually committed suicide. He, too, hated Methodists, lived in his parish and visited his parisioners (and Shepton Mallet Gaol), but he and William Holland had very little in common beyond that. It's another very useful resource and interesting for local and micro-history, though.
*hamsterwoman won't mind me mentioning that!
[ETA: I started drafting this post out on 4th Jan, so you can see I'm keeping up with the speedy part.]
(Last time, in March 2023, I had caught up as far as early 2020, when I fell into a Star Wars Prequel hole and wrote ridiculous amounts of fic and read a whole bunch of SW novels, where I mostly liked the Legends ones and resented the new canon ones, but not always.)
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers, and while I am not at all at
hamsterwoman's level of (what is it? frustration? love to hate? affectionate and deeply invested loathing? lol), these have proved to be fine but only sometimes for me - the second one, where it was more contained, really worked for me. This one didn't really. But I gave it a star and a smile in the margin in my Book Diary, which isn't bad, either! (I think therefore the disappointment is just because I hoped they would be so much more my thing than they've turned out to be, rather than me not liking them or anything. Just, easy to read, fine, I appreciate lots of the world-building, no great feelings, alas.) Anyway, next up I read The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells, the first in the Raksura books, and I loved it! I had to swiftly follow it up with The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths (presumably with b'day cash), oh, and The Edge of Worlds and since have read through the rest at a slow rate of waiting (im)patiently for birthdays and Christmases and continued to love the world-building and characters and the whole thing, and, although sometimes I get exhausted when she gets all fast-paced, that is merely a compliment to her skill and testament to my general lack of everything.
Murder on the Flying Scotsman, The Black Ship and Heirs of the Body by Carola Dunn, which at this date is now making me all nostalgic for lack of Daisy, Murder Magnet Supreme, and the long-suffering Alec in my life for AGES. Anyway, Daisy went on a train and there was murder, she went out for dinner in the suburbs and there was murder and, um, I forget the plot of the last one, but there was definitely murder.
(I must re-read them. I just need to pick up more of the first few, which at the time I got from the library and now the library does not have them, and I am less good at getting to the library anyway.) Anyway, these are fun and well done cosy detective stories set in the 1920s, which I enjoyed a lot, and were easy-going enough to help me back into reading when I was so unwell.
Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens, which was great fun (a children's book mash-up of boarding schools and golden age murder), although I have STILL not stumbled over any of the sequels in charity shops; a grave injustice.
I also read a few more Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire books, which generally enjoyed, and some much more than others, and occasionaly where they suddebly mid-20th C attitudes at me in the middle of the souffle of delight (inevitable, but also ALAS) but at this stage I can't remember them individually without going to look at the and read the blurb to remind me which was which, as they sort of merge in my head rapidly. Although, unlike Wodehouse, I can remember which ones I read by reading the blurb, so I can do that if people want to know.
Then, for family history reasons, I took notes from Paupers and Pigkillers: The Diary of William Holland 1799-1818. William Holland was the vicar of a tiny Quantock parish called Overstowey, close to where I grew up and where a lot of my ancestors come from. He was sometimes, inevitably, much as you would expect from an 18th/19th C Vicar, but his diary entries were fascinating and never dull. He was Welsh and took a long time to adapt to the "stupid, slow" Somerset people (worse in every way than Welsh common people). He had opinions about all his fellow vicars, and a local Non-Conformist bigwig (Thomas Poole) was his Nemesis ("Satan himself cannot be more false and hypocritical") and he gets very gleeful if he feels he is one up on the Nemesis. He also got to correspond to an Earl about face-science and was involved in some coincidences that you wouldn't have put in a novel because it would have been too unrealistic, but rl can get away with these things.
His diary was written in multiple notebooks over the period and for whatever reason, only around every other one has survived, so there are a lot of gaps, and we also do not know what made him start writing a diary, because the first one is among the lost. The first entry we do have, though, is him being very disapproving of the Coleridge party who'd arrived at Nether Stowey, invited by the Nemesis himself: "Saw that Democratic hoyden Mrs Coleridge who looked so like a friskey girl or something worse that I was not surprised that a Democratic Libertine should choose her for a wife."( More from William )
Anyway, in short, it's great stuff if you have ancestors from the Quantocks or are interested in that sort of thing generally.
I followed that up with note-taking from another diary by another Somerset vicar who lived around the same time, although not so near the places I was interested in - John Skinner's Journal of a Somerset Rector 1803-1834. This was also interesting, but a much harder read as became increasingly mentally ill and depressed as it continued, often alienating those around him with his paranoia, and eventually committed suicide. He, too, hated Methodists, lived in his parish and visited his parisioners (and Shepton Mallet Gaol), but he and William Holland had very little in common beyond that. It's another very useful resource and interesting for local and micro-history, though.
*
hamsterwoman won't mind me mentioning that!
