skygiants

Like several other people on my reading list, including osprey_archer (post here) and troisoiseaux (post here, I was compelled by the premise of I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After 28 Years In A Convent, a once-bestselling (but now long out-of-print) memoir by a British woman who entered a cloister in 1914, lived ten years as a nun, decided it wasn't for her, lived another almost twenty years as a nun out of stubbornness, and exited in 1941, having missed quite a lot of sociological developments in the interim! including talking films! and underwire bras! and not one, but two World Wars!

Obviously Baldwin did not know that WWI was about to happen right as she went into a convent, but she does explain that she came out in the middle of WWII more or less on purpose, out of an idea that it would be easier to slide herself back into things when everything was chaotic and unprecedented anyway than to try to establish a life for herself as The Weird Ex Nun in more normal times. Unclear how well this strategy paid off for her, but you can't say she didn't give it an effort. Baldwin was raised extremely upper-class -- she was related to former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, among others -- but exited the convent pretty much penniless, so while she did have a safety net in terms of various sets of variously judgmental relations who were willing to put her up, she spends a lot of the book valiantly attempting to take her place among the workers of the world. And these are real labor jobs, too -- 'ex-nun' is not a resume booster, and most of the things she felt actually qualified to do for a living based on her convent experience (librarianship, scholarship, etc) required some form of degree, so much of the work she does in this book are things like being a land girl, or working in a canteen. She doesn't enjoy these jobs, and she rarely does them long, but you have to respect her for giving it the old college try, especially when she's constantly in a state of profound and sustained culture shock.

Overall, Baldwin does not enjoy the changes to the world since she left it. She does not enjoy having gone in a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her, and come out a middle-aged woman who's missed all the milestones that everyone around her takes for granted. She does, however, profoundly enjoy her freedom, and soon begins to cherish an all-consuming dream of purchasing a Small House of her Very Own where she can do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants. After decades in a convent, you can hardly blame her for this. On the other hand -- fascinatingly, to me -- it's very clear that Baldwin still somewhat idealizes convent life, despite the fact that it obviously made her deeply miserable. She has long conversations with her judgmental relatives, and long conversations with us, the reader, in which she tries to convince them/us of the real virtues of the cloister; of the spiritual value of deep, deliberate, constant self-sacrifice and self-abegnation; of the fact that it's important, vital and necessary that some people close themselves away from work in the world to focus on the exclusive pursuit of God. It is good that people do this, it's spiritual and heroic, it's simply -- unfortunately -- the only case in which she's ever known the church to be wrong in assessing who does or does not have a genuine vocation after the novice period -- not for her.

Baldwin is a fascinating and contradictory person and I enjoyed spending time with her quite a bit. I suspect she wouldn't much enjoy spending time with me; she will keep going to London and observing neutrally that it seems the streets are much more full of Jews than they were before she went into the convent, faint shudder implied. At another point she confesses that although she'd left the convent with 'definite socialist tendencies,' actually working among the working people has changed her mind for the worse: 'the people' now impressed me as full of class prejudice and an almost vindictive envy-hatred-malice fixation towards anyone who was richer, cleverer, or in any way superior to themselves. Still, despite her preoccupations and prejudices, her voice is interesting, and deeply eccentric, and IMO she's worth getting to know. This is a woman, an ex-nun, who takes Le Morte D'Arthur as her beacon of hope and guide to life. Le Morte! You really can't agree with it, but how can you not be compelled?

On the first weekend of January genarti and I went along with some friends to the Moby-Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which was such an unexpectedly fun experience that we're already talking about maybe doing it again next year.

The way the marathon works is that people sign up in advance to read three-minute sections of the book and the whole thing keeps rolling along for about twenty-five hours, give or take. You don't know in advance what the section will be, because it depends how fast the people before you have been reading, so good luck to you if it contains a lot of highly specific terminology - you take what you get and you go until one of the organizers says 'thank you!' and then it's the next person's turn. If it seems like they're getting through the book too fast they'll sub in a foreign language reader to do a chapter in German or Spanish. We did not get in on the thing fast enough to be proper readers but we all signed up to be substitute readers, which is someone who can be called on if the proper reader misses their timing and isn't there for their section, and I got very fortunate on the timing and was in fact subbed in to read the forging of Ahab's harpoon! (genarti ALMOST got even luckier and was right on the verge of getting to read the Rachel, but then the proper reader turned up at the last moment and she missed it by a hair.)

There are also a few special readings. Father Mapple's sermon is read out in the New Bedford church that has since been outfitted with a ship-pulpit to match the book's description (with everyone given a song-sheet to join in chorus on "The Ribs and Terrors Of the Whale") and the closing reader was a professional actor who, we learned afterwards, had just fallen in love with Moby-Dick this past year and emailed the festival with great enthusiasm to participate. The opening chapters are read out in the room where the Whaling Museum has a half-size whaling ship, and you can hang out and listen on the ship, and I do kind of wish they'd done the whole thing there but I suppose I understand why they want to give people 'actual chairs' in which to 'sit normally'.

Some people do stay for the whole 25 hours; there's food for purchase in the museum (plus a free chowder at night and free pastries in the morning While Supplies Last) and the marathon is being broadcast throughout the whole place, so you really could just stay in the museum the entire time without leaving if you wanted. We were not so stalwart; we wanted good food and sleep not on the floor of a museum, and got both. The marathon is broken up into four-hour watches, and you get a little passport and a stamp for every one of the four-hour watches you're there for, so we told ourselves we would stay until just past midnight to get the 12-4 AM stamp and then sneak back before 8 AM to get the 4-8 AM stamp before the watch ticked over. When midnight came around I was very much falling asleep in my seat, and got ready to nudge everyone to leave, but then we all realized that the next chapter was ISHMAEL DESCRIBES BAD WHALE ART and we couldn't leave until he had in fact described all the bad whale art!

I'm not even the world's biggest Moby-Dick-head; I like the book but I've only actually read it the once. I had my knitting (I got a GREAT deal done on my knitting), and I loved getting to read a section, and I enjoyed all the different amateur readers, some rather bad and some very good. But what I enjoyed most of all was the experience of being surrounded by a thousand other people, each with their own obviously well-loved copy of Moby-Dick, each a different edition of Moby-Dick -- I've certainly never seen so many editions of Moby-Dick in one place -- rapturously following along. (In top-tier outfits, too. Forget Harajuku; if you want street fashion, the Moby-Dick marathon is the place to be. So many hand-knit Moby Dick-themed woolen garments!) It's a kind of communal high, like a convention or a concert -- and I like concerts, but my heart is with books, and it's hard to get of communal high off a book. Inherently a sort of solitary experience. But the Moby-Dick marathon managed it, and there is something really very spectacular in that.

Anyway, as much as we all like Moby-Dick, at some point on the road trip trip, we started talking about what book we personally would want to marathon read with Three Thousand People in a Relevant Location if we had the authority to command such a thing, and I'm pitching the question outward. My own choice was White's Once And Future King read in a ruined castle -- I suspect would not have the pull of Moby-Dick in these days but you never know!

Due to the combo of the ongoing Eight Days of DWJ project and being on the Otherwise judging committee, this has been one of my best years in recent memory for reading actual books and my worst for keeping up with write-ups.

( Books read, 2025 )

As usual, I'm hoping to write up many of the ones I missed and will probably not in fact actually get around to most of them, so feel free to ask me about any of them -- I'll try to either do a short version here or get myself together for an actual post!

The Queen's Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis did quite a good job of giving me historical context around the lives of artisans and upwardly mobile bourgeois in 17th and early 18th century France and only a mediocre job IMO of convincing me of its central argument, but I was reading it for the former and not the latter so I can't say I was disappointed per se ...

As the author, historian Joan DeJean, introduces her narrative, she was browsing the National Archives when she came across two documents: the first, appointing Jean Magoulet as official embroiderer to Queen Marie-Thérèse of France; the second, decreeing that Magoulet's daughter Marie Louise should be put in prison and deported to New Orleans on charges of prostitution. DeJean immediately dropped what she was doing to Get To The Bottom Of This and went on a deep dive into the entire Magoulet family as well as the family of Louis Chevrot, the young man whose involvement with Marie-Louise resulted in the charges above.

In order to write this family saga, Joan DeJean has pulled out every relevant family document -- marriage licenses, birth certificates, guardianship statements, criminal charges, recorded purchases, etc. etc. -- and she does a clear and interesting job of explaining what we can learn from them, what these kinds of documents normally look like and what their context is, what the specific features of these family documents imply, and letting you follow her logic with your own brain. I appreciate this very much! I had no idea, for example, that it was standard in 17th-century France for the court to appoint a guardian for any child who lost a parent, even if they still had the other parent living, to ensure that their financial interests were protected, something that came up often in this narrative where a lot of kids were losing parents in situations where their financial interests were not particularly protected. It's a really good example of historical detective work, how you can draw a picture of a family through time through the bureaucratic litter they leave behind, and I appreciated it very much.

On the other hand, Joan DeJean also occasionally slips into writing like this --

In the course of their attempts both to get rich quick and to save their skin when they got into bad straits, the Queen's Embroiderers became imposters, tricksters, con artists nonpareil. They lied about everything and to everyone: to the police, to notaries, to their in-laws. They lied about their ages and those of their children, about their professional accomplishments and their net worth. They caroused; they philandered; they made a mockery of the laws of church and state. The only truly authentic thing about them was their extraordinary talent and their ability to weave gold and silver thread into the kind of garments that seemed the stuff of dreams. In their lives and on an almost daily basis, haute couture crossed paths with high crime.

Savage beauty indeed.

-- which made me laugh out loud every time it happened. So, bug, feature? who could say ....

Anyway, Joan DeJean makes a pretty good argument for most of the family gossip she pulls out about the Magoulets and the Chevrots, but the center of her argument about the Great Tragic Romance between Marie-Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot rests on a really elaborate switcheroo that I simply do not buy. In drawing out her family saga, DeJean has become obsessed with the fact that there seem to have been two Marie-Louise Magoulets, one being more than a decade older than the other, and, crucially, also more than a decade older than Louis Chevrot; ( I guess this is technically spoilers for a three hundred year old scandal )

But a.) context about material culture and craftsmanship is what I was here for and context is what I got, in spades, and b.) if you're going to invent a historical conspiracy theory, make it as niche as possible, is what I say, so despite the fact that I don't BELIEVE DeJean I still spiritually support her. Has she perhaps connected a few more dots than actually exist? Perhaps. But I still certainly got my money's worth [none; library] out of the book!

I am not allowing myself to dive into the Yuletide archive this year until after reveals due to a bunch of other reading commitments that have to get done by early January, BUT! I obviously made an exception for my own

THREE

INCREDIBLE

GIFT

FICS:

The Knight Under the Apple Tree

“Our crop is well tended,” Celia protested, despite all evidence that it was not. “It grows copiously out yonder.”

Oliver turned his head to look out the window. “Indeed, the grass outside does grow most mightily.”

“It is a sheepcote, sir; as the name suggests, it is for the keeping of sheep. Thus grass is essential.”

“And yet I do not see the sheep.”

I asked someone to sell me on As You Like It's Celia/Oliver side ship and I have completely received my wish: this fic is SO cute and does such a lovely job filling out the relationship between these characters until it feels like something that fully exists and that I want to root for

A rainbow-stripe in another proper world

“None of it ever happened,” said Uncle Nirupam in his precise way, “and so we have no memories of it, of course. But the instincts remain. I felt the same way when I first visited this world. I thought, is this where they burn people like us?”

The first of two excellent Witch Week fix-it fics -- this one is a short little outsider-POV gem in which Janet Chant and Nan Pilgrim are married, which is not something I would have ever thought of in a million years but which delights me deeply! galaxy brain!

Remember, Remember

“To produce the required crispiness, the mandrake is dipped in wallpaper paste, dredged in sawdust, and then pan-fried until it is completely burnt on all sides,” Nan recited obligingly. “It is served with a side of slugs poached in their own slime. Their chewy texture provides a perfect complement…” Estelle was howling with laughter by this point. Nan, as always in such moments, felt as though she were being carried along by an inexorable flood of words quite independent of herself. A rhyme was pushing insistently at the inside of her head, and she let it out without the least idea where it was going to finish up:

“Crispy mandrake, extra fancy,

Bring me something

Chrestomanci!”

and THIS one is a luxurious and voice-perfect THIRTEEN THOUSAND WORDS spent with my beloved terrible children as their memories are returned by way of an encounter with the TRAGICALLY ABANDONED SENTIENT GARDEN IMPLEMENTS. ABSOLUTE GALAXY BRAIN AGAIN ... I'm so happy ...

and having been Yuletided well beyond my deserts, I now leave the archive for now but I look forward to reading everyone's recs on the other side!

Last time I got the chance to hang out with raven, about a year ago -- there would have been another time recently but, alas!, airline crimes interfered -- I ended up with two books shoved into my hands: Mavis Doriel Hay's Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell.

I was not particularly familiar with Hay's game before this; she falls squarely in the Golden Age but only ever published three novels before focusing all her attention on Rural British Handicrafts. raven is right however that these books are both very fun and worthy of attention for their structure: neither of them have a kind of traditional primary detective figure, and both of them instead focus on a group of people in the murder victim's broader community who sort of collectively solve the crime by bouncing against each other in various directions until the right information comes to light.

In Murder Underground, the unloved landlady of a boarding house is found murdered on the subway, and her Bertie Wooster of a nephew promptly bumbles his way all over the crime scene and makes himself prime suspect number one (Dorothy Sayers, in her review, called this man one of the most feckless, exasperating and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail and I couldn't put it better! god bless!) We spend a good chunk of the book following the Feckless Nephew and another good chunk just hanging out with the people who live in the boarding house, all of whom have Opinions, Mostly Incorrect.

Death on the Cherwell has some returning characters from Murder Underground but mostly focuses on a group of Young Lady Students who have been having an inaugural meeting for their we-hate-and-curse-our-bursar club when they happen to see said bursar floating down the river in a boat, presumably pre-cursed because she's very obviously dead. The police detective on the case has more to do in this one but the charm of the book is all in the Young Lady Students bopping around trying to investigate on their own, annoying various of their friends and relations in the process.

Hay has also written a third book that I've not yet read and I'm curious to see if it leans as much as these two into the ensemble and the way that a whole community can become stakeholders in A Murder Problem. In the meantime, raven has encouraged me to pass these along to another good home if anyone else would like them! ETA and they are CLAIMED

(As always when reading Golden Age mysteries one is inevitably going to run into some classic Golden Age racism, and in this case it would be remiss of me not to mention that Death on the Cherwell has some opinions about Eastern Europe ... ah, those excitable Yugoslavians! A Yugoslavian Young Lady Student MIGHT declare blood feud against one of her admins. Who Could Say. We Just Don't Know.)

On a lighter Parisian note, I read my first Katherine Rundell book, Rooftoppers, which I would have ADORED at age ten but also found extremely fun at age forty!

The heroine of Rooftoppers is orphan Sophie, found floating in a cello case the English Channel after a terrible shipwreck and adopted by a charming eccentric named Charles who raises her on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry. Unfortunately the English authorities do not approve of children being raised on Shakespeare and Free Spirited Inquiry, so when they threaten to remove Sophie to an orphanage, Charles and Sophie buy themselves time by fleeing to Paris in an attempt to track down traces of Sophie's parentage.

Sophie is stubbornly convinced she might have a mother somewhere out there who survived the shipwreck! Charles is less convinced, but willing to be supportive. On account of the Authorities, however, Charles advises Sophie to stay in the hotel while he pursues the investigation -- but Sophie will not be confined! So she starts pursuing her own investigations via the hotel roof, where she rapidly collides with Matteo, an extremely feral child who claims ownership of the Paris roofs and Does Not Want want Sophie intruding.

But of course eventually Sophie wins Matteo over and is welcomed into the world of the Rooftoppers, Parisian children who have fled from orphanages in favor of leaping from spire to steeple, stealing scraps and shooting pigeons (but also sometimes befriending the pigeons) and generally making a self-sufficient sort of life for themselves in the Most Scenic Surroundings in the World. The book makes it quite clear that the Rooftoppers are often cold and hungry and smelly and the whole thing is no bed of roses, while nonetheless fully and joyously indulging in the tropey delight of secret! hyper-competent! child! rooftop! society!!

The book as a whole strikes a lovely tonal balance just on the edge of fairy tale -- everything is very technically plausible and nothing is actually magic, but also, you know, the central image of the book is a gang of rooftop Lost Kids chasing the haunting sound of cello music over the roof of the Palais de Justice. The ending I think does not make the mistake of trying to resolve too much, and overall I found it a really charming experience.

The Ukrainian fantasy novel Vita Nostra has been on my to-read list for a while ever since shati described it as 'kind of like the Wayside School books' in a conversation about dark academia, a description which I trusted implicitly because shati always describes things in helpful and universally accepted terms.

Anyway, so Vita Nostra is more or less a horror novel .... or at least it's about the thing which is scariest to me, existential transformation of the self without consent and without control.

At the start of the book, teenage Sasha is on a nice beach vacation with her mom when she finds herself being followed everywhere by a strange, ominous man. He has a dictate for her: every morning, she has to skinny-dip at 4 AM and swim out to a certain point in the ocean, then back, Or Else. Or Else? Well, the first time she oversleeps, her mom's vacation boyfriend has a mild heart attack and ends up in the ER. The next time ... well, who knows, the next time, so Sasha keeps on swimming. And then the vacation ends! And the horrible and inexplicable interval is, thankfully, over!

Except of course it isn't over; the ominous man returns, with more instructions, which eventually derail Sasha off of her planned normal pathway of high school --> university --> career. Instead, despite the confused protests of her mother, she glumly follows the instructions of her evil angel and treks off to the remote town of Torpa to attend the Institute of Special Technologies.

Nobody is at the Institute of Special Technologies by choice. Nobody is there to have a good time. Everyone has been coerced there by an ominous advisor; as entrance precondition, everyone has been given a set of miserable tasks to perform, Or Else. Also, it's hard not to notice that all the older students look strange and haunted and shamble disconcertingly through the dorms in a way that seems like a sort of existential dispute with the concept of space, though if you ask them about it they're just like 'lol you'll understand eventually,' which is not reassuring. And then there are the actual assignments -- the assignments that seem designed to train you to think in a way the human brain was not designed to think -- and which Sasha is actually really good at! the best in her class! fortunately or unfortunately .... but fortunately in at least this respect: everyone wants to pass, because if you fail at the midterm, if you fail at the finals, there's always the Or Else waiting.

AND ALSO all the roommates are assigned and it's hell.

Weird, fascinating book! I found it very tense and propulsive despite the fact that for chapters at a time all that happens is Sasha doing horrible homework exercises and turning her brain inside out. I feel like a lot of magic school books are, essentially, power fantasies. What if you learned magic? What if you were so good at it? Sasha is learning some kind of magic, and Sasha is so good at it, but the overwhelming emotion of this book is powerlessness, lack of agency, arbitrary tasks and incomprehensible experiences papered over with a parody of Normal College Life. On the one hand Sasha is desperate to hold onto her humanity and to remain a person that her mother will recognize when she comes home; on the other hand, the veneer of Normal College Life layered on top of the Institute's existential weirdness seems more and more pointless and frustrating the further on it goes and the stranger Sasha herself becomes. I think the moment it really clicked for me is midway through Sasha's second year, when ( spoilers )

I am home! with my own cats! and my own computer!! This is very exciting because I have spent most of the last two weeks traveling, including last Monday when I spent about 24 hours total stumbling through different airports getting rerouted onto different flights before finally getting to achieve my dearest wish at that point, Be Horizontal.

In the course of that extremely long day I watched two French movies on planes:

( Au revoir là-haut/See You Up There )

( La venue de l'avenir/Colors of Time )

The other Polly Barton-translated book I read recently was Asako Yuzuki's Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, which I ended up suggesting for my book club on account of intriguing DW posts from several of you.

Butter focuses Rika Machida, a magazine journalist, on the cusp of becoming the first woman in her company to break the glass ceiling and join Big Editorial, who decides that her next big feature is going to be an insider interview with the infamous prisoner Manako Kajii. Kajii is accused of murdering several men that she met on dating sites after seducing them with a fatal combination of sex, personal attention, and French cooking; in the eyes of the public, however, her greatest crime is that she somehow managed all this femme fatale-ing while being Kind Of Fat.

After a tip from her best friend Reiko -- a housewife who quit her own promising career in hopes of starting a family -- Rika, despite having no previous interest in cooking or domesticity, writes to Kajii about getting her recipe for beef stew. This opens the door for a connection that gets very psychologically weird very fast; Kajii, behind bars, tests Rika with various little living-by-proxy challenges -- eat some good butter! go to the best French restaurant in town! eat late night ramen! after having sex! and tell me all about it -- and Rika, fascinated despite herself, allows herself to be manipulated. For the interview, of course. And also because it turns out good butter is really good, and that eating and making rich food for herself instead of working to keep herself boyishly thin (the prince of her all-girl's school! One of the Boys at work!) is changing her relationship to her body, and her gender, and to the way that people perceive her in the world and she perceives them.

This is more or less what I'd understood to be the plot of the book -- a sort of Silence of the Lambs situation, if the crime that Clarice was trying to solve by talking with Hannibal was societal misogyny -- but in fact it's only about half of the story, and societal misogyny is only one of the big crimes under consideration. The other one is loneliness, and so the rest of the book has to do with Rika's other relationships, and the domino-effect changes that Rika's Kajiimania has on the other people in her life. The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension ( spoilers I suppose ) But there's also Rika's mother, and her boyfriend, and the older mentor that she has secret intermittent just-lads-together meet-ups with in bars to get hot journalistic tips; all of these relationships are important, and usually ended up in places I didn't expect and that were more interesting than I would have guessed.

Not everything landed for me about this book, but this was one thing it did pretty consistently that I appreciated -- Rika would think about something, and I would go, 'well, that was didactic, you just said your theme out loud,' and then the book and Rika as protagonist would revisit it and have a more complicated and potentially contradictory thought about it, and then we'd go back to it again, and it usually ended up being more interesting than I would have thought the first time around. It's a long book, possibly too long, but it's equally possible I think that it does need that space to hold contradictions in.

It was however quite funny to read this shortly after Taiwan Travelogue -- another book I have not written up and should probably do so soon -- and also shortly after What Did You Eat Yesterday and also seeing a lot of gifsets for She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat ... fellas, is it gay to be really into food? signs point to yes!