The Marvelous Mitfords

I've had the most splendid day, doing absolutely nothing but sitting in my back yard in the sun and reading, and getting very tan. My book of choice is The Mitford Girls, by Mary S. Lovell, which I talked about vaguely here, back when I bought it in December. I am absolutely loving it. I started it Saturday night or maybe Sunday, the thing is 529 pages, and I expect to finish it tomorrow. It's lovely having time to read, but if I were reading a different book I doubt I'd have gotten through so much of it. I always forget how much I like reading biography.

For the few readers of book blogs who have not yet heard, the Mitfords were (and are, I suppose) a family of British aristocrats made famous mostly by Nancy Mitford's semi-autobiographical novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. They were at the height of their notoriety (I think I can pretty safely call it that) in the 1930s and '40s. Lord and Lady Redesdale, David and Sydney Mitford had six daughters and a son, born between 1902 and 1920. Each of them is a fascinating and often strikingly different person in their own right, and on top of this they lived in one of the most interesting times in history. Not only that but they were also a notable part of this history. The book suggests, for example, that it is possible that Diana Mitford (third eldest daughter) was the only person to be personally well-acquainted with both Churchill and Hitler.

I enjoyed the stories of their childhood and their early adulthood, especially the various eccentricities of the family, and also the various associations they had--suddenly reading a name of some close acquaintance or other and realizing that it was some famous person. Evelyn Waugh, for example, based his novel Vile Bodies off Diana Mitford and her first husband and their friends. Nancy Mitford especially knew numerous famous members of England's literary world.

What I've found most fascinating about this book, though, is the politics, and the family's place within political history. Diana and Unity Mitford were both devoted Fascists, while Decca Mitford was a Communist, and David and Sydney Mitford's inability to agree on Hitler, Fascism, and the war fractured their marriage. The family was related to Winston Churchill. Diana's second husband, Oswald Mosley, was leader of the British Fascist party. Unity spent most of the 1930s living in Germany, and for quite a long time sat in restaurants she knew Hitler frequented, waiting to see him. Eventually, he noticed her. They got to know each other very well; he gave her presents, found her apartments, paid medical bills, got her tickets to the opera. She was so torn between Britain and Germany that she decided she would have to commit suicide if they went to war with each other.

The story of Unity Mitford's relationship with Hitler and Germany is, I think, the most interesting part of this book for me. I've never read anything about Germany in the years before World War II, and it's especially interesting to do so now, having innocently read The Pursuit of Love a year ago, and now being able to connect its author to such a subject.

I definitely recommend this book, whether you already know anything about the Mitfords or not. The writing is very fluid, and I think does a good job of capturing the world these people lived in, and their extremely unique and forceful personalities.

Summer reading

Summer has begun in earnest, and while there are many things I dislike about summer, I do like having the time to read and sew, and update this blog.

And I have been using my time, even! I made myself a pair of shorts, navy blue with red apple-shaped buttons, which are pleasingly picturesque. I'm plotting all sorts of other sewing projects, like a lemon-print cotton dress, and various skirts and shirts and whatnot. I have also been reading, and catching up on everyone else's book blogs, which I am sadly behind on (I have 30 or 40 entries to read for at least four different blogs). Reading all these bookish thoughts are making me contemplate doing JulNoWriMo again, which I hadn't planned on (last year I started it half way through the month and still managed to finish in time--there are a couple of blog entries in which I mention it).

I finished reading The Hero and the Crown, yesterday, by Robin McKinley. It's a bit of a classic, I guess. It certainly has numerous elements of classic fantasy, though it's so good these don't really bother at all. I loved the style of the writing, although the style sort of changes part way through, and then changes slightly again. The middle section moved the slowest, and then toward the end it picked up and I fairly raced through.

It's the story of Aerin, daughter of the king by his second wife, who was never very well-accepted, and whose daughter is now a bit of a stranger in her own home. Of course, Aerin is not entirely who she thinks she is.

The book was often rather surprising. It doesn't follow quite the expected pattern, but I think this is a side effect of the way the style changes. In the beginning I expected it to be a conventional fantasy and follow conventional fantasy plotlines, what with dragons and swords and princesses, but then it changed and fell more into the pattern of authors such as Patricia McKillip or John Dickinson, a silvery, dreamlike sort of writing and action. And then it changed again and became sort of a cross between the two. It is a very satisfying book in that it wraps things up very nicely for Aerin, though it's almost too nicely, but there's enough that goes wrong along the way that this ending isn't really a problem.

It was given to me as the favourite book of the giver, so I'm glad I enjoyed it.

It's an apt title even if I don't quite remember what the title came from...

Some time last week I finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, which I got for my birthday in May. It's translated from French, and now I've read it in English I kind of want to read the French.

There is a certain quality particular to a lot of French literature, which I once failed utterly at explaining, but which I really enjoy. It's a clarity, an ability to be profound without being frilly and using too many words or too obscure words. I wonder if it's got to do with French having much less vocabulary than English, so there's no need to use excessive quantities of synonyms. Anyway, this quality works especially well for this book, which talks a lot about Japanese culture and art and whatnot, and there's a certain similarity between simplicity in Japanese art and this slightly indefinable quality of French writing.

The book is about people who hide what they are--Renee, a concierge in a posh apartment building who is really very intellectual but puts on a front of being a typical dull concierge, and an inhabitant of the apartment building, Paloma, an extremely intelligent twelve-year-old who pretends to be merely average, and who is so fed up with what she sees as the meaninglessness of life that she's decided to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. The book is told by these two characters, alternating between Renee's chapters, and Paloma's Profound Thoughts and Journals of the Movement of the World. Eventually, someone new moves into the building...

This is a terribly well put together book. Some books I like because they are sort of dumbly satisfying, with happy endings and whatnot, but this I like because it is very true, and it doesn't all go the way you want it to but that's what life is like. All together, I liked it a great deal.

Dropping by for a chat...

I'm still here, really! Just incredibly busy. Tech rehearsal for my play and my graduation are both on Thursday, and then the play is going on all weekend. We're doing The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard. If by some chance you're in Seattle, come see it at West Seattle High School (not actually my school), 3000 California Ave SW, Friday at 7:30, and Saturday at 2:00 and 7:30.

I'm not even here just to advertise! After ages and ages and various interludes of reading other things, I've finally finished Wuthering Heights. I've been reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery, but I needed a lightweight book to bring with me at the last minute as I was heading out the door so I grabbed Wuthering Heights, and then I got back into it and finished it all in one go this morning. I guess I just needed a break from it.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. It's far too dreary to become a favourite; my favourite books are exclusively happy, or at least hopeful. Of the three Bronte's I've read, this is certainly my least favourite, but it's also the only unhappy one. It's very compelling, anyway, and everyone in it has such a forceful personality. It's also nearly impossible to understand most of the characters, they're all so exaggeratedly passionate. But not, I think, unrealistically so. It's an interesting combination. I sort of wonder if the environment of the Heights and the moors surrounding is what promotes such extremes of feeling.

Anyway, I'm glad to have read Wuthering Heights, though I don't think I'll read it again. I'll be back soon to talk about The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I've almost finished that.

Happy Easter!

I'm not Christian, so really I only celebrate the pagan bits, but I've always been fond of Easter. I plan to spend it sewing and reading Wuthering Heights.

Bronte one, Bronte two, Bronte three.

I'm definitely going to be posting here less often until the end of June, because this is my busiest time of the year, and I have ridiculous amounts of things going on. I have to graduate, put on a play, go to classes, and help Nova move out of the Mann building. I suspect my reading time will be rather cut short as well, but I am working on some things.

I started reading Wuthering Heights on Saturday, and am already well into it. Now that I can say I've read all three Bronte sisters, it's rather interesting to compare them. It was easy for me to get into Wuthering Heights, the story really jumps in quickly and it's put together in such an interesting way, with different people telling the story, even people who are totally tangential to the story. On the other hand, I have a really difficult time getting into Charlotte Bronte's novels, though Jane Eyre is one of my very favourite books. Of the Bronte's novels, I have read Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and now a good chunk of Wuthering Heights. I started Villette, but did not get very far. I think Jane Eyre is the most conventionally structured of these, in that it retains the first person narrative throughout the whole book, without changing narrators or throwing in diaries or letters. Nineteenth century first person novels still seem strange to me, though I'm not sure why.

I loved Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and I am fully expecting to love Wuthering Heights too, though I suspect it will be less satisfying.

Here I go, cheerio, on my way...

Wednesday night, I saw a production of Alan Bennett's The History Boys at ArtsWest. It's one of my favourite plays, but I've only every read it and seen the movie, so it was incredibly exciting to actually see a stage production of it. It was quite excellent, though I'm having a hard time separating the fabulousness of the script from the actual production. I didn't like some of the casting (Posner, mostly, and Irwin a little bit), and some I thought was great (Mrs. Lintott, the Headmaster, Scripps, Timms). I will say that it's a play that is very settled in a particular production of it (the movie version and the production with the same cast), and ArtsWest did a good job of making it their own.

I love what this play says about history, literature, and life. When Hector says he's trying to teach the boys not to speak, in their middle age, about their love of Words, said in that stuffy reverential tone, and that's what the Gracie Fields was for, I always think that Alan Bennett knows that the people who really do love words aren't reverential about them--they jump up and down and flail about, and they love them whether they're in Hardy or in Brief Encounter. Alan Bennett is a very sharp fellow, I think. I keep meaning to read more of his writing, but there are so many things I keep meaning to read.

And, if I kept getting distracted staring at the lighting during the show, it's because I'm a theatre geek, and not because the show was not absorbing.

Jane Austen, Russia, and everything else

I've been rather absent lately, but school has definitely taken precedence. I've spent the last week lurking in the lighting booth (which is really just a booth, it was never finished properly) at school cleaning heavy, incredibly dusty stage lights, which is very very fun but also time consuming. I admit I have not done a lot of reading. I'm still plodding through Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen, which is very good but not, I admit, that gripping. At least, in the way that nonfiction rarely grips me. So that's slow going, and I'm determined to finish it before I read anything else.

I gave up on The Beginning of Spring. I've discovered that books about Russia just don't work for me. Penelope Fitzgerald is great, I just can't get myself to enjoy the setting. I think it's possible that this is not exclusive to Russia, but rather any terribly cold climate. The cold just gives the book a mood that I can't really enjoy, though sometimes I appreciate it. There are still some Russian classics I'd like to read, but that may have to wait until I take a class, or something.

Even if the Miss Austen biography is slow going, I have been thinking about Jane Austen in general, and the research paper I'm working on about sibling vs. romantic love in her novels. It's a question that's rather invaded the rest of my life, too, actually. What do you think? In literature, or in life, what is the real difference between romantic love and love between siblings/very close friends?

Three in one

I spent nearly all of yesterday reading, which was very pleasant, and finished three books, which I'm very pleased with. It's been a long time since I spent an entire day curled up in my chair doing nothing much but reading, and I've definitely missed it. It was an especially good day for it, too, as it was grey and rainy most of the day and then come evening there was a brief thunderstorm and enough hail that it looks like it snowed. Silly weather.

I finished that new Tamora Pierce book, Melting Stones, which I enjoyed but wasn't terribly impressed with. It was first-person, which I like much less in general, and I think her third-person novels are better. Still, it's Tamora Pierce, whom I love, so it really doesn't matter how good the book was because it was comforting to read it. It was exactly the sort of book I needed. Although apparently it didn't entirely satisfy the need for such a book, as now I'm rereading The Will of the Empress.

I also finished two books I'd been reading through DailyLit, which I just kind of decided I was going to finish all in one go. This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie. I enjoyed This Side of Paradise a lot, though I see why it's less-read than The Great Gatsby--it struck me as being a bit of an experiment, like he thought, "Well, I'll write this whole chapter like it's a play, let's see how that goes," whereas The Great Gatsby is more tightly reined in and concrete. The actual writing, however, is as fabulous as ever.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles is the first Agatha Christie I've read, and if I remember correctly the first one she wrote, and I liked it very much. I liked how the narrator was as fallible and disposed to assumptions as any of the characters (except, of course, Poirot), and he felt more like just another character than most narrators do, since he was very definitely not the main character. The writing was always very clear and free of any muddling, which is a quality that always reminds me of a lot of French literature. It kind of has to be clear, since the story of the murder is so complicated, and so little is known at one time or so much changes, that otherwise you'd get completely confused.

I'd like to read a biography of Agatha Christie, mostly because I want to know what her writing process was. The plot is so intricate that of course it must have been planned out in advance, but I can't imagine being able to write a novel that I've already plotted in such detail. Anyway, this just increases my idea that I should read more mysteries.

A bit of an update.

I haven't posted in quite some time, I see, although that doesn't mean I've not been reading. Mostly, life is getting in the way of keeping up with all the internet things I follow. School and friends are the main culprits, though I must say I rather like both of them.

One thing that's been keeping me busy is the writing of my senior research paper. I have to write a paper for my Jane Austen class anyway, which has to be 5-7 pages, so it's not that much more work just to make it 12-15 pages instead and call it my senior research paper. It's on sibling relationships in Jane Austen's novels, but also on the various romantic relationships that spring from sibling-like relationships, and how I think the sibling-like aspects of these relationships were more important to Jane Austen than the romance. I'm really enjoying writing it.

In the course of my research for the paper, I've been reading Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen, which I like a good deal. I love reading biographies, but don't do it very often, and this is a very good one. Clear and well put together, and also well able to keep my interest.

Other books on the table--my second Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring, and the newest Tamora Pierce book, Melting Stones. I've loved Tamora Pierce for years; it's young adult fiction which has not the best writing, but which always manages to involve fascinating characters, concepts, and plots. This is exactly what I needed in terms of a comforting fantasy novel that is also new.