September Books
Oct. 1st, 2009 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeSeptember
Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown - Jennifer Scanlon
The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell
Spinster - Sylvia Ashton-Warner
The Best of Myles - Flann O'Brien
The Ionian Mission - Patrick O'Brien
The Reverse of the Medal - Patrick O'Brien
The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell
No More Saturday Nights - Norma Klein
Dimsie Goes to School - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
The Helen Gurley Brown biography was written up everywhere as being about fun and feminism. The early part of the book is rather dull, lots of dense information about where and how she grew up that didn't really manage to relate it to the wider social context. The later chapters, about Cosmopolitan specifically, were much better, though still overall not very engaging. The stuff about how she considered herself a feminist, and support for specific issues such as abortion, was really interesting, particularly her interactions with Gloria Steinem. I wanted much more about that, but I suppose partly it's the limitation of biography about living subjects.
I am starting to think of A Dance to the Music of Time as Where's Widmerpool.
I am slowly transporting all my Patrick O'Brien books back to my parents' house so that my mum can reread them. Unfortunately having read these on the train there, I now want to reread them all myself, and I have lots of other books I need to read first. And work to do. But mostly the other books. I think I read something about a film sequel to Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and I would like that to be true.
Spinster was fascinating. It's a story about a white woman teaching in a Maori school in New Zealand in the 1950s, and she's sort of an alcoholic and has weird relationships with men, and she is very protective of her surname which people can't pronounce and approves of anyone who can. She is scared of the inspectors, and parents, and loves her children completely and utterly. She devises a reading scheme for the Maori children that is about their own lives and fears so that they are not confronted with an alien world when they come to learn to read. It was odd, and disconcerting, and utterly involving. Last year I went to a Gender, Education and the Body conference when Bronwen Davies was talking about Deleuze and kindergarten and lines of flight, and I still don't really understand what on earth that was about but this book reminded me of it. The head and Miss Vorontosov are trying to rebuild the school so that the white children in the community will come back to it, and there is lots of talk of the "new race", and they struggle with the white families who resent the Maori children - all these conflicting ideas about nationality and multiculturalism. It's a very sad book.
My uncle had given me a copy of the Myles piece about hiring people to make your library look well read and then this showed up on the uni bookstall. I have enjoyed it very much, especially the cliche catechism.
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jinxremoving gave me No More Saturday Nights, for which much thanks. It is about a boy who goes to college with his newborn son in tow. I had read it before ages ago, and it was as uncomfortable a start as I remember. Tim's high school girlfriend is pregnant, and has decided to give the baby up for adoption. Tim finds out that she is accepting money from the adoptive parents, and decides that he wants to take the baby instead. Klein writes this as rather ambiguous, and doesn't exactly demonise Cheryl (the mother), but it is very much that she is somehow not a proper person. She's working class while Tim is middle, and she's not clever, and eventually she is engaged to a 35 year old beige man, and the implication is that she just wanted to marry anyone at all. It's an interesting book, but a bit thin. We are told that Tim finds parenting alongside a full course load difficult, but it still seems a bit straightforward for him. I did like that the girls he moves in with aren't all falling over themselves to help with the cute little baby, but the feminist that he ends up getting together with is a bit acerbic-because-of-family-traumas and, again, thin characterisation.
Reading Dimsie Goes to School reminded me of a piece I once read - either in FOLLY or in Serendipity, I think - by a woman who was on a day out with her husband and spotted a copy of The Senior Prefect through the window. Naturally she was terribly excited, but the shop was closed until the afternoon, and it was only morning. Thinking her husband would not take terribly well to "can we stay here all day until the bookshop opens because there is a book I may or may not be able to afford", she set about trying to keep him there with stealth, including betraying the sisterhood by pretending to be unable to comprehend how he could be so very good at skimming stones. I think she got the book in the end. ANYWAY. I had forgotten how nasty the seniors are in Dimsie Goes to School, horrible and underhand. Especially I had forgotten how Meg Flynn is too lax with the juniors. I know that school stories are generally written around the younger girls (though this one wasn't, of course), but it does sometimes trouble me that I have difficulty identifying with the seniors, let alone the staff, despite the fact that I must be a good five years older than many of the "jolly young mistresses".
Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown - Jennifer Scanlon
The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell
Spinster - Sylvia Ashton-Warner
The Best of Myles - Flann O'Brien
The Ionian Mission - Patrick O'Brien
The Reverse of the Medal - Patrick O'Brien
The Soldier's Art - Anthony Powell
No More Saturday Nights - Norma Klein
Dimsie Goes to School - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
The Helen Gurley Brown biography was written up everywhere as being about fun and feminism. The early part of the book is rather dull, lots of dense information about where and how she grew up that didn't really manage to relate it to the wider social context. The later chapters, about Cosmopolitan specifically, were much better, though still overall not very engaging. The stuff about how she considered herself a feminist, and support for specific issues such as abortion, was really interesting, particularly her interactions with Gloria Steinem. I wanted much more about that, but I suppose partly it's the limitation of biography about living subjects.
I am starting to think of A Dance to the Music of Time as Where's Widmerpool.
I am slowly transporting all my Patrick O'Brien books back to my parents' house so that my mum can reread them. Unfortunately having read these on the train there, I now want to reread them all myself, and I have lots of other books I need to read first. And work to do. But mostly the other books. I think I read something about a film sequel to Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and I would like that to be true.
Spinster was fascinating. It's a story about a white woman teaching in a Maori school in New Zealand in the 1950s, and she's sort of an alcoholic and has weird relationships with men, and she is very protective of her surname which people can't pronounce and approves of anyone who can. She is scared of the inspectors, and parents, and loves her children completely and utterly. She devises a reading scheme for the Maori children that is about their own lives and fears so that they are not confronted with an alien world when they come to learn to read. It was odd, and disconcerting, and utterly involving. Last year I went to a Gender, Education and the Body conference when Bronwen Davies was talking about Deleuze and kindergarten and lines of flight, and I still don't really understand what on earth that was about but this book reminded me of it. The head and Miss Vorontosov are trying to rebuild the school so that the white children in the community will come back to it, and there is lots of talk of the "new race", and they struggle with the white families who resent the Maori children - all these conflicting ideas about nationality and multiculturalism. It's a very sad book.
My uncle had given me a copy of the Myles piece about hiring people to make your library look well read and then this showed up on the uni bookstall. I have enjoyed it very much, especially the cliche catechism.
jinxremoving gave me No More Saturday Nights, for which much thanks. It is about a boy who goes to college with his newborn son in tow. I had read it before ages ago, and it was as uncomfortable a start as I remember. Tim's high school girlfriend is pregnant, and has decided to give the baby up for adoption. Tim finds out that she is accepting money from the adoptive parents, and decides that he wants to take the baby instead. Klein writes this as rather ambiguous, and doesn't exactly demonise Cheryl (the mother), but it is very much that she is somehow not a proper person. She's working class while Tim is middle, and she's not clever, and eventually she is engaged to a 35 year old beige man, and the implication is that she just wanted to marry anyone at all. It's an interesting book, but a bit thin. We are told that Tim finds parenting alongside a full course load difficult, but it still seems a bit straightforward for him. I did like that the girls he moves in with aren't all falling over themselves to help with the cute little baby, but the feminist that he ends up getting together with is a bit acerbic-because-of-family-traumas and, again, thin characterisation.Reading Dimsie Goes to School reminded me of a piece I once read - either in FOLLY or in Serendipity, I think - by a woman who was on a day out with her husband and spotted a copy of The Senior Prefect through the window. Naturally she was terribly excited, but the shop was closed until the afternoon, and it was only morning. Thinking her husband would not take terribly well to "can we stay here all day until the bookshop opens because there is a book I may or may not be able to afford", she set about trying to keep him there with stealth, including betraying the sisterhood by pretending to be unable to comprehend how he could be so very good at skimming stones. I think she got the book in the end. ANYWAY. I had forgotten how nasty the seniors are in Dimsie Goes to School, horrible and underhand. Especially I had forgotten how Meg Flynn is too lax with the juniors. I know that school stories are generally written around the younger girls (though this one wasn't, of course), but it does sometimes trouble me that I have difficulty identifying with the seniors, let alone the staff, despite the fact that I must be a good five years older than many of the "jolly young mistresses".
