September was an excellent month, I was in Florence the whole time. The first few weeks were very packed with museum visits and dashing about, and since then I’ve been writing. So I only finished eight books this month, but they’re very interesting ones.
The Letters of Queen Victoria Volume 3, 1854-1861 — Queen Victoria (1908) The thing that would surprise you about Queen Victoria’s letters is what a passionate person she was. She cared so much. She cared about some pretty peculiar things, such as keeping other monarchs on their thrones, but she also cared about her family, about being kept in the loop by politicians who tried to keep her out of it, about the Scottish Highlands, and about parliamentary procedure. This volume ends with the death of Albert, so this isn’t the late “not amused” Victoria. But she’s never going through the motions, she’s always deeply engaged in a way I wouldn’t have expected.
I like reading letters; I like the sense you get of a real person who gets up in the morning and writes the letter and doesn’t know what’s happening next any more than we do in our own lives. I often find it makes me feel sympathetic to them as a person, and occasionally the opposite, seeing people in this close-up, day-by-day way sometimes makes me loathe them. With Queen Victoria it isn’t either of those things. I do like her more, but I don’t feel I really know her the way I often do after reading letters—and this is the third volume of her letters I’ve read. They’re edited, of course, and she is careful, of course, and almost always writing to subordinates and not equals. Very interesting. I hope there are more volumes.
The Waiting Game — Elizabeth Cadell (1985) It’s amazing that this was a new book in 1985, it feels as if it’s from an earlier era, probably from Cadell’s own youth. This is a book about a quiet village with a few families, and then a stranger arrives, just as Jane Austen prescribed. The stranger and heroine is a girl called Gianna, which—look, it isn’t a French name, it just isn’t. But she’s French, and her father (except it turns out he isn’t) used to be engaged to the stepmother of the hero, and… this is a very silly book, redeemed only by being fun. There is a ridiculous and completely unnecessary plot in which two people turn out to be siblings and they never find out and it doesn’t matter. I feel this is too silly to recommend to anyone, and yet I read it all through and quietly enjoyed it. I mostly enjoyed the character of the stepmother who wants to live in an English village and do nothing.
Fallen — Melissa Scott (2023) This is book two of Firstborn, Lastborn and I have not read volume one. However, I was told this stood alone, and so it does. This is a ton of fun, a big space opera universe, which underwent a collapse centuries ago when AI went rogue and broke the FTL system—similar in some ways to the backstory of Kate Elliott’s Alexander the Great in Space books.
This begins almost like a C.J. Cherryh book, with a spaceship captain and her sidekick wondering how to get out of a planetary situation turned dangerous. A woman turns up from the captain’s past with a solution to the immediate problem but which, of course, entangles them in deeper and more dangerous issues. There are nanite “burdens” in everyone’s DNA, the AIs are lurking in the FTL dimension (and actively trying to escape from it) there are artifacts left by the ancestors which could be great or could lead to doom… Melissa Scott is always great at really solid worldbuilding and events that can feel like real history.
Much Ado About Nada — Uzma Jalaluddin (2023) You’re going to find this hard to believe but this is a modern version of both Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Jane Austen’s Persuasion and it’s set in the Muslim community in Toronto, and it’s brilliant. There’s a huge problem with updating versions of classic stories and it’s that they don’t make sense in a modern context—I know I complained here about the sisters in Joanna Trollope’s Sense & Sensibility being entitled jerks because they expect to live on family money, unlike Austen’s girls, who cannot reasonably earn their own living. But because Jalaluddin’s characters live in a context (devout Canadian Muslims) where purity before marriage is as expected as it was in Shakespeare’s Italy or Austen’s England, and because she can write about a heroine who does have a degree and a job and is still living at home because it’s hard to break away from parental expectations, she can make the plots work.
If you already know the plots, you will be wondering things like “How does she do Hero?” and “How does she do Louisa Musgrave?” and then you will read the book and be delighted. If you don’t have these questions in mind, it won’t feel like you’re missing anything, I think. You can just read a good story about people in an interesting community—which is either your own community in which you’ll be pleased to be represented, or if not you may well, like me, be interested to learn about it. I bought this book on strong recommendations from two friends, and then kept it sitting there unread for a while, and now I’m sorry I didn’t leap on it right away, because it really is excellent. Great characters, great situations, excellent use of source material, and just a terrific read. One warning, it’s very long, much longer than a normal romance, and while the cover makes it look as if it’s funny, and it is funny in spots, it isn’t a light book—it deals with a lot of serious issues. It deals with them very well, but it’s best to know starting out that this isn’t a light-hearted romp you can zip through. I kept thinking about it after I finished it and will definitely re-read it, which is only the case with the best romance novels for me.
Rainbow Gold: Poems Old and New Selected for Boys and Girls — Sara Teasdale (1922) Free on Project Gutenberg. This is a poetry anthology, and actually it’s really good—I enjoyed reading it. It’s a really good selection of fun readable poetry from before 1922, and while originally aimed at children isn’t a bit childish. But then I guess I grew up on this kind of poetry, all English language, all metrical, lots of it narrative. My beloved Faber Book of Children’s Verse (school prize) does have some translations and some free verse, but it was from the Seventies. This is sufficiently older that it does not. But almost everything here is good, and well arranged, and a joy to read. Much of it was familiar, some was new to me. If you want a free anthology of fun poetry that reads aloud well, this is a good one to mix in with more modern and wide-ranging ones.
Love and Death in Renaissance Italy — Thomas V. Cohen (2003) This was so good. Cohen takes a selection of court cases from sixteenth-century Rome and finds out as much as he can about the specific people and places and events, from the court documents, from physical locations, and from anything else he can find out about the participants. There’s a case where a wife and her lover were killed by the jealous husband, a case where a man was harassing a young girl who wanted to become a nun, a case of a girl insisting that a man who has promised to marry her go through with it—most of the cases are ordinary people, though the honour killing was a lord, and it’s absolutely fascinating having these glimpses of their everyday lives through their testimony and their actions. Cohen has arranged some of them in “acts” and made some of them dialogues, and in every way done as much explication as possible without obscuring the events. Mostly, the people speak for themselves, with explanation where necessary. I really love this form of writing microhistories, and I’d happily read much more of it. I don’t think it assumes much starting knowledge, I think it would be accessible to most people, and very interesting especially for writers.
We Regret to Inform You — Ariel Kaplan (2018) YA novel about an overachieving teen who is inexplicably turned down by all her college choices. It’s well written and fast paced, and, as is common in good YA, what it’s really about it growing up and discovering who you are and what you want. The details and characters and point of view in this are terrific, and I raced through it. It’s an excellent example of how a low-stakes story can be gripping because the bad things can really happen. In a novel, to a certain extent the higher the stakes the less plausible it is that the bad thing will occur, and therefore, to the experienced reader, the less you actually care. Will the universe end? Will the protagonist die? Nope, not going to happen. Will the protagonist fail to get into even Paul Revere, her “safety” college? Will she have to tell her mom she didn’t get in anywhere? There’s real tension there. This book also has good stuff about money and class in America. I’ll definitely be reading more by Kaplan.
Unquiet Land — Sharon Shinn (2016) Another in Shinn’s Elemental Blessings series. I love the worldbuilding. I love the blessings. I love the fact that each book features a protagonist from a different element—water, air, fire, and now earth. (The last one is bone and wood.) I love seeing the protagonists from the earlier books advanced in their lives and meddling in other people’s lives. I love the details of everyday life in a fantasy world—in this one the protagonist is setting up a shop while trying to make a connection with the daughter she abandoned years before. But I don’t like the action plots, which the books don’t really need and which also tend to be a little rushed, because I suspect that Shinn, like me, is more interested in the details. It’s interesting, though, that even though I do not like the action plots, and I know perfectly well that everyone is going to be OK just because it’s that kind of book, I still find myself unable to look away when characters appear to be in danger. It’s an odd sensation, not being able to look away, while knowing nothing bad will really happen and consequently feeling a little manipulated. Anyway, the things that are great about these remain great.
