2012 Reading - Tracy Chevalier, Remarkable Creatures
I thought as an experiment this year I'd try logging, and reviewing however briefly, every (published) book I read. Contemplated using LibraryThing, but of course can't remember my login, and if I don't seize the moment I shall have read too many things to work back through - so DW/LJ it will have to be.
This is next month's read for my book club; unremarkable, enjoyable enough, romped through it in a couple of evenings. It's another Chevalier fictionalised-retelling-of-historical-figures, in this case Mary Anning, the young working-class woman who from selling fossils as curios on Lyme Regis beach in the nineteenth century became the discoverer of the first icthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils, and a second, older woman, Elizabeth Philpot. While it makes some firm, if oft-rehearsed, points about the lack of independence of most women - particularly middle-class women - at the time, I found the characterisations of the two women a bit flat; might not have bothered to finish it if it hadn't been a book club read.
[Cross-posted at both LJ and DW - feel free to comment at either...]
This is next month's read for my book club; unremarkable, enjoyable enough, romped through it in a couple of evenings. It's another Chevalier fictionalised-retelling-of-historical-figures, in this case Mary Anning, the young working-class woman who from selling fossils as curios on Lyme Regis beach in the nineteenth century became the discoverer of the first icthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils, and a second, older woman, Elizabeth Philpot. While it makes some firm, if oft-rehearsed, points about the lack of independence of most women - particularly middle-class women - at the time, I found the characterisations of the two women a bit flat; might not have bothered to finish it if it hadn't been a book club read.
[Cross-posted at both LJ and DW - feel free to comment at either...]