The books on the bookshelf
I do the same old song and dance every summer, with the laziness for posting, and I am just discovering that is never going to change. I do have much to discuss, however, I really need to get some book reviews done, because by the time I finish blathering on about my life which is not that interesting, I've lost all interest/motivation to continue on with the entry. So expect to be told about the saga-that-lacks-coherency that is my life at a later date. And so for the books. I read some of these a while ago, so some impressions (most, actually) are going to be fairly general.
I've always meant to read some of these stories, but never really gotten around to it. The movie in all its awesome kicked me into gear a bit, and once summer started, I took a crack into the world of Holmes and Watson. And on the whole, I am very impressed. They were nothing I would devotedly read seven hours a day, but they were written well, and just had those features of Victorian England that made them utterly enchanting to me, in a way not wholy connected with anything Doyle did intentionally.
That is the long and short of it, I guess. It is not that they are brilliantly written, though the reasoning that Doyle works out for Holmes really is insanely smart most of the time. And generally the stories follow a very set format. Holmes gets a case, by the time the person is done telling him about it he has it mostly figured out, and then Holmes does some footwork and solves said case. So there are rarely surprises, and I think I'll have to get into the stories involving Moriarti before I can find any sort of surprise twists in my mysteries, but the tone of the book is what draws me into it. It is just...Victorian, in all its delightful and infuriating features. Class warfare, damsels in distress, science, logic, and the exploration of all of the above. Doyle draws all of that together, and I don't think he could have written it any other way, and honestly, if he'd tried to break some of these conventions, the books would have lost something. And as I said, they aren't something I'd read all day, but it is a book I would love to be able to keep on my coffee table, to open and read by the fire while drinking tea. This is just how beautifully British it is. And even though it is so formatted and adorably stereotypical, I still found myself getting excited and into the stories, especially the ones about daring dos. On the whole, a good book, if not a great one, and something I'd love to own someday soon.
I...don't know what to think. This is about the same reaction I have gotten from everyone else I've met who's read the book. On one hand, the first portion especially completely skeeved me out. It is not even just the supposed pedo vibes we're supposed to get between Alice and Dodson, but the pedo between all the men over the age of fourteen. Everybody is sniffing hair and touching people, and even though the scene with Dodson photographing gypsy!Alice was supposed to be powerful, mostly it just squicked me. The writing of it was done very well, but I spent most of the first half of the book just sort of making faces. It was creepy, and I did not care for it.
But on the other hand, oh my God the second half, especially when everything goes to hell right after it was almost so perfect. When a book can bring me to tears, I cannot help but love it at least a little. And for all its rocky start, and for all I was uncertain about how I felt on the actual ending, there was just that one portion of the book that had me hooked and weeping, and so I have to give it props for that. Unless the book is Little Women, it is hard to make me cry while reading or watching something, so if it can be done, I must give the thing respect. And parts of this book were so beautiful that they raised my estimation of the whole thing. The author gets credit from me, because the parts I did not like were still written in a very lovely fashion, and the parts I did love took my heart captive.
Okay, this is what I'm talking about. Dan Brown, you could learn a thing or two from this lady. And Geraldine Brookes, thank you for getting your freaking history right. This book had everything dear to my little english-majory and history-studying heart, and everything that heart could have ever desired. In-depth and accurate discussions of book binding and conservation, and she. didn't. screw. up. the. basics. This is almost all I can ask at the beginning of historical fiction, and usually I don't get it. Granted, this book could have had false information too, but she got the basics right, and until I can research further to check the truth of the other stuff, I can continue applauding. The book covered the journey of a Jewish passover book from its creation, to its final resting in Bosnia during the war with the Serbs in the mid 90s, and it described this journey by an analysis of little things found in the book during its conservation, like parts of insects and wine stains. And the writing was absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking; everything was so vivid. Trust me, it's something you notice when reading about the torture of a converso during the Spanish inquisition. It was sad and sickening, but that's how it was supposed to be, and I loved it.
I wish I had been taking better notes while I was reading it, because there was one line in particular I wanted to quote here, to show just how simple language can be, and yet so powerful, which is the style of the whole book. Give me simplicity, and you've given me a beautiful book. Even the small portions at the beginnings of chapters were elegantly simple: "Here lies the flower of a people who know how to die." Just little things like that. I have not been truly impressed impressed in a long while, and this book did it. When something has such a touching storyline on its own, and can be fairly accurate on medieval Spain and Renaissance Italy, not falling into the myths that are so prominent in our culture and so wrong for the sake of drama, I have to love it. And it was a lot of fun for me to read about the book binding portions of the book, since I had the chance to take a full-semester class on that just this past spring. She was right on those counts too.
I'm not waving the book around as a model of perfection and saying it didn't have its faults, because of course it did. There was some romance in there that I found odd in its placement, and some parts, especially in the "present-day" portions of the book told by Hannah, were a little drama-lama, but even here, she avoided some family tropes that, while I have a guilty pleasure for them, would have detracted from something if they'd shown up.
The long and short of it: it's smart, well-written, and sneaks in and grabs your emotions when you're not looking. And I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or Jewish culture. It's not a page-turner thriller, more of the emotional ride than the excitement one, but it still drew me in hook line and sinker. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a university library that needs to give me some books on the Spanish inquisition and other such fun historical events.
And this entry took a long time to finish, because, as predicted, didn't manage to finish it the day I started. And I'm heading out of town for a while, in about...half an hour. So it hasn't been proofed, and for this I apologize. And sleep deprivation does nothing for my mediocre abilities. So I beg your indulgence, and I will come back and make it nice and pretty for my own peace of mind when I has time.
TTFN
I've always meant to read some of these stories, but never really gotten around to it. The movie in all its awesome kicked me into gear a bit, and once summer started, I took a crack into the world of Holmes and Watson. And on the whole, I am very impressed. They were nothing I would devotedly read seven hours a day, but they were written well, and just had those features of Victorian England that made them utterly enchanting to me, in a way not wholy connected with anything Doyle did intentionally.
That is the long and short of it, I guess. It is not that they are brilliantly written, though the reasoning that Doyle works out for Holmes really is insanely smart most of the time. And generally the stories follow a very set format. Holmes gets a case, by the time the person is done telling him about it he has it mostly figured out, and then Holmes does some footwork and solves said case. So there are rarely surprises, and I think I'll have to get into the stories involving Moriarti before I can find any sort of surprise twists in my mysteries, but the tone of the book is what draws me into it. It is just...Victorian, in all its delightful and infuriating features. Class warfare, damsels in distress, science, logic, and the exploration of all of the above. Doyle draws all of that together, and I don't think he could have written it any other way, and honestly, if he'd tried to break some of these conventions, the books would have lost something. And as I said, they aren't something I'd read all day, but it is a book I would love to be able to keep on my coffee table, to open and read by the fire while drinking tea. This is just how beautifully British it is. And even though it is so formatted and adorably stereotypical, I still found myself getting excited and into the stories, especially the ones about daring dos. On the whole, a good book, if not a great one, and something I'd love to own someday soon.
I...don't know what to think. This is about the same reaction I have gotten from everyone else I've met who's read the book. On one hand, the first portion especially completely skeeved me out. It is not even just the supposed pedo vibes we're supposed to get between Alice and Dodson, but the pedo between all the men over the age of fourteen. Everybody is sniffing hair and touching people, and even though the scene with Dodson photographing gypsy!Alice was supposed to be powerful, mostly it just squicked me. The writing of it was done very well, but I spent most of the first half of the book just sort of making faces. It was creepy, and I did not care for it.
But on the other hand, oh my God the second half, especially when everything goes to hell right after it was almost so perfect. When a book can bring me to tears, I cannot help but love it at least a little. And for all its rocky start, and for all I was uncertain about how I felt on the actual ending, there was just that one portion of the book that had me hooked and weeping, and so I have to give it props for that. Unless the book is Little Women, it is hard to make me cry while reading or watching something, so if it can be done, I must give the thing respect. And parts of this book were so beautiful that they raised my estimation of the whole thing. The author gets credit from me, because the parts I did not like were still written in a very lovely fashion, and the parts I did love took my heart captive.
Okay, this is what I'm talking about. Dan Brown, you could learn a thing or two from this lady. And Geraldine Brookes, thank you for getting your freaking history right. This book had everything dear to my little english-majory and history-studying heart, and everything that heart could have ever desired. In-depth and accurate discussions of book binding and conservation, and she. didn't. screw. up. the. basics. This is almost all I can ask at the beginning of historical fiction, and usually I don't get it. Granted, this book could have had false information too, but she got the basics right, and until I can research further to check the truth of the other stuff, I can continue applauding. The book covered the journey of a Jewish passover book from its creation, to its final resting in Bosnia during the war with the Serbs in the mid 90s, and it described this journey by an analysis of little things found in the book during its conservation, like parts of insects and wine stains. And the writing was absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking; everything was so vivid. Trust me, it's something you notice when reading about the torture of a converso during the Spanish inquisition. It was sad and sickening, but that's how it was supposed to be, and I loved it.
I wish I had been taking better notes while I was reading it, because there was one line in particular I wanted to quote here, to show just how simple language can be, and yet so powerful, which is the style of the whole book. Give me simplicity, and you've given me a beautiful book. Even the small portions at the beginnings of chapters were elegantly simple: "Here lies the flower of a people who know how to die." Just little things like that. I have not been truly impressed impressed in a long while, and this book did it. When something has such a touching storyline on its own, and can be fairly accurate on medieval Spain and Renaissance Italy, not falling into the myths that are so prominent in our culture and so wrong for the sake of drama, I have to love it. And it was a lot of fun for me to read about the book binding portions of the book, since I had the chance to take a full-semester class on that just this past spring. She was right on those counts too.
I'm not waving the book around as a model of perfection and saying it didn't have its faults, because of course it did. There was some romance in there that I found odd in its placement, and some parts, especially in the "present-day" portions of the book told by Hannah, were a little drama-lama, but even here, she avoided some family tropes that, while I have a guilty pleasure for them, would have detracted from something if they'd shown up.
The long and short of it: it's smart, well-written, and sneaks in and grabs your emotions when you're not looking. And I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or Jewish culture. It's not a page-turner thriller, more of the emotional ride than the excitement one, but it still drew me in hook line and sinker. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a university library that needs to give me some books on the Spanish inquisition and other such fun historical events.
And this entry took a long time to finish, because, as predicted, didn't manage to finish it the day I started. And I'm heading out of town for a while, in about...half an hour. So it hasn't been proofed, and for this I apologize. And sleep deprivation does nothing for my mediocre abilities. So I beg your indulgence, and I will come back and make it nice and pretty for my own peace of mind when I has time.
TTFN