You don't have to have read all the things
I've been musing a while on something that somebody wrote in a review of Jo Walton's new book (which I am champing at the bit waiting to actually be available), that they weren't sure it would work for people who didn't have a background in those specific works of sff that are alluded to in the text.
And I've been thinking about this and coming to the conclusion that no, it doesn't really matter if you've read the books that an author mentions in a work of fiction. I've read lots and lots of books which were riffing off some existing text in some way that, at the time, I hadn't read (and you know, I still haven't read some of the moralising poems Lewis Carroll was playing around with in the Alice books). You don't have to have read The Pilgrim's Progress to enjoy Little Women, and I could make a case that as it's what it means to the March sisters that's involved, it isn't necessarily going to add anything to the book if you have read it.
I was also, having posted already today about Stella Gibbons, thinking about Cold Comfort Farm, and that it is hilarious even if you haven't read Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence and doubtless other SRS BZNZ novelists of her day.
Reading about books that one hasn't read in another book may well motivate one to find them and read them.
But, as a trope, people thinking or talking about books and the characters in them is about a certain kind of relating to the world and about what reading means and the value of fiction. And it would probably work just as well with made-up books or stories or other media forms which one couldn't possibly have read.
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Annoyances du jour:
A we tried to deliver card from the postman which has No Information at all on it - even whether the delivery was for me or for partner or for downstairs, no indication of why it couldn't be delivered, and no reference number. And all you can do on their website is request a redelivery, not ask if it was even supposed to come here (let me whinge a bit about the recurrent delivery of items for same number, parallel street).
But this is as nothing to the really infuriating article in today's Guardian by the appalling Naomi Wolf, which I will not link to, and I won't address its main points for fear of frothing at the mouth, but all I will say is, if you are going to invoke Oscar Wilde, it would be a great deal more compelling if you didn't get the facts of the case into a right mishmash:
The Oscar Wilde trial of 1895 is worth remembering. Wilde, like Assange, was held in solitary confinement. Like Assange, he faced a legal proceeding for alleged sex crimes in which there was state pressure on the outcome: the alleged behind-the-scenes involvement of the then prime minister, Lord Rosebery, ensured the likelihood of a "guilty" verdict. The roar of public opprobrium, in the wake of reports from accusers shielded in some cases by anonymity, also sealed Wilde's fate. His sentence - two years' hard labour - was atypically severe.
In all my readings about the case, Rosebery might have liked to intervene but his involvement with Queensberry's elder son (who committed suicide) and garnering Queenberry's enmity and rumours of his own homosexuality led to his being advised against doing anything and letting the retrial of Wilde go forward. While the sentence was not 'atypically severe' - it was the standard penalty under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (the infamous Labouchere Amendment), and actually, a bagatelle compared to what the sentences for sodomy and attempted sodomy had been under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861.
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