potentialities

Some years ago I found a copy of The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Volume III in a used bookstore, and I've never read it because, among other reasons, I'm constitutionally incapable of starting anything with Volume III. Some time during Femslash February I got frustrated that there wasn't more Anne/Diana fic, especially higher-rated fic (and seriously, why isn't there more Anne/Diana fic?), which extremely indirectly led me to finally put in an interlibrary loan for Volume I, 1889-1910, which I then in due time received. It makes for really fascinating reading. LMM burned all her previous journaling attempts at fourteen and started fresh, so it doesn't quite take her from Anne's age to author of Anne of Green Gables and its first sequel, but it's close. Young Maud (without an 'E') reminds me of her various young heroines in flashes while seeming to me like her own very different person.

The low-hanging fruit of biographical criticism is that LMM, raised primarily by her own aloof grandmother, returned again and again to stories about young girls who melt older women's hearts, so it surprised me that contemporaneously, at least from fourteen onwards, Maud barely mentioned her grandmother in her journal at all. Generally she alluded to her grandparents collectively, or if either was singled out for particular mention, it was her grandfather, pretty much always in the context of how they hampered her social life. Her focus as teenager was very much on writing about her relationships with her peers, male and female. It was only later, starting in her mid twenties, that she began to write about her childhood in retrospect. After her grandfather died, Maud was forced to live with her grandmother in order that she could stay in her own home, which probably had not a little to do with how the role of the older woman became so prominent in her work. The way she describes it, she found these things much more painful to remember than she thought that they had been to her at the time, which I think does comport with the way she presented herself in those earlier journal entries.

I hadn't read anything about either her long unhappy engagement to a man whom she realized, more or less the instant that she accepted his proposal, that she couldn't stand to be intimate with, nor her torrid love affair with a man that she didn't respect and had already decided that she would never marry but whom she could barely keep her hands off of. By her account, they got pretty hot and heavy, having ample alone time in the house where they were both boarding, and on one occasion only narrowly avoided having sex when she, though strongly tempted, refused. It seems like this was her only real experience with physical attraction, at least thus far, and it pretty much just made her miserable. By the end of this volume, she is engaged to the man she would marry, Ewan Macdonald, and knowing what I've read in passing in other sources about their marriage, it was like a horror movie as she talked herself into the engagement.

I was also surprised how little she wrote about her writing in her journal. Notably, she sprung Anne of Green Gables upon it as a fait accompli, which is rather amusing. She does then mention working on the sequel in subsequent entries, more like what I would expect.

I only realized after I'd finished reading the selected journals that this book was coming out in a month: Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery. It's a YA novel that looks to begin when she's fourteen, where it can draw on the journals, and climax with her sadly necessary decision to move back to Cavendish with her grandparents because her father's new wife is awful. I've placed a hold on it as well to see if it's any good.

Sidenote, mostly relevant to my own interests: teenaged Maud was apparently an avid and skilled baseball player. ♥ She says they played a modified game of ball at recess, and described another game, at a celebration of the Queen's Birthday: "After dinner Mr. Stovel made some bats and we all went over to the lake and had a game of baseball. It was glorious. Mr. S and I were on the same side and we just made things hum. We won the game, too."

I found a hardcover copy of To Say Nothing of the Dog at the thrift store today. Not only is the dustjacket in tolerable condition, I found a folded To Say Nothing of the Dog poster from the Science Fiction Book Club tucked in the back.

Why did they print a To Say Nothing of the Dog poster in the first place? I don't know, but now I have one.

The 2015 Youth Media Award winners were announced this morning. Brown Girl Dreaming cleaned up with a Newbery Honor, a Coretta Scott King Award, and a Silbert Informational Book Honor, and Rain Reign got a Schneider Family Book Award (disability experience).

I haven't read any of the other winners or honorees. I placed a lot of holds at the library.

This was fun last year, so I have once again used my data from Goodreads to construct some charts!



First, the star ratings that I gave books. Four stars is by far the most common, because I do at least try to read books that I'm going to like a lot. I was also pretty free with five stars and three stars, chary of two stars, and only read a single book that I gave only one star. I enjoy leaving scathing reviews but do prefer to mostly not waste my time reading books that deserve them. I pretty much just hate-skimmed that one because I wanted to be informed when I hated on it.



A little under half the books I read last year were ebooks, the rest being either mine, the library's, or interlibrary loan requests.



Over three-quarters were fiction.



I read almost exactly the same number of adult fiction books as last year, but twenty-seven more children's and YA books. Interestingly, that increase is almost entirely accounted for by the twenty-two Baby-sitters Club books that I reread as part of my canon review for Yuletide, which I suppressed from my usual Wednesday reading posts to maintain secrecy.



That wasn't the only rereading I indulged in last year. I also finished rereading the Alleyn mysteries and reread all of Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, in addition to miscellaneous other books. I feel guilty about rereading books sometimes because there are so many books I haven't read and want to, many of which are in piles around me at this very moment. On the other hand, books I've already read are easy to pick up because they're a known quantity, and there's pretty much always something that I didn't notice or appreciate before the latest reread.



Finally, according to Goodreads, War and Peace made up 1.6% of the pages that I read last year.

I used the data from my year in books on Goodreads to construct some charts!



I read more paper books than ebooks and twice as many books from libraries (my own and others) as books that I actually own (and thus can put off reading indefinitely).



I read way more fiction than nonfiction.



A little over a third of those works of nonfiction were academic, with the remainder being written for a popular audience.



Returning to fiction, a little over a third of the fiction I read was children's or YA, while the rest was published for adults (I didn't use a shelf to track how much of that fiction was "adult").



I have a shelf for "speculative fiction", which is the umbrella term I like for science fiction, fantasy, and things that don't slot precisely into either of those genres. When I started reading superhero comics I made a shelf specifically for them, since Marvel and DC comics combine the two pretty freely. Fantasy dominates the speculative fiction shelf, unsurprisingly; miscellaneous/not categorized further comes in second, which makes sense, because I like weird things.



Finally, Goodreads says that I read 77,462 pages last year, and that the longest book I read is Les Misérables at 1,463 pages, making Les Mis a little less than two percent of what I read during the year.

Nine episodes from series I of QI are available for legal streaming in the U.S. on Hulu! I mean, this is clearly still less than ideal, but it's a huge improvement over the prior state of affairs where no episodes of QI were available legally in the U.S. in any format.

Also, I just caught that A Tale for the Time Being made the Booker shortlist, which pleases me greatly as it is by far the best novel I have read thus far this year. ♥

What I've been reading

I reread Death in Ecstasy, which was my least favorite Ngaio Marsh so far. The drugs subplot seriously strained my credulity—I don't consider myself to be an expert on heroin, by any means, but I can't find any evidence that anyone has ever smoked it in cigarettes. The main plot about the cult-y little church where they hand out these mysterious heroin cigarettes is not that much more realistic or engaging either. Also, this is the first book in my reread where Marsh's homophobia puts in an appearance, which is gross, especially since it's not just some throwaway characters but actually Alleyn and Fox (Foxkin nooooooo!) who get together to sneer at the poor harmlessly swishy acolyte boys nursing massive crushes on the tinpot cult leader. I mean, they are both hopeless doofuses but all this disproportionate animus makes me want to like them somehow anyway.

The next Ngaio Marsh I reread, though, was Vintage Murder, which is quite good. It's the first time she develops Alleyn as a character on his own, without the crutches of Nigel Bathgate (who will fade out of the books shortly) or even my beloved Foxkin, except in some adorable letters that Alleyn writes him. She does rely on two subjects that she loves: the theatre (again) and New Zealand (for the first time), including some breathtaking scenery porn. Alleyn makes astounding leaps in his ability to negotiate tricky social situations and control his impulses to be a total IRL troll, or maybe that's just limited to when he's hanging around with Nigel Bathgate, whose pigtails he takes such an inordinate amount of pleasure in pulling.

I reread Artists in Crime, which is an old favorite that I've reread lots of times and I still pretty much love it. I adore Troy, of course, but Lady Alleyn is the best.

I read Ann M. Martin's new book, Better to Wish, the opening part of a four-book family saga. It was good, although it feels like a much longer book was abridged to hit middle-grade length. (Why didn't I think of that? /lazywriter)

I read The Blue Faience Hippopotamus based on a recommendation from hermionesviolin (and her mom!), and it is, indeed, adorable. ♥

What I'm reading next

Hopefully more books than this week. It was a busy week.

Feel Films, the production company that's adapting Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for television, have just optioned Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series! I'm so excited, and I think my British murder mystery-watching parents will probably enjoy watching this one with me. We're still mourning the end of Lewis and outraged that Ben Miller is leaving Death in Paradise, which is unacceptable and might as well be a different show going forward.

Plus the fourth Peter Grant book, Broken Homes, is due out next month! Double squee!

I reread/finished Les Misérables mostly for the purpose of being able to say, authoritatively and with actual citations, that where the musical differs from the book I like the musical better, particularly where all things Javert are concerned.

I mean, I also genuinely enjoyed reading it on its own merits, with significant overlap between my very favorite parts and things that are patently unsuitable for adaptation to musical theater, such as the forty-page parenthesis concerning the history and practices of a convent in Paris and the effects generally of enclosure and the contempletive life on practitioners and society. (Actually, I would drop everything and fly to see a show that turned this into a big musical number, but I don't think my presence would make up for the other theatregoers demanding their money back in droves.)

But yes, the dynamic between Javert and Jean Valjean in the book is completely unsuitable for my purposes, which are all porny ones. Book!Javert does not have nearly enough angst, or indeed feelings of any kind, although I am strangely touched by his concern, evidently either repressed or unrealized until he is on the point of offing himself, that prisoners are being docked 10 sous when they drop a thread and this is unfair as it does not affect the quality of the finished cloth. JAVERT YOU DORK, ILU BUT YOU ARE HOPELESS. ♥

I still ship him with book!Valjean, but it's more because Javert is the only one who appreciates him at all because Cosette and Marius are such ungrateful, oblivious meanyheads. Especially Marius, the unbelievable twit. Valjean sort of enters into a bizarre, unsafe, unsexy D/s relationship with him at the end and I am so not into it.

I just finished reading the Queen's Thief books while primed by ellen_fremedon's post on the subject, so I couldn't help noticing that Sounis's reemergence in A Conspiracy of Kings forms a perfect natural sedoretu. I ship all four marriages kind of a lot, but the het couples are obviously too cute to break up.

(Incidentally, can I just praise the craft that goes into writing four books in a series that each end with the exact same plot twist? It's like M. Night Shyamalan directed four movies that each end with the revelation that Bruce Willis is, in fact, dead. [That probably would have been a better reveal at the end of The Happening.] That takes serious writing chops.)

I won my copies of The Thief and The Queen of Attolia from Worldbuilders 2010, so Megan Whalen Turner drew a cow in the front of my book. ( It is adorable: )