Two more books

[lunabee34]

The first is the reason that the November children's books roundup is so lean: we mostly read The Borrowers each night for the whole month of November.


The Borrowers by Mary Norton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This was such a fun read! I didn't read this as a child and so had no idea where the story was going. I love that it's ambiguous as to whether the Borrowers are real or just a story Mrs. May's brother told her when they were young. I also am relieved to see that there are more books in the series because I desperately want to know what happened to Lupy and how Uncle Hendreary and his boys have been living and how Pod, Arrietty, and Homily set up house after their "immigration." Thoroughly delightful story.



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The second is a truly excellent collection of essays I read yesterday while doing research for my book chapter. It really helped me to clarify for myself a few things I want to do in my writing. I very much think that some of you would enjoy reading it; I think it's got a wider audience than just academics.


Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century by Ann R. Hawkins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This collection of essays is so good. Not a dud among them. Included are several articles about Marie Corelli, one about Alice Meynell, and another about Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood. All the articles are about 19th-century women writers and how they cultivated or eschewed celebrity (or how their descendants made choices about their legacies after their deaths). Lots of really good stuff about print and visual artifacts of celebrity (for example, the birthday book or the use of signatures and photos/portraits on the frontispieces of novels). Apparently most scholarship about celebrity culture has defined it as a phenomenon that begins in the early 20th century with the advent of movies, which is nuts to any Victorianist LOL, so a lot of space is devoted to showing that the antecedents of modern celebrity culture start much earlier than media studies often allows. I think this collection is easy to read, interesting, and accessible beyond the scholar. Highly recommended.



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Comments

[resonant]

When I was a kid, I had a single volume with four or five Borrowers books in it, and it defeated me over and over. I would start reading, finish Book 1, start Book 2, bog down in the middle, and the next time I went back to it I wouldn't remember anything so I'd start over at the beginning.

That was the beginning of my suspicious attitude towards books that contain multiple other books.

[lunabee34]

Oh, man. I have 100% been there. LOL

It's not quite the same, but that's been my experience with trying to read Les Mis. I slog through 800 pages, take a break, forget everything I read and have to start over again. I have to come to terms with the fact that I am never reading that book, and that's okay.

[rahirah]

I managed to miss The Borrowers entirely as a kid (instead, I read a Borrowers knockoff called The Littles.) I keep vaguely thinking that I should catch up...

[lunabee34]

Yeah, I didn't read it, and I didn't read The Littles either. The Borrowers is a really quick read; an adult could read the first book in an hour maybe. It just took us so long because reading it aloud in like seven minute increments. I expect the subsequent books are of about the same length and difficulty.

[sallymn]

I remember loving The Borrowers when I was young, the whole worldbuilding and all the domestics for tiny people details fed straight t into my imagination...

[lunabee34]

I would have loved it as a kid, too! Fiona is definitely into it.

[chelseagirl]

I've read studies of Byron and celebrity culture, going so far as to call him the first modern celebrity. FWIW.

[lunabee34]

Yes! I've got a couple of those on my to-read list.

From what I understand after reading this book and a few additional articles, with the exception of The Frenzy of Renown by Braudy, most late 20th century scholarship on celebrity culture focuses on the 20th century; it's not that it denies antecedents, just that it starts the conversation there. Looks like English and media studies of the early 21st century start to get more arguments about celebrity culture in the 19th century and a few about it in the late 18th.

I'm reading The Frenzy of Renown next. I hope it's as good as this volume.

[chelseagirl]

*sigh* I remember being a scholar.

Now I am learning about assessment and data-driven research.

Is it any wonder I am writing historical fiction for fun? It gives me the opportunity to actually delve into related areas to the thing I actually got my PhD in . . . .

[lunabee34]

*hugs*

I think we are each having a bit of grass is greener because I never learned about assessment and data-driven research, and it would actually be really useful to me to know; I've delayed writing up the last two years of my writing marathon research project for that reason (among others).

[oracne]

Oooh, that Hawkins is very tempting.

[lunabee34]

It was really good. I despise stilted, jargony criticism. All these essays are easy to read and interesting while making complex arguments. And I've had recent engagement with a lot of the subject matter (like one of the essays is about that Coquette novel I just taught--it was based on a real life case, and apparently a handful of women made a concerted effort decades after her death to prove that she was indeed married and not a Fallen Woman).