regshoe

First of all—since I believe there are a few people reading my journal who are mostly on Discord and/or Tumblr—if anyone would like to try out Dreamwidth/get to know the site better, starterpack has just got going and looks like being an excellent resource!

I've spent the last few days going, OK, I need to read a short book next to make sure I can fit it in before the end of the year, and have managed to do this three times before actually running out of year, so that worked. :D Here they are...

Birds and Man by W. H. Hudson (1901). I wanted some nice light non-fiction to complement my Yuletide reading, so went browsing the 'Birds' category on Gutenberg.org, as you do. I'm very happy to have found this! It's beautiful nature writing—both in Hudson's eye for detail and for imaginative and well-observed description, and in his ideas and arguments. The book is structured as a series of essays covering such topics as the beauty of the wood-warbler, the nesting habits of jackdaws, the tragic decline of the raven in lowland England, the folklore surrounding owls and, especially interestingly, Hudson's views on contemporary conservation questions, particularly hunting and egg-collecting. Hudson lived in England in later life and wrote this book there, but he grew up in Argentina, and his descriptions of the countryside and birds of the West Country are interspersed with anecdotes and wildlife from the South American pampas, which I really enjoyed (the upland goose sounds like a lovely bird). The angles taken on everything are always original and interesting, and the whole thing is a delight to read.

White Cockades: An Incident of the Forty-Five by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1887). A Jacobite adventure from the author of Imre: A Memorandum, oh yes :D This book is set in the summer of 1746, when our plucky young hero Andrew Boyd, the son of a Highland landowner, stumbles across a Jacobite fugitive hiding amongst the heather. Andrew and his father take in the man, who introduces himself as Lord Geoffry Armitage, and Andrew more or less textually falls in love with him. Then the Hanoverian soldiers arrive... It's all a very gripping adventure—a much less ambitious book than Flight of the Heron, of course, not so historically detailed and IMO much less geographically convincing. It's also sentimental and a bit overly sensational (I guessed the big plot twist in the first chapter)—but nonetheless a very fun read for all that. I liked the relationship between Andrew and Geoffry, all the more for knowing the author probably did mean it like that, and I enjoyed the drama of the soldiers—I thought Captain Jermain was a good portrayal of how much damage the carelessly powerful can cause without necessarily being malicious. (Keith Windham wouldn't like him at all!). And, you know—I'd have to check the dates, but I don't think it would be terribly difficult to cross it over with Flight of the Heron...

The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson (1910). This is a boarding school story, which I always like, and it's a turn-of-the-century Australian novel that isn't by E. W. Hornung, which made for an interesting comparison!—this is a side of Australian life Hornung presumably didn't see much of. The story opens with twelve-year-old Laura Rambotham being sent off to school in Melbourne, and follows her subsequent adventures and misadventures there. My overall feeling is that it's a good book but not necessarily a very enjoyable one. For one thing it's a painfully accurate depiction of the experience of being twelve years old, not knowing how to say or do the right thing and suffering terrible embarrassment as a result. Laura is a very interesting character, deeply flawed and painfully sympathetic, but the other characters all seemed more or less unlikeable, and there's very little warmth to the book's relationships. It is pretty subtextually queer, which was interesting—Laura is continually uninterested in boys, and repeatedly clashes against social expectations about it in ways that again were both very true to life and kind of excruciating to read. At one point she falls in love with an older girl in that sort of desperate, jealous way of a crush when you're an insecure teenager with no way of understanding your own feelings. The ending seemed to be trying to introduce more hope, but did very little to justify it, and felt oddly incomplete as a result—I felt there was a whole extra novel in those hints about Laura's future in the last chapter.