Reading etc.

“George III: A Personal History” by Christopher Hibbert

I found this lying around the parents’ house and thought I would give it a go. It’s alright. It feels a little bit like history by numbers. The author finds the pertinent facts, orders them and gives them to us with extensive references at the back.

Despite being described as “a personal history”, much of it deals with George III’s public life. Aside from the loss of the colonies, we get the Gordon riots, and lots and lots of politics. Prime Ministers (or First Lords of the Treasury) come and go with monotonous regularity – though lots of Pitts was a big feature. Forming governments appears to be a very vexed issue.

The author seems to sympathise with the king’s concerns about catholic emancipation (on coronation he had taken an oath to uphold the protestant faith and not promote any other and he took it seriously) but this view isn’t really likely to go over well with an Irish reader. Ireland gets pretty short shrift and apart from the question of emancipation which was particularly relevant to Ireland, I think the only reference to Ireland was when the Prince of Wales asked to be made Lord Lieutenant and was, mercifully, told no. Despite the many wrongs visited by England on Ireland, the authorities drew the line there.

I expected a bit more about George III’s family life. There is quite a lot about Queen Charlotte (of Mecklenburg after whom the most notorious street in Dublin was named – it was the core of the red light district in the 19th century – I throw in this fact, not covered by our author, for free) but all of his many sons and daughters (15 children of whom 13 survived to adulthood), other than the Prince Regent are largely dealt with in two chapters at the end. He seems to have mostly sent the boys abroad and not let them come home (odd, when he himself never travelled abroad) and kept the girls locked up and unmarried. I can’t help feeling that his relationships with his children deserved a bit more attention. I know far more about the King’s relationship with the Pitts than with his children. Surely, the wrong way round for a “personal history”.

All in all, it’s a pretty sympathetic portrait of a monarch who is mostly remembered for going mad. To paraphrase Johnston (who has a cameo in the book), worth reading but not worth buying to read.

“The Blue Afternoon” by William Boyd

I very much enjoyed “Any Human Heart” and “A Good Man in Africa” by this author. I quite liked “Restless” and I thought that I would give this early work a go. Apparently it won some prizes. He is a good writer and his research seems to be pretty good – although given what I know about the fields he covers in this novel (architecture on the west coast of America in the 30s and surgery and aeronautics in Manila at the turn of the last century), I suppose he could fool me pretty easily.

The story is essentially about a surgeon in the Philippines in the very early years of the 20th century. It is unnecessarily framed by a meeting in the 1930s. The first part of the book deals with an architect in 1930s America. It’s engaging, a whole lot of interesting plot lines are set up, then the architect meets this man who claims to be her father and we’re whisked back to Manila in the 1900s. None of the early plot lines are resolved and you’re wondering what they were there for in the first place other than to give you the author’s views about 30s architecture (v.interesting but perhaps for another place).

The main storyline looks at a number of things. Early 20th surgery is one strand. If I might summarise – very nasty but very interesting. Early 20th century aeronautics is another. If I might summarise – very dull and a completely unnecessary subplot. This story has more unresolved storylines than any other work of this kind I have read. It is littered with red herrings that are never dealt with – who murdered the Americans? who indeed? was the other murder related? what nefarious role did Dr. Cruz play? We will never know. Now, I know it’s all high literary concept to have lots of uncertainty but to my mind, when you write it like a detective story, it’s a complete cop out not to resolve it. That said one of the things that I really enjoyed about the book was the description of social strata in Manila, the sense of place and the history of the war with the Americans.

The final piece is set in Lisbon. This read very much as though the author had had a good holiday in Lisbon and was determined to do a piece on it. Some of the earlier strands were resolved but by no means all. It was by far the weakest part of the book and I think it was written as the author was staring at the disparate bits of his novel and losing the will to live. It knots things together in a desperate, inconclusive kind of way.

I would try another William Boyd. He shines in two areas – nice writing and excellent research brilliantly conveyed.

“The Last Weekend” by Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison is terrific. He is a poet and he writes beautifully. I can find the language in poets’ novels a bit overwhelming but this is not the case here. You read this feeling that each word was chosen with care and is just right; not demanding attention but conveying perfectly and sometimes lyrically the author’s meaning.

And then, as though this were not enough, it’s really cleverly plotted. It’s narrated by Ian who seems like a slightly chippy everyman who is indulging in a mid-life crisis. Not an entirely promising narrator and he is never appealing. I can’t really tell you what it’s about without ruining the story but it is creepy and quite brilliant. Highly recommended.

“Life in Georgian England” by E. N. Williams

I picked this up in the parents’ house. It was written in 1962 by a “senior history master in a leading public school” and it reads that way too. The preface contains the rather endearing line “Above all, I must thank my pupils, who teach me my history.” The preface also contains the lines “Since it has not been thought suitable to quote sources in a work of this nature, my first duty is to thank (and apologise to) those authorities whose works I have ransacked. To one of these I am especially grateful and that is Dr. J. H. Plumb, whose criticisms have been invaluable and whose kindness, inexhaustible.” This may make the review from the Sunday Times on the dust jacket less impressive “Mr. Williams has produced a first-class boook, packed with vivid incident; wise, well-balanced and revealing.” So says Dr. J.H. Plumb.

Aaannnyhow, there is lots of information and the book tries to give a general appreciation of the era across the social spectrum but at 170 odd pages it’s all, of necessity, rather superficial. I found the statistics at the beginning really fascinating (which, I think, makes me officially sad). England and Wales grew from a population of some 5.5 million in 1696 to just over 9 million at the time of the battle of Waterloo. That’s a lot of growth over 100 odd years. The chapter on the upper classes covers a lot of ground that is, I would have thought, pretty familiar to most readers. I did enjoy the chapter on lower class life though. How about this little piece on the Vagrancy Laws:

“..the pauper after whipping and/or imprisonment, was not ‘removed’ but ‘passed’: that is, trundled in a cart from one parish boundary to the next till he was home…Professional beggars, like some of the Irish returning home after the London hay-making season, found it a convenient mode of transport.”

This is, I think the only reference to Ireland in the text. As an Irish reader, it’s a little bit surprising to see 1798 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Rebellion_of_1798 and 1801 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Union_1800 pass without even a slight reference to momentous events across the water. To an Irish person, late 18th century revolutions go like this 1. America, 2. France, 3. United Irishmen.

This book explicitly refers to 1798 thus: “But with the excesses of the Terror and the aggressions of French nationalism, the dream became a nightmare….Their disappointment was intense, Coeridge wrote that he had withdrawn from “French metaphysics, French politics, French ethics and French theology”. In the same year, 1798, he and Wordsworth published the first edition of their Lyrical Ballads….”

Surprising. I suppose that this is the problem of the colonised, we always think our misfortunes are foremost in the coloniser’s mind but really, they are worrying away about the romantic poets.

It is interesting that this book goes on quite a bit about the French revolution and its profound and shocking impact on late Georgian England. Did the author/the English forget that they themselves had form on regicide?

Still, I rather liked this neat little volume covering the basics; I see it is part of a series and am mulling on acquiring some more, assuming they are still in print.

“Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel

I prepared a big long spiel on this and then I lost it. I can’t face doing it again. Here is the summary version. This is about Thomas Cromwell who was Henry VIII’s chancellor. Some kind of great, great, great uncle of the more famous Oliver. Until about page 350 I thought that this was one of the best books I had ever read, I was entranced with it, I couldn’t speak highly enough of it and I kept accosting random strangers and telling them about it. But, at page 350 or thereabouts, I went off it: I got increasingly tired of the way everyone was always very clever and each sentence uttered was capable of several different interpretations, something not clarified by the author’s tendency to refer to her hero only as “he”; I was unconvinced about why our hero attached himself to the Boleyn interest – this is not, in my view at all clearly explained (and as those of us who were forced to do Othello for the Leaving know, lack of motive for a principal character is a major flaw in any work); Cromwell is given a very modern English liberal sensibility, this became annoying and deeply unconvincing; and, the endgame with Thomas More drags on forever.

Still and all, well worth a read.

“The Mysterious Affair at Styles” by Agatha Christie

Read while recovering from Wolf Hall. You know, Agatha Christie, undemanding.

“Skulduggery Pleasant – Dark Days” by Derek Landy

Really lovely to read this series set in Ireland. Other than that, teenage zombie, vampire, alternative universe standard fare. With a skeleton.

“The Famished Road” by Ben Okri

That’s it, I’ve had it with magical realism. Never again. I should have been warned by the following quote from a review on the back “..an epic poem that happens to touch down this side of prose…When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them.” And the following: “Overwhelming…just buy it for its beauty..” You certainly wouldn’t want to buy it for its plot. Because there is none. 500 pages of the spirit child and his visions set to a backdrop of grinding poverty. I am so glad to have finished this book. Poetry that lands just this side of prose is not meant to be read in 500 page dollops in my view. If this book had been written in four stanzas, I might really have enjoyed it.

“Tanglewreck” by Jeanette Winterson

I got a present of this from my godson and I really enjoyed it. It’s Jeanette Winterson’s first foray into the world of children’s fiction and she does a good job. I think that she is a fantastic writer and that is a huge help. Her plot is a bit convoluted and owes a lot to Philip Pullman’s “Dark Materials” trilogy. Mrs. Coulter and Regalia Mason are closely related. Still, I would definitely read another of her offerings for children.

I have lost my copy of “Cold Comfort Farm”. I am bereft.

Finally, what would you think if your husband, a man who normally reads literary fiction, came home with a book entitled “Another Man’s Life”? And further, he had recently turned 40. And further the book was described thus on the dust jacket:

“Another Man’s Life is a brilliant, funny and honest novel about living every man’s dream – whatever that is….

Tom is married with kids. After losing two jobs in as many years, he is now a full-time ‘house-husband’ with the self-confidence of a mid-leap lemming.

Sean, his twin brother, runs his own business, wears handmade suits and sleeps with a succession of beautiful women. The problem is: they are both miserable.

Sean craves stability and domestic bliss. Tom dreams of a day when his shirt is not dripping with his children’s snot.

So, the brothers decide to use the trick of their birth to live each other’s fantasies; to have another man’s life for two weeks.

But things are never quite so simple and the truth of what these brothers really want begins to emerge…”

Is it any wonder I’m growing my hair?

I am growing my hair. Mostly through inertia, it grows slowly. I haven’t had it cut since April 2009 and it only really needs to be cut now. It hasn’t yet reached my shoulders. Someone complimented me on it recently and commented that 90% of men who have affairs have them with women whose hair is longer than their wives’ hair. Discuss.

I did a virtual spring clean. I went through my RSS reader and had some thoughts which follow. This is perhaps not a post for the faint-hearted but persistent readers will be rewarded with some excellent links later on.

I read all my blogs through bloglines, recommended to me many years ago (2004, I think) by the ever enchanting Fluid Pudding. I rarely go to see the blogs themselves although they are much more beautiful in the flesh than the standard text offering produced by bloglines. I go to blogs to comment and I go to one blog which will only put the first couple of lines in my RSS feeder (I’m looking at you Beth Fish). Until my recent ruthless clear up of my RSS feed there were a startling 250 blogs (I am now down to a much more manageable 178) to which I was subscribed and I would glance at most of them regularly. With some regret, I unsubscribed from old blogs that I have kept on the list in the hope that they might revive (chez miscarriage, last updated 2005, still one of the best blogs ever) but stuck with some very irregular updaters on the basis that their very rare posts (approximately annual) are worth the wait (Aphra Behn) or that I care about them and want to see how they are getting on (wet feet, little blemishes, gpmama) or perhaps can’t quite face following them in another medium (Letter B – lost to twitter)

In the past, I almost always took site recommendations from other bloggers. I still do this but over the past year or so, I find myself checking out links recommended in the paper. Yes, the paper version of the paper. I tear out the relevant article and stick it in my diary for later inspection. Almost invariably, these are corporate collective type blogs, almost never individual voices. Mostly, journalists appear to go for blogs written by other journalists or commentators on media sites or collective blogs from think tanks and NGOs. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of blog but it is quite a different animal from the blog written to satisfy a personal need to communicate rather than a corporate obligation to do so.

In my spring clean of my RSS feeds I removed people who were no longer posting and I divided up the blogs I read into the following categories:

20six
Cartoons
EU
Factual
Ireland
Me
Personal
UK
US
Work
Writing

And now I’m going to tell you about them. Because I can. Here is the public service part of this post. I will give you some of my favourites from each group and why (though, like the book, they are all my favourites). You deserve this for reading thus far. And they are, unless otherwise specified, regular updaters.

20six (14 feeds)

This should really be subsumed into personal (see below) but for sentimental reasons, I keep it separate. I started my blogging life on this platform and I still remember it with fondness. All of the people listed here started on 20six. None of the people listed here are still on 20six which tells its own story.

When I first met Town Mouse (met in the broadest sense of the word, you understand) she lived in London. Now she lives in rural Scotland. She gets a lot of excellent material from bad weather.
Heather used to live in Switzerland but now lives in Greece. Less snow, a completely different relationship with bureaucracy.
Mike believes in the beauty of travel.
Lesley’s blog is called peregrinations.

Mobile bunch, aren’t they?

Belgium (4 feeds)

I don’t follow Belgian blogs much anymore following my repatriation. The woman who stole my name writes very nicely. She is gloomy. I would love her, if she wasn’t me only better. As it is, I am left with a faint sense of bitterness. Even though you probably only ended up here looking for her. Damn her.

Cartoons (10 feeds)

xkcd.com is my favourite by a long way. Very funny little stick men. Catering for the minority market for tech cartoons.
Missed connections has appealing watercolours but they are not quite cartoons. Have a look you’ll see what I mean. Also, they are very infrequently updated.

EU (4 feeds)

What can I say, I still care but following my weeding out, much less so it would appear. Of the four remaining after the cull, Jon Worth’s is by far the best. He often complains about the poor quality of the EU blogosphere, he’s right.

Factual (16 feeds)

This is where I put most of the more corporate, um factual stuff.

Pride of place here most go to Kottke.org I love this site. Its tagline is “home of fine hypertext products” and it couldn’t be more true. I have found some of the best things on the internet via Kottke. 14,414 other blogline subscribers and I find it invaluable, informative and unmissable. And very regularly updated. An observation: anything whimsical which is reported in the papers (for example, portion sizes in the last supper are getting bigger) I will almost invariably have seen earlier on the internet, usually at least a week earlier. Quite often on Kottke.

I am fond of the Sartorialist also. A man who attempts to inspire everyone to dress beautifully.

Seth Godin is perhaps a little American in approach for us Europeans, too perky and all that, but still very insightful at times (I have to say that I don’t buy his obsession with the lizard brain but buying into everything isn’t the point). I tried to apply his wisdom on powerpoint once when giving a presentation to a group of English county councillors (really, please don’t ask) and it all went horribly wrong. I still think it’s good advice though.

Lessons for Old People. Distressingly informative from time to time although I would like to emphasise that I DO actually know how to friend people on facebook, should I wish to do so.

Free Range Kids – Let your children out occasionally. It’s health and safety gone mad etc.

Ireland (19 feeds)

Nearly two years back in the country and I am still trying to get a handle on the Irish blogosphere. Since, theoretically, with the internet it doesn’t matter where you live, you might think that I could have started that process in Belgium. But it ain’t so Joe. I am much more interested in finding out about what Irish people think about everything now that I live here again. And I have found it pretty darn difficult.

Jason O’Mahony, who I started reading when I was in Belgium, is funny and on the ball about the Irish political situation but he doesn’t do much personal stuff. So far, my biggest find in my traditional blog reading field is Ken and Dot, a New Zealander and a Briton living in Dublin with their two small sons, so not entirely Irish. I quite like Fatmammycat but she is not quite what I’m looking for – too young and enthusiastic. She is trying to change the world. Admirable but tiring. I have joined a ning group of mother bloggers but so far nothing has really appealed.

On the corporate side of things, there are a number of good, competent, interesting blogs – I like Irish election best but, with a range of writers, it can be hit and miss. These blogs are fine in their way but what I really miss and what I can’t seem to find are personal blogs that I love. Blogs that talk about ordinary things on my doorstep (rather than the doorstep in Utah – snowing again apparently). Suggestions very welcome.

Me (17 feeds)

Mostly blogs by people I know or know of in real life. I can recommend my sister-in-law. I know I would have to say that anyway, so you can’t tell whether it’s true or not unless you go and check. It’s true, really.

I would recommend my friend the cappuchin but he almost never updates. Worth the wait though. Brother Lawrence, are you listening?

Bloglines can be a little cranky and it has stopped picking up Nicholas’s feed no matter what I try to do to persuade it otherwise. And shamefully, I only rarely go to check – this is because he often posts on Dr. Who and that is, frankly, a disappointment after all that clicking. It’s the other posts that are worthwhile (unless you’re a Dr. Who fan, in which case, all bets are off) and the beauty of bloglines was that you could pick up one and ignore the other. When it worked.

Personal (55 feeds)

This is by far the largest category of the blogs that I read. I pulled them all together under this heading. I used to subdivide them into mothers (obviously, I read a lot about mothers), infertility (because being infertile makes you a better writer – this appears to be true), medical (all the things medical people do, strangely compelling) and other categories (OCD anyone?). As the corporate sector grew and blogging became mainstream, I found myself reading more and different kinds of writing, I realised that all of these blogs from the different categories had one very significant thing in common. That they were personal about the authors’ real lives. And, drumroll, here are some recommendations.

Dooce: Because, although her blog supports her family (making her corporate, I suppose) she is both very funny and completely genuine and she writes about her life, day in, day out. Can there be anyone at all in the western world who doesn’t know her?
Beth and Chris: Because, really, how often do you get a successful husband and wife blogging team?
Finslippy: Because she writes beautifully although, alas, the quantity of posts has fallen.
Fluid Pudding Because I love her and reading her blog is why I started blogging in the first place
Mamacita: Because she has standards.

UK (10 feeds)

I find that I have, over the years, accumulated a number of blogs complaining about the state of society from our friends across the water. I gather them here. PC blogs (guess what that’s about) and Random Acts of Reality (less easy to guess, a paramedic) are my favourites.

US (6 feeds)

The Huffington Post, the New York Times, the White House blog. That kind of thing. Can’t say that there is anything there that I would particularly recommend although, I did read a fantastic series on maths in the NYT. I have spent some time boring my husband about this so I fail to see why you should be immune. Of all the online media commentary I have trawled through, I have found this series the most enlightening and fascinating. It also made me deeply envious as I can’t imagine something similar being produced by the Irish Times’s immensely dull online offerings.

Work (14 feeds)

Well, this is a secret. But if you hold down a job why are you not using the power of the internet to stay on top of your field? Eh? Could be because you don’t fancy reading about work at 11 at night. The authorities are against access to bloglines. On balance, probably for good reasons. This means I end up reading my work updates at home. But never mind because work and life are all one seamless joined up space now are they not? Really, no, you think not..

Writing (4 feeds)

More reading and writing really. People who write about what they read and what they write. And offer advice. My favourite? How to Write Badly Well. I also miss Miss Snark. Alas.

That’s the lot. What do you read online? How do you read? And, most importantly, what would you recommend?