Kivrin

As often with Sherlock, I enjoyed the experience of watching the episode but have mixed feelings about it, both in my cranky-cradle-Sherlockian mode ("but in the stories it went like blahBLAHblah not blahblahBLAH!!") and other modes.

( Stand with me here upon the terrace )

I'm still slowly picking at the Alison Weir book on Mary Stuart and the death of Darnley. SO MANY DAMN NOBLES OMG. As a kid I had an old (probably circa 1935 though hard to say) novelized life-of-Mary-Queen-of-Scots that I read several times, and I browsed the Antonia Fraser bookstop of a biography, so there's a haze of deja vu around Bothwell and Rizzio and Marys Seton, Beaton, Fleming and Hamilton, but no real understanding. breadandroses was asking, and I have no idea, why it is "Queen/King of Scots" and not "Scotland."

Series 2 of Call the Midwife is now up on Netflix; I roped breadandroses into watching the Christmas special with me and look forward to enjoying the rest of it along with more of Foyle's War. We watched the first episode of Bomb Girls the other night and were underwhelmed except by the costumes. In the non-BBC, non-mid-twentieth-century vein, we did start watching Agents of SHIELD last night. I fell asleep halfway through, which is more of a commentary on "rhinoviruses are evil" and "watching most of my TV on Netflix and download has left me unused to putting up with commercial breaks" than on the show.

LAST BOOK I FINISHED

Happy Accidents, an autobiography by Jane Lynch. Not enough acting and too much stereotypically-artsy spirituality for my taste, but an engaging book nonetheless. I wanted more detail about her work with Christopher Guest (I just typed Christopher Guffman, OOPS.) The speedy progress of JL's relationship with her now-wife Laura disturbed me since it involved JL rapidly becoming a parent to Laura's child from a previous marriage. And damn, a quick google reveals that they're divorcing after three years of marriage and four years together. That poor kid.

CURRENT READING
Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley by Allison Weir. Royal Families: still the original soap operas.

The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers by Harry Bernstein. Urban poverty and religious divisions in early-twentieth-century England. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn meets All-of-a-Kind Family.

LAST BOOK I FINISHED:
Monday night I finished the second Maggie Hope book, Princess Elizabeth's Spy. It is even more of a WWII Mary Sue fanfic than the first book was. Not only does Maggie go to Windsor as an undercover protective spy for young Princess Elizabeth (unlikely but okay) she and the princess are ( spoiler ) Also there's new people-have-been-keeping-secrets-from-you crazy for Maggie (someone else she was told was dead isn't dead!) And there's feistiness. Maggie is soooo feisty. Super super feisty in the face of moustache-twirling sexism that completely crumbles before her feistiness.

I will admit that if Maggie was crushing on a spunky lady-in-waiting or dashing Land Army woman rather than a procession of fighter pilots and senior (and therefore of course male) spies I'd have more patience with all the soap-operatic plotting and the dicey details (surely a new tutor wouldn't be invited to call the heir to the throne "Lilibet," and the phrase "on lockdown" wasn't used in 1940s Britain in the modern what-you-do-when-there's-a-mad-gun-wielding-person-in-the-school sense? If only because UK English so often does different things with prepositions than US English does.)

The book was a good illustration of some of the points raised in this interesting article on Strong Female Characters that penwiper26/eight_of_cups brought to my attention. It's as if the author doesn't trust readers to be interested in Maggie unless she's absolutely extraordinary - a brilliant mathematician, fluent in multiple languages, first to figure out all sorts of stuff, a favorite of Churchill, with a crazy history involving mysterious parents and hidden information. She can't just fight crime espionage, she has to be Super Super Special Good at it. She can't just be the protagonist because she's the protagonist, it has to be justified by her stupendousness.

It's tiring. And in the next book apparently she'll be parachuting into Germany (because she's totes fluent in German, of course!) I think I'll just reread Code Name Verity instead of pressing on with this series.

WHAT I'M READING NOW
A novel about Wallis Simpson, The Shadow Queen by Rebecca Dean. I'm not sure if I'll finish it - it's pretty romance-novel-ish - but at the moment it's a diverting enough look at high society (and would-be high society) in US cities in the aughts. Since most of my reading about the Windsors has been focused on QEII and her parents, the texts have tended to take an anti-EdwardVIII and anti-Wallis tack to reflect the views of George VI and his family, so it's interesting to read something sympathetic to Wallis.

I'm also reading Joseph Anton, Salman Rushie's memoir of his years in hiding after the publication of The Satanic Verses. ("Joseph Anton" was his alias, compounded from the names of two writers he admires, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.) It is somewhat exhausting in its detail about the nuts and bolts of publishing negotiations - there are pages I want to stamp with AND PEOPLE WERE TOO SPOOKED TO PRINT HIS WORK because that's the upshot - but it is vivid and compelling about the emotional (and financial) cost of living under the radar.

All the furor about The Satanic Verses happened when I was old enough to take notice but not old enough to have much of a grasp of the situation. An author had been forced to go "into hiding" - I pictured a man under a table. Years later, in a critical theory class in college, I offered the image as a joke on my young self. It turns out, however, that Rushdie did have to make uncomfortably frequent dives under tables and into closets whenever unexpected visitors turned up at places he was staying.

I really like his prose in the memoir, and I particularly enjoy his choice to write in the third person. It gives a sense of the disconnection he felt, but it also effectively underlines the fact that he is a writer before anything, and making narrative out of experience is something he does as much as he breathes. Unfortunately I don't expect to get any further in reading his fiction than I already have, because magical realism just... does not ring my bells. But I may try again after Joseph Anton.

WHAT I'LL READ NEXT

Absofricklinlutely no idea.

Happy Birthday, kelilah! I hope it is marvelous.

One of the Kindle Daily Deals is $1.99 for Strong Poison. Get it here.

WHAT I WAS READING ON THE WAY TO WORK: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. And a long gen seaQuest fanfic, AU after season 1, in which the only allusion to a certain character is "Admiral Smith's daughter had been killed in the attack on [place X]."

WHAT I MOST RECENTLY FINISHED: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose.

WHAT I MOST RECENTLY REREAD: Bits of The Mercy Rule by Perri Klass.

WHAT'S UP NEXT: Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl because I've, uh, never actually read it. I was thinking, while I was reading the Francine Prose book, that I don't actually remember finding out about the Holocaust. I surmise that it was between when I was five and when I was eight or nine but I'm not sure. I think it was The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss, which I got out of the library at my school in India around my ninth birthday, that kicked off my READ ALL THE YA HOLOCAUST NOVELS stage, and it was I Am Rosemarie by Marietta Moskin that I read over and over. And The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black, since it's come in at the library.

So apparently noting your current reading on a Wednesday is a meme.

WHAT I WAS READING ON THE WAY TO WORK: Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch by Sally Bedell Smith. An interest in the present-day British royal family has been an adjunct to my Merlin (BBC 2008) fandom, particularly after I read Rageprufrock's classic fic Drastically Redefining Protocol. I love backstage stories and royalty spends a lot of time trying to negotiate the onstage/offstage transition. That's a fancy way of saying "I have read, on paper and in public, a pulpy joint bio of Princes William and Harry. And two other biographies of the Q-Unit.*"

* Her Majesty: Queen Elizabeth II and Her Court by Robert Hardman and Majesty: Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor by Robert Lacey

Random memorable facts from the book: 1) The Q-Unit was once denied entry to the US upon landing in Lexington, KY because she doesn't have a passport. (The matter was resolved with a call to the British Embassy, who called INS, who called the customs official - it is not recorded if the customs official was told to look at a damn pound note.) 2) JFK was nearly ten years older than the queen. I don't know why that surprised me but it did. It rather neatly highlights the sharp difference between "young for a president" and "young for a monarch." When QEII visited the Kennedy White House she'd been a head of state for nearly ten years and JFK, while older, had been a head of state for about ten minutes (well, six months.)

(Recently I have also been listening to YouTube'd documentaries about various Hanover/Saxe-Coburg-Gotha/Windsor/Windsor-Mountbattens while doing data entry or other such tasks, and have finally gotten it absolutely clear in my head who it is who survived to kick off the alternate history in Peter Dickinson's King and Joker and also has been put forward as a possible Jack the Ripper. To wit: Prince Albert Victor, the oldest son of Queen Victoria's oldest son.)

WHAT I MOST RECENTLY FINISHED: either The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner or Christine Falls by Benjamin Black. Thief is YA adventure about Greeks and gods, and is highly enjoyable, though I felt slightly jerked around by a narrative twist. Christine Falls is the first in a series of mystery novels centered around a morgue pathologist in 1950s Dublin. It's... grim but very well written and compulsively readable.

WHAT I MOST RECENTLY REREAD: In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden. Also a variety of P.D. James books, most notably Children of Men of which I said to my parents: "It's a lot better than I thought it was when I was sixteen. It's better than I think I was able to grasp at sixteen." At sixteen (or possibly fifteen or even fourteen, I don't remember exactly when I read it) my thoughts were mostly "where's Adam Dalgliesh?" and "wow, the end of the world is depressing." Now my thoughts include "this doomsday scenario is uncomfortably vivid" and "the should-I-get-involved-or-retreat-into-my-own-comfort question is both well-drawn and pointed" and "I'm sure I did not get, fifteen-plus years ago, how a female Archbishop of Canterbury features as PART of the dystopia."

WHAT'S UP NEXT: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner.

So, for my birthday, breadandroses and I went up to NYC over the weekend and a very nice busy time. A few notes:

- One of Craig Ferguson's bits in his Saturday show at Radio City included an extended riff on "what it would look like if chocolate actually WAS addictive" which culminated in the question "Have you ever said 'I'll just have one Mounds bar' and woken up three days later on the floor of a Piggly Wiggly with a sore arse and Snickers in your ears?" The name 'Piggly Wiggly' is inherently hilarious to Yankees like me; when a Scotsman says it it's even better. When a MANIC Scotsman says it, it's sublime. The Manic Scotsman principle applies to a lot of Craig Ferguson's comedy; it's not that jokes about Hitler's vegetarianism are original, it's that CF delivers them with such verve.

- It's peculiarly informative to attend back-to-back events at Radio City Music Hall and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The venue designed for nonparticipatory events is more intimate AND has better sightlines. Both, however, have extensive corps of well-trained ushers.

- 300-voice choir? FRICKIN' AWESOME.

- Clergy and servers have got to be in good trim to process around the LARGEST CATHEDRAL IN THE WORLD, particularly because they don't start from the narthex but from the south arm of the crossing to then go BACK to the narthex and down the center aisle.

- "I think Episcopalians are trained to stand in doorways," one assisting priest was complaining as the procession wound back down the south aisle towards the crossing at the end of the service.

- Some popular parenting blogger in NYC needs to get the word out that, while the procession of the animals makes the Feast of St Francis (observed) a particularly engaging service for the small fry, the fact that the procession happens in the last quarter of a service that included (in this instance) four readings, a sermon, several anthems, two dance performances, and communion for, conservatively speaking, a thousand, and lasted nearly two hours, it's a poor choice for a kid who has no prior experience of religious services.

- Given that St. J's was being un-Episcopalian enough to be asking the congregation to raise our hands and sway, kumbaya-style, I feel they might as well have gone whole-hog and put up some jumbotrons so those of us west of the crossing could see what was going on at the altar.

- WE SAW A KANGAROO IN CHURCH A KANGAROO HOPPING UP THE AISLE ON A LEAD CHEERFULLY VEERING FROM SIDE TO SIDE TO INVESTIGATE THE HUNDREDS OF PHONES HELD UP TO TAKE ITS PICTURE.

- Also in the procession of animals: a camel (regal and relaxed), a donkey (trying hard to bolt from its handlers), a number of rabbits of various subspecies snuggling up to their people, a yak (so hairy I could not guess at its mood), a spiky-shelled giant tortise on a small wheeled platform garlanded with flowers, a snake in a terrarium, two black swans, a turkey, a macaw wearing a service animal badge, a fennic fox, a potbellied pig, and several lamas (one very nervous and clearly not having a good time.) And, bringing up the rear, a clean-up crew with a wheelbarrow and a shovel.