Wednesday offers condolences
Mar. 4th, 2026 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinWhat I read
Finished A Slowly Dying Cause and she does seem to be grinding these out rather. Also I didn't actually check the details but there were some descriptive passages of places that seemed very similar, or least deploying the same epithets - 'the demilune beach' I think was one - that seemed a bit cut and paste. Also maybe more Havers, but when she finally appeared did we want that plot development??? And something entirely new (or rather, old and heritage) for Lynley to angst about.
Then read the latest Slightly Foxed.
Then onto GB Stern, The Woman in the Hall (1939), which it is longer since I last read than I thought. Still v good but not sure that I will be reccing it for the book group.
Then this already discussed - further thought that it was rather like hearing somebody tell one about book they have read - at least this bore a fairly close resemblance to the original, was not like that scene in one of E Nesbit's Bastable novels in which they talk about Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and all appear to have been reading entirely different book.... But still left a lot out.
On the go
After that I actually started Nicola Barker, TonyInterrupter (2025), Kobo deal/sortes ereader, which I was quite enjoying, and then -
Arrival of Barbara Hambly, Death at the Palace (A Silver Screen Historical Mystery Book 4) so am currently immersed in that.
Next up
And after that, imagine it will be straight on to Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped, which also published yesterday. Then maybe back to TonyInterrupter.
Maybe I'm missing something
Mar. 3rd, 2026 05:57 pmoursinHave just been reading a very odd book - sortes ereader, something it appears I bought when you could still convert Kindle books to Kobo epub, cannot recall if it was something someone had recommended or what.
LH Johnson, Tell Me of a Girl (2018) - independently published, a retelling of The Secret Garden.
I am not sure why. Because usually if people are doing a retelling they are remixing or shaking up in some way? Okay, this did do some kind of vaguely different backstory of Mary's relationship with her mother, but otherwise it followed the story pretty exactly though leaving stuff out, and much of what was actually in the original seemed terribly washed out.
Characters who are vivid presences in the original seemed muted (Martha, Ben Weatherstaff, Dickon, the robin) - and devoid of Yorkshire speech to boot.
One might have expected that maybe a retelling might do what that recent reworking of Katy did and be a bit more disability positive, but no.
Mary Lennox is already a stroppy young person who doesn't exactly need to grab more agency, hmmm?
It's also done in a rather annoying typographical style.
At the end the author indicates that it's not only in dialogue with Burnett's original but with a whole swathe of scholarship on Golden Age children's lit. Maybe it came out of the project for a course???
I could see it sort of working as the basis of a rather moody atmospheric movie version?
Has anyone else come across this? I'm really not sure what to make of it.
Hedjog b flopp
Mar. 2nd, 2026 08:21 pmoursinTwo reading groups - one in person, one online - on consecutive days - plus various assorted frazzlements - has left me not feeling like coming up with the wonted witty badinage and repartee to delight dr rdrz.
(Who said 'What witty badinage and repartee'???)
Moderately entertaining coincidence: RL book group was being hosted in a part of London in which (lightly disguised) work discussed in online group takes place (snarked at by the author). I suspect it has changed Quite A Lot since those days....
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Talking of London: Square Mile strikes back: how the City of London is fighting disinformation about crime. I discover from that that we have a Lady Mayor of London, and upon further research, she is not even the first woman to hold the office but the first to take the style of Lady Mayor, go her.
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Do we not find it annoying when academic publishers do not reveal, until you have actually made a purchase, that their ebooks can only be consumed via their walled-garden app? In this particular instance at least the work was open-access and I had not taken a loss except in the expenditure of time in the process. But really. If you are offering your product as a ebook, I think this should be made clear from the outset.
Culinary
Mar. 1st, 2026 03:50 pmoursinLast week's bread held out, unto there being (just) enough for frittata (onion &thyme) for Friday night supper.
On Friday evening I made some Famous Aubergine Dip (had wild pomegranate vinegar, yay) to take to book group (happening this evening), but have not made foccaccia due to other attendees' gluten issues. Will take carrot sticks instead.
Saturday morning breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 strong white/dark rye flour.
Today's lunch (a bit early because of having to set off to book group): partridge breasts rubbed with crushed white peppercorns, thyme, rosemary and salt, panfried in butter and olive oil, deglazed with madeira; served with kasha (have now discovered the correct proportions, and this sort does not go mushy, either), purple tenderstem broccoli, for which I sauteed chopped ginger and fennel seeds in olive oil and then added the broccoli and stirred around for a bit, then added a few tablespoons of water and steamed for half an hour, and gingery-grilled baby courgettes.
Bits and bobs
Feb. 28th, 2026 04:21 pmoursinWe Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe:
In his groundbreaking documentary, We Were Here, Kuwornu shares the diverse African presence in Renaissance Europe that he found: princes, ambassadors, saints, artists, scholars, and knights—all revealed through art from the period.
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This is an older piece but I don't think I've posted it before: Taking Photos of the First Women’s Liberation Conference
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Q&A: Bidding farewell to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust:
The Shropshire site, which comprises 10 museums and 35 listed heritage buildings, is transferring to the custodianship of the National Trust on 2 March after a challenging period that saw it grapple with severe flooding and falling visitor numbers.
Supported by a £9m government investment, it is hoped the takeover will secure the site’s long-term future and enable it to benefit from the National Trust’s high profile and visitor expertise.
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Ultraprocessed food: whaddya know, It's All More Complicated.... People want to avoid ultra-processed foods. But experts struggle to define them - not all are junk foods.
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Who ARE these people
Feb. 27th, 2026 03:34 pmoursinThis seems somehow to link on to earlier posts this week - a lot of my memories of childhood reading/being read to are associated with episodes of illness!
Posted in a group on Facebook: 'A book you read as a child yet still think about today'.
WOT.
Just So Many.
The various classic works of children's literature that have become culturally embedded in references and allusions - the Alice books, the Pooh books, The Wind in the Willows, the Jungle Books, The Secret Garden, Little Women et seq, the Katy books -
Ones that are perhaps not quite so iconic? like the Little Grey Rabbit books.
A whole mass of girls' school stories and pony books. A fair amount of Enid Blyton though I'm not sure I think about any specifics there.
Various anthologies and collections - some stories still remembered - classic fairytales, myths, etc.
Plus things like Pears Cyclopaedia and The Weekend Book
And I do, in fact think about things like, the attitude towards The Scholarship Girl in The Making of Mara in what is actually the unposh, girls' day school, to which her father sends snobbish Mara. (Only this week when thinking about educational privilege....)
Plus, I will mention yet again being absolutely traumatised by Marie of Roumania's The Lily of Life.
Odds and ends
Feb. 26th, 2026 06:14 pmoursinI've posted occasionally about Maria Sibylla Merian, this sounds like an interesting book on her and her art.
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The funding to save the area surrounding the Cerne Giant for the National Trust has been raised: any further donations will go to habitat creation and increasing access.
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Exhibition: North Staffordshire Miners’ Wives Action Group Archive (formed in response to the 1984 miners’ strike,members have been actively campaigning for over 40 years).
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Martyrdom, Misrepresentation and the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ (I was at uni with a Loveless descendant). And I discovered that the Internet Archive has a recording of the BBC Home Service broadcast of Miles Malleson and H Brook's Six Men of Dorset.
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More rather horrifying reports coming out about the surrogacy industry: Embryo couriers, student egg donors and cut-price surrogates. Journalist Alev Scott investigates northern Cyprus’s booming baby business — where Brits head for cheap treatment, gender selection and lax legislation.
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The National Archives is hosting the exhibition 'Love Letters', exploring 500 years of expressions of love. This exhibition captures the voices of paupers and monarchs, reflecting friendships, romance, and more. But why does love appear in government documents?
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Recovering “Lesbian” Voices in the Middle Ages: Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Germanic Mystics.
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The Rohonc Codex: Hungary’s Mysterious Manuscript That No One Can Read
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Wednesday dutifully attended the Fellows' symposia
Feb. 25th, 2026 06:04 pmoursinWhat I read
Finished Eleven Hours to Murder and went on to Death by the Dozen, which combine the cozy antics of Cat Caliban and her posse with mysteries tending to be rooted in past historical events in and around Cincinnatti. And Cat is after all pursuing a career as a PI, rather than taking up some quirky midlife career and just stumbling over bodies. And her partner is a retired cop who used to work in Juvie, not homicide. So counter to a lot of the recurrent tropes....
Then I realised, oops, that next meeting of in-person book group appears to be next Sunday - though I have not received any further notification since exchange of emails after the last meeting - so I have been reading Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (2023), which is blurbed as 'genre-bending', meaning it does things I am not that on board with, i.e. the writer's personal stuff/odyssey and b) fictionalising bits as narrative. Though I am marking it up somewhat for her realisation that her Great Hero G Orwell was A Horror. I daresay a lot of his trouble with being basically incapable in managing matters and practicalities was down to class and educational background but you'd have thought he might have cottoned on to some of that? rather than blithely eating up the whole of their butter ration? (fairly minor in the overall marital picture).
On the go
Read a bit more in I Am a Woman but still feeling a bit bogged down, even if Laura has finally had a night of sapphic passion.
Elizabeth George, A Slowly Dying Cause (Inspector Lynley Book 22) (2025). Fortunately this was a Kobo deal. Phoning it in. Also getting rather bogged down. 20% in and only just getting a sight of Lynley, let alone Havers. Includes great chunks of autobiographical reminiscence from the corpse.
Have also made some progress on volume for review.
Up next
Have apparently manifested, in place where I would never have thought to look for it, GB Stern, The Woman in the Hall (1939), which I had been fruitlessly looking for elsewhere, with a notion of maybe recommending for book group, as has recently been reissued for the first time since 1939 by British Library Women Writers.
As Rose Red said in the Katy books -
Feb. 24th, 2026 04:34 pmoursin'I'm so glad I didn't die with the measles when I was little!'
Thinking a bit further about that education meme and the line You were in relatively good physical and mental health.
Well, on the one hand, I had my vaccinations for smallpox, diphtheria and whooping cough all in order at a young age.
I did, however, get measles, chickenpox and mumps once I started school and they were going around. And in those days if you had an infectious disease you were obliged to stay off school for a designated quarantine period (and return your library books to the Public Health Department for fumigation).
I think scarlet fever was still around though rare, and I have a vague recollection of some child at the school actually dying from it?
Polio vaccination only came in when I was 7 or 8.
I suffered from severe tonsillitis until they removed them when I was 6, I am not at all sure, in the light of present thinking on the subject, that this was necessary, but it was very common.
In less dramatic health interventions, I mention the free codliver oil, orange juice and milk bestowed by a munificent government.
I am a little surprised, in retrospect, that my short sight wasn't picked up through testing at school, but in fact my mother noticed me squinting at things and took me for an eye-test.
I feel that I had fair amounts of time off from school being ill one way and another (besides the aforementioned epidemic diseases and operation) - not to mention the appendectomy and its after-effects when I was at uni - but that this didn't have any major adverse impact.
At the grammar school I was tagged for remedial exercises to do with the way I walked (on the outsides of my feet?): am not sure this had any effect whatsoever.
My migraines were not identified as such.
Period pains were after the way of womanhood, pretty much.
On the whole, relatively good health. A certain amount of mental stress, especially at uni.
That educational privilege meme thing
Feb. 23rd, 2026 06:16 pmoursinAnd I'm not at all sure it's culture-neutral, hmmmm?
Okay, I had parents who had books in the house and read to me and once I could read took me to the local library to get tickets for the children's department.
No children's museums that I recall but visiting the rather dull local one attached to the public library, and visits to local sites of historical interest.
My primary school was not, I think, particularly distinguished - suspect that the year there were a whole four of us passed the 11+ was Memorable - but there were some good teachers.
I don't know how one calibrates into all this my mother knowing the teacher of Infants 1 and asking her about whether I could go to school once I had turned 5 (having an autumn birthday) and her saying, oh, send her along, on account of my mother thinking I was entirely ready.
And then the Head saying I should do the 11+ technically a year early - (which was not a given, people did get kept back)
Going to a fairly academically-intense girls' grammar school, where I did get the odd spot of class-hassle, I realise in retrospect (including from horrid Mrs B of the really weird ideas about sex), where I was marked out as university material and my parents exhorted to keep me on the sixth form -
Which they were entirely happy to do.
So yes, I was I suppose supported on my academic journey. But some of that was external factors, like the existence of that extinct phoenix, full student grants.
Culinary
Feb. 22nd, 2026 08:16 pmoursinThis week's bread was a Standen loaf, strong brown/buckwheat flour, maple syrup, malt extract - but due to electric scale going weird and giving strange readings, the proportions got very odd and it turned out larger and a lot denser than usual, if still edible.
Friday night supper: Gujerati khichchari, with pinenuts.
Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft roll recipe, 4:1 strong white/buckwheat flour, a touch of maple syrup, dried cranberries, turned out rather well.
Today's lunch: Scottish salmon tail fillets baked in foil with butter and lime slices; served with La Ratte potatoes boiled with salt and dill and tossed in butter, buttered spinach and baked San Marzano tomatoes.
(no subject)
Feb. 21st, 2026 04:28 pmoursinBooks and screens: Everyone is panicking about the death of reading usefully points out that panic and woezery over reading/not-reading/what they're reading etc etc is far from a new phenomenon:
We have been here before. Not just once, but repeatedly, in a pattern so consistent it reveals something essential about how cultural elites respond to changes in how knowledge moves through society.
In the late 19th century, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold per week in Britain. These ‘penny dreadfuls’ offered sensational stories of crime, horror and adventure that critics condemned as morally corrupting and intellectually shallow. By the 1850s, there were up to 100 publishers of this penny fiction. Victorian commentators wrung their hands over the degradation of youth, the death of serious thought, the impossibility of competing with such lurid entertainment.
But walk backwards through history, and the pattern repeats with eerie precision. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, novel-reading itself was the existential threat. The terms used were identical to today’s moral panic: ‘reading epidemic’, ‘reading mania’, ‘reading rage’, ‘reading fever’, ‘reading lust’, ‘insidious contagion’. The journal Sylph worried in 1796 that women ‘of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels … the depravity is universal.’
....
In 1941, the American paediatrician Mary Preston claimed that more than half of the children she studied were ‘severely addicted’ to radio and movie crime dramas, consumed ‘much as a chronic alcoholic does drink’. The psychiatrist Fredric Wertham testified before US Congress that, as he put it in his book Seduction of the Innocent (1954), comics cause ‘chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction’, calling them more dangerous than Hitler. Thirteen American states passed restrictive laws. The comics historian Carol Tilley later exposed the flaws in Wertham’s research, but by then the damage was done.
I'm a bit 'huh' about the perception of a model of reading in quiet libraries as one that is changing, speaking as someone who has read in an awful lot of places with stuff going on around me while I had my nose in a book! (see also, beach-reading....) But that there are shifts and changes, and different forms of access, yes.
Moving on: on another prickly paw, I am not sure I am entirely on board with this model of reading as equivalent to going to the gym or other self-improving activity, and committing to reading X number of books per year (even if I look at the numbers given and sneer slightly): ‘Last year I read 137 books’: could setting targets help you put down your phone and pick up a book?:
As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. In a culture that counts steps, optimises sleep and gamifies meditation, the pressure to quantify reading may say less about books than about a wider urge to turn even our leisure into something measurable and, ultimately, competitive.
Groaning rather there.
Also at the sense that the books are being picked for Reasons - maybe I'm being unfair.
Also, perhaps, this is a where you are in the life-cycle thing: because in my 20s or so I was reading things I thought I ought to read/have read even if I was also reading things for enjoyment, and I am now in my sere and withered about, is this going to be pleasurable? (I suspect chomping through 1000 romances as research is not all that much fun?)