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Recent reading (with additional rambling)
Jun. 10th, 2021 10:16 pmI started on the next book club book (The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern), but it did not hook me. Really I just want comfort reading right now--I am still having housemate woes. I went home to fetch some stuff before we leave for the family summer place, and after meeting my housemates who are moving, I started crying (luckily after leaving). : (
Most of my comfort reading now (and has been for a while) is apparently books set in 18th and 19th century Britain. This is clearly spillover from my fandom, but I guess it's also pure escapism, because it's so different from my own life. Well, sometimes escapism is what you need. So anyway, I reread Beck and Call by Annick Trent (set in 1790's Britain, of course). I know I recently recced that, but I hadn't actually read the finished version, as opposed to reading the draft in chunks. I think the best thing about it is how realistic the characters' lives as servants feel: how they don't have much free time, how their masters' demands shape their lives, the class gradations between the servants, the economic precarity if they lose their place. And yet, it's not at all a depressing book--it's engaging and the characters still have agency, and also I love how the ending finds a new path in life for one of the characters which neither he nor I had imagined, but which made me very happy.
It was also enormously satisfying to read, for the first time, a book which I had bound myself! Actually it's quite easy to take an epub and format it for bookbinding. An epub is just a glorified html file, and you can search/replace the html with Latex code, and then of course you have to do some manual stuff as well. But easy, on the whole, now that I've got the hang of it. I remember being annoyed that the Murderbot novellas were not available in one volume, for example, but I guess I can just make that happen for myself now, if I want!
In other good news, I have my first vaccination shot booked in twelve days!!
Most of my comfort reading now (and has been for a while) is apparently books set in 18th and 19th century Britain. This is clearly spillover from my fandom, but I guess it's also pure escapism, because it's so different from my own life. Well, sometimes escapism is what you need. So anyway, I reread Beck and Call by Annick Trent (set in 1790's Britain, of course). I know I recently recced that, but I hadn't actually read the finished version, as opposed to reading the draft in chunks. I think the best thing about it is how realistic the characters' lives as servants feel: how they don't have much free time, how their masters' demands shape their lives, the class gradations between the servants, the economic precarity if they lose their place. And yet, it's not at all a depressing book--it's engaging and the characters still have agency, and also I love how the ending finds a new path in life for one of the characters which neither he nor I had imagined, but which made me very happy.
It was also enormously satisfying to read, for the first time, a book which I had bound myself! Actually it's quite easy to take an epub and format it for bookbinding. An epub is just a glorified html file, and you can search/replace the html with Latex code, and then of course you have to do some manual stuff as well. But easy, on the whole, now that I've got the hang of it. I remember being annoyed that the Murderbot novellas were not available in one volume, for example, but I guess I can just make that happen for myself now, if I want!
In other good news, I have my first vaccination shot booked in twelve days!!
