Recent reading
Nov. 19th, 2021 05:20 pmBlack Water Sister, by Zen Cho (2021)
Well, I'm grateful someone chose this for book club, because it was excellent! Very engaging and readable style, immersive setting in a culture I know nothing about, and I was hooked by the plot and characters. It's about a young woman who moves back to Malaysia and becomes haunted by the ghost of her grandmother. Or that's how it starts, anyway. I remember Sorcerer to the Crown had that same readable quality, but the ending just didn't work for me. In this one, I thought the ending was great: it leaves a number of things open, but that was fine by me. Also, it feel simultaneously like the personal stakes are higher in this book than in Sorcerer to the Crown, while at the same time it has a smaller-scale, more domestic setting? Which I liked.
The Jacobites by Daniel Szechi (2019)
Am I not done with this subject yet? Apparently not. Anyway, this was a very good complement to what I've read before, in that it spent very little time on the course of the '45, and more on other stuff. I might write up some of it for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cahn's salon of 18th century geeks, but the most interesting bit was how far the actual politics (as shown by their formal declarations) of the exiled Stuarts had departed from that of the autocratic James II when he was kicked out, and turned into something that was...kind of its opposite.
Which makes sense! There was always a struggle over power between the monarch and the parliament (and other power bases), and if the king is actually in exile and not on the throne, he's in a uniquely bad bargaining position. He's dependent on his supporters to get the throne back, and pretty much has to agree to what they want. By 1708, James III (and BPC after him) was promising such things as three-year terms for parliament, all ministers and judges appointed by parliament, religious toleration (but no Catholics in office--and wouldn't that have been bitter for James II to swallow), the king could not set foreign policy on his own, etc. And they agreed that if the king broke these agreements, then parliament could kick him out. No doubt if any of these kings had actually ended up on the throne, they would've tried to get power back, like William III did after the Glorious Revolution, disappointing the radical Whigs, but they'd be starting from a bad bargaining position.
ETA: Here is the detailed write-up.
Well, I'm grateful someone chose this for book club, because it was excellent! Very engaging and readable style, immersive setting in a culture I know nothing about, and I was hooked by the plot and characters. It's about a young woman who moves back to Malaysia and becomes haunted by the ghost of her grandmother. Or that's how it starts, anyway. I remember Sorcerer to the Crown had that same readable quality, but the ending just didn't work for me. In this one, I thought the ending was great: it leaves a number of things open, but that was fine by me. Also, it feel simultaneously like the personal stakes are higher in this book than in Sorcerer to the Crown, while at the same time it has a smaller-scale, more domestic setting? Which I liked.
The Jacobites by Daniel Szechi (2019)
Am I not done with this subject yet? Apparently not. Anyway, this was a very good complement to what I've read before, in that it spent very little time on the course of the '45, and more on other stuff. I might write up some of it for
cahn's salon of 18th century geeks, but the most interesting bit was how far the actual politics (as shown by their formal declarations) of the exiled Stuarts had departed from that of the autocratic James II when he was kicked out, and turned into something that was...kind of its opposite. Which makes sense! There was always a struggle over power between the monarch and the parliament (and other power bases), and if the king is actually in exile and not on the throne, he's in a uniquely bad bargaining position. He's dependent on his supporters to get the throne back, and pretty much has to agree to what they want. By 1708, James III (and BPC after him) was promising such things as three-year terms for parliament, all ministers and judges appointed by parliament, religious toleration (but no Catholics in office--and wouldn't that have been bitter for James II to swallow), the king could not set foreign policy on his own, etc. And they agreed that if the king broke these agreements, then parliament could kick him out. No doubt if any of these kings had actually ended up on the throne, they would've tried to get power back, like William III did after the Glorious Revolution, disappointing the radical Whigs, but they'd be starting from a bad bargaining position.
ETA: Here is the detailed write-up.
