Books I read in September 2024
Oct. 2nd, 2024 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1Total: 7 books
— Olivia by Dorothy Strachey;
— Yellow Rose by Nobuko Yoshiya;
— A Passage to India by E.M. Forster;
— Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor;
— School for Barbarians by Erika Mann;
— Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley;
— Dubliners by James Joyce.
Wrow... all bangers.
"Olivia" is a very short novel originally published as "Olivia, by Olivia," with Strachey adding her real name later. Strachey was part of Virginia Woolf's circle but didn't published "Olivia" until she was in her late 80s. It's an autobiographical story about an English girl (Olivia) who is sent to a French boarding school, where she becomes obsessed with one of her schoolmasters, Madame Julia. Her infatuation is part teenage crush and part love for French literature, a subject tied deeply to Julia in her mind. Whether or not the much-older Julia is interested in return is a point of tension throughout the novel; for the most part it seems she is, but is she just teasing Olivia? Will she ever really be with her?
Woven throughout this is the darker story of Julia and ... fuck, I forget her name. The other female headmistress, who opened the school with Julia and, at one point before the novel starts, was her lover. Over time Julia and her former lover have grown apart, partially because of Julia's eye for students and partially because of other teachers deliberately driving a wedge between them. It all culminates in a dark, ambiguous ending that Olivia herself can't quite parse. I described this book to Rich as "Jane Eyre" for lesbians. Julia is your female Mr. Rochester, and she rocks.
Yellow Rose: This short story was published in Japan in the 20s and launched the yuri genre as we know it. Similar to Olivia, it follows a new teacher at a school in the countryside, where she becomes infatuated with one of her own students. Cultural norms drive them apart, and when the girl's parents ask her teacher to please encourage her to get married like a good girl, she acquiesces, even though it means ending her relationship with the student before it even starts. Short but extremely bittersweet and moving.
A Passage to India: MY NEW FAVORITE NOVEL. Packed with gorgeous prose and complex, human characters, this book features Dr. Aziz, an Indian Muslim in the 1920s; Mr. Fielding, an English director at the local college in Chandrapore; Mrs. Moore, an elderly woman visiting her son; and Adela Quested, the young woman visiting India alongside Mrs. Moore to decide if she will marry Mrs. Moore's son Ronnie. Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore are put off by the attitude of English ex-pats toward Indians and determine to see the "real India," which leads to Mrs. Moore befriending Dr. Aziz in a mosque. That friendship leads to a murky scene in a disorienting cave, where Miss Quested accuses Dr. Aziz of trying to rape her, and he goes to trial with only Mr. Fielding and Mrs. Moore defending him out of all his English acquaintances. Although Dr. Aziz is acquitted, it scars his friendship with Fielding in particular forever, and likely would have scarred his relationship with Mrs. Moore as well, had she lived. This is a great anti-colonialist book that resists the urge to frame any of its characters as strictly good or strictly bad. Everyone involved makes mistakes, sometimes unforgivable ones (like Miss Quested's accusation) and sometimes just uneasy ones (like Mrs. Moore's decision to go back home to England rather than testify on Aziz's behalf... I say uneasy rather than forgivable for this one because Mrs. Moore dies on the way and becomes a symbol of Aziz's innocence; Aziz himself prefers to believe that Mrs. Moore was *sent* away against her will, and one could argue that she was, but really...)
Address Unknown: Only 60 pages long, this book was published in America in the 30s and features two German-Americans who are close friends and business partners. When Martin moves back to Germany in 1932, he is almost immediately sucked into Nazi propaganda, to the surprise and dismay of his Jewish friend Max, and by the end of the novel, all characters except Max (safe in San Francisco) have been disappeared or killed. Kressmann Taylor wrote this book in response to a real-life event. When her liberal, moral, educated German friends moved back to Germany in the early 30s, she was alarmed by how quickly they fell to Nazi thinking and joined the party. When they visited San Francisco a few years later, they refused to even acknowledge their old Jewish friends. Kressmann Taylor became obsessed with "why" and "how" and started voraciously reading everything she could get her hands on from Germany. This novel is the result, and explores the potential use of letters as a weapon.
School for Barbarians: Nonfiction, this book is a deep dive into the all-encompassing nature of Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Mann first dissects how propaganda has infiltrated and sundered the family structure, then spends the greatest portion of the novel examining every single class in German schools to identify how the education system has been degraded and Nazi-fied. This was really eye-opening. My professor said at the start of the class, "If you think you would have been one of the good Germans, this book will change your mind" -- and he was right. I had watched documentaries about propaganda in German schools before, but I had no idea how complete it was; I honestly thought it basically amounted to singing some Nazi "hymns" and saying "Heil Hitler" as a regular "hello." I had also read Maus, and for me one of the most memorable parts is when the narrator says that the children were worse/more vicious than the adults; "School for Barbarians" really explains why, and gives you the impression that it was almost impossible for any child NOT to be viciously antisemitic by the time the war started.
The part that most interested me was about art classes. Once Nazis took control of the schools, art classes for children were focused entirely on war (as was every other class, honestly). Assignments involved drawing bomb shelters under attack, doctors bearing wounded patients on stretchers, gas masks and their different filters. Every class seemed to have only one goal, which was to convince children they were *already* at war, and that their daily life was full of misery, blood, and the threat of death. In reality, of course, war was still years away.
Time Must Have a Stop: This was surprisingly readable. Huxley has a reputation for being rather dry, but I was sucked into this right away. In the end, though, it was tough to rate -- a five-star book with a one-star epilogue, imo. The main story follows Sebastian, a boy obsessed with poetry and dead languages who is desperate to be taken seriously as an adult. His father is a stern, unfeeling socialist who has neglected Sebastian all his life in pursuit of revolution. His extended family are middle-class and philanthropic, but obsessed with appearing cultured and well-educated; his uncle Eustace married a wealthy older woman and inherited her fortune when she died, and is a materialistic aesthete, sort of an Oscar Wilde-type.
When Sebastian goes to Florence to visit Uncle Eustace, Eustace gifts him a Degas original and then abruptly dies of a heart attack, leaving Sebastian in a bind. Nobody knows that Eustace gave him this drawing; he wants a set of dinner clothes so he can attend adult parties without embarrassing himself, so he sells the drawing secretly and uses it to buy the new clothes. However, this sets off a chain of lies which leads to a little Italian girl being accused of theft, a dog being killed, and a kind religious cousin named Bruno being imprisoned. Throughout the whole novel, Sebastian struggles with his conscience vs. his own weakness and desire to find the easy way out.
What ruins the book is the ghastly epilogue. Some 15 years later, Sebastian is a widower and a wounded war vet who spends his days penning a spiritualist manifesto. Huxley uses the epilogue to info-dump his own opinions on spirituality ad nauseum. It's wearying, it's preachy, it's abrupt, it's just plain obnoxious. In brief paragraphs, Huxley explains that Sebastian had a wife, cheated on her, she found out, it caused a miscarriage, she went septic, she died, he reunited with Bruno (free from prison!), Bruno had cancer, Sebastian cared for him, Sebastian had a spiritual awakening and became the maniacal manifesto-writer that we see today. All this info is an afterthought for Huxley, because the main draw for him is making us read Sebastian's manifesto T__T
Dubliners: Hey, it's Dubliners! What can I say. Not my favorite James Joyce, not my least favorite either. I like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man better, but I can appreciate Dubliners more now that I'm an adult. As a teen, parts of it were touching and parts of it were dry and emotionally remote. Now the deliberate dryness and remoteness are part of the appeal. Joyce likes to tell us exactly what was said and done, nothing else, and let the readers mull it over.
— Olivia by Dorothy Strachey;
— Yellow Rose by Nobuko Yoshiya;
— A Passage to India by E.M. Forster;
— Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor;
— School for Barbarians by Erika Mann;
— Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley;
— Dubliners by James Joyce.
Wrow... all bangers.
"Olivia" is a very short novel originally published as "Olivia, by Olivia," with Strachey adding her real name later. Strachey was part of Virginia Woolf's circle but didn't published "Olivia" until she was in her late 80s. It's an autobiographical story about an English girl (Olivia) who is sent to a French boarding school, where she becomes obsessed with one of her schoolmasters, Madame Julia. Her infatuation is part teenage crush and part love for French literature, a subject tied deeply to Julia in her mind. Whether or not the much-older Julia is interested in return is a point of tension throughout the novel; for the most part it seems she is, but is she just teasing Olivia? Will she ever really be with her?
Woven throughout this is the darker story of Julia and ... fuck, I forget her name. The other female headmistress, who opened the school with Julia and, at one point before the novel starts, was her lover. Over time Julia and her former lover have grown apart, partially because of Julia's eye for students and partially because of other teachers deliberately driving a wedge between them. It all culminates in a dark, ambiguous ending that Olivia herself can't quite parse. I described this book to Rich as "Jane Eyre" for lesbians. Julia is your female Mr. Rochester, and she rocks.
Yellow Rose: This short story was published in Japan in the 20s and launched the yuri genre as we know it. Similar to Olivia, it follows a new teacher at a school in the countryside, where she becomes infatuated with one of her own students. Cultural norms drive them apart, and when the girl's parents ask her teacher to please encourage her to get married like a good girl, she acquiesces, even though it means ending her relationship with the student before it even starts. Short but extremely bittersweet and moving.
A Passage to India: MY NEW FAVORITE NOVEL. Packed with gorgeous prose and complex, human characters, this book features Dr. Aziz, an Indian Muslim in the 1920s; Mr. Fielding, an English director at the local college in Chandrapore; Mrs. Moore, an elderly woman visiting her son; and Adela Quested, the young woman visiting India alongside Mrs. Moore to decide if she will marry Mrs. Moore's son Ronnie. Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore are put off by the attitude of English ex-pats toward Indians and determine to see the "real India," which leads to Mrs. Moore befriending Dr. Aziz in a mosque. That friendship leads to a murky scene in a disorienting cave, where Miss Quested accuses Dr. Aziz of trying to rape her, and he goes to trial with only Mr. Fielding and Mrs. Moore defending him out of all his English acquaintances. Although Dr. Aziz is acquitted, it scars his friendship with Fielding in particular forever, and likely would have scarred his relationship with Mrs. Moore as well, had she lived. This is a great anti-colonialist book that resists the urge to frame any of its characters as strictly good or strictly bad. Everyone involved makes mistakes, sometimes unforgivable ones (like Miss Quested's accusation) and sometimes just uneasy ones (like Mrs. Moore's decision to go back home to England rather than testify on Aziz's behalf... I say uneasy rather than forgivable for this one because Mrs. Moore dies on the way and becomes a symbol of Aziz's innocence; Aziz himself prefers to believe that Mrs. Moore was *sent* away against her will, and one could argue that she was, but really...)
Address Unknown: Only 60 pages long, this book was published in America in the 30s and features two German-Americans who are close friends and business partners. When Martin moves back to Germany in 1932, he is almost immediately sucked into Nazi propaganda, to the surprise and dismay of his Jewish friend Max, and by the end of the novel, all characters except Max (safe in San Francisco) have been disappeared or killed. Kressmann Taylor wrote this book in response to a real-life event. When her liberal, moral, educated German friends moved back to Germany in the early 30s, she was alarmed by how quickly they fell to Nazi thinking and joined the party. When they visited San Francisco a few years later, they refused to even acknowledge their old Jewish friends. Kressmann Taylor became obsessed with "why" and "how" and started voraciously reading everything she could get her hands on from Germany. This novel is the result, and explores the potential use of letters as a weapon.
School for Barbarians: Nonfiction, this book is a deep dive into the all-encompassing nature of Nazi propaganda in the 1930s. Mann first dissects how propaganda has infiltrated and sundered the family structure, then spends the greatest portion of the novel examining every single class in German schools to identify how the education system has been degraded and Nazi-fied. This was really eye-opening. My professor said at the start of the class, "If you think you would have been one of the good Germans, this book will change your mind" -- and he was right. I had watched documentaries about propaganda in German schools before, but I had no idea how complete it was; I honestly thought it basically amounted to singing some Nazi "hymns" and saying "Heil Hitler" as a regular "hello." I had also read Maus, and for me one of the most memorable parts is when the narrator says that the children were worse/more vicious than the adults; "School for Barbarians" really explains why, and gives you the impression that it was almost impossible for any child NOT to be viciously antisemitic by the time the war started.
The part that most interested me was about art classes. Once Nazis took control of the schools, art classes for children were focused entirely on war (as was every other class, honestly). Assignments involved drawing bomb shelters under attack, doctors bearing wounded patients on stretchers, gas masks and their different filters. Every class seemed to have only one goal, which was to convince children they were *already* at war, and that their daily life was full of misery, blood, and the threat of death. In reality, of course, war was still years away.
Time Must Have a Stop: This was surprisingly readable. Huxley has a reputation for being rather dry, but I was sucked into this right away. In the end, though, it was tough to rate -- a five-star book with a one-star epilogue, imo. The main story follows Sebastian, a boy obsessed with poetry and dead languages who is desperate to be taken seriously as an adult. His father is a stern, unfeeling socialist who has neglected Sebastian all his life in pursuit of revolution. His extended family are middle-class and philanthropic, but obsessed with appearing cultured and well-educated; his uncle Eustace married a wealthy older woman and inherited her fortune when she died, and is a materialistic aesthete, sort of an Oscar Wilde-type.
When Sebastian goes to Florence to visit Uncle Eustace, Eustace gifts him a Degas original and then abruptly dies of a heart attack, leaving Sebastian in a bind. Nobody knows that Eustace gave him this drawing; he wants a set of dinner clothes so he can attend adult parties without embarrassing himself, so he sells the drawing secretly and uses it to buy the new clothes. However, this sets off a chain of lies which leads to a little Italian girl being accused of theft, a dog being killed, and a kind religious cousin named Bruno being imprisoned. Throughout the whole novel, Sebastian struggles with his conscience vs. his own weakness and desire to find the easy way out.
What ruins the book is the ghastly epilogue. Some 15 years later, Sebastian is a widower and a wounded war vet who spends his days penning a spiritualist manifesto. Huxley uses the epilogue to info-dump his own opinions on spirituality ad nauseum. It's wearying, it's preachy, it's abrupt, it's just plain obnoxious. In brief paragraphs, Huxley explains that Sebastian had a wife, cheated on her, she found out, it caused a miscarriage, she went septic, she died, he reunited with Bruno (free from prison!), Bruno had cancer, Sebastian cared for him, Sebastian had a spiritual awakening and became the maniacal manifesto-writer that we see today. All this info is an afterthought for Huxley, because the main draw for him is making us read Sebastian's manifesto T__T
Dubliners: Hey, it's Dubliners! What can I say. Not my favorite James Joyce, not my least favorite either. I like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man better, but I can appreciate Dubliners more now that I'm an adult. As a teen, parts of it were touching and parts of it were dry and emotionally remote. Now the deliberate dryness and remoteness are part of the appeal. Joyce likes to tell us exactly what was said and done, nothing else, and let the readers mull it over.
