Vodkafan's Reading Adventure 2014

[pontalba]

Well as long as you bounce back..... that's what's important  Re: the kindle, now that would never happen with a tree book ( smug mode)  

 

LOL, OTOH.......a kindle won't mildew.  

 

 

 Yep I have to concede that.....haha your "smug mode" post  fits really well with PP's face on your avatar I can just imagine him saying it

 

Love the Pink Panther. 

[vodkafan]

Strolling along with The Violent Century. It's OK

[vodkafan]

The Time Of My Life                        1/5

 

Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi

 

I actually finished reading a book. It's been a while since that happened. This makes a hat-trick of books I have read in the last year of celebrity biographies- Doris Day, Michael Caine and now Patrick Swayze. I don't think I will read any more. They are just too sanitized and cleaned up like they are only telling half the story.  

[Athena]

It's a shame . I hope you enjoy your next read more. Maybe pick something by a favourite author?

[frankie]

If you want an unsanitized (auto)bio of celeb life, I would recommend Mötley Crüe's The Dirt.  

[Kidsmum]

The Time Of My Life                        1/5

 

Patrick Swayze and Lisa Niemi

 

I actually finished reading a book. It's been a while since that happened. This makes a hat-trick of books I have read in the last year of celebrity biographies- Doris Day, Michael Caine and now Patrick Swayze. I don't think I will read any more. They are just too sanitized and cleaned up like they are only telling half the story.  

 

I didn't know you were a fan of Patrick Swayze VF or perhaps your an ex fan now 

[vodkafan]

I still like his "biggies" Ghost and Dirty Dancing.  Yes, I think he was an OK actor. But the autobiography is pretty boring, to be honest. I have heard from other places that he and Jennifer Grey didn't get on all at the beginning of filming for DD and  both had to be persuaded to carry on. It would have been interesting to read all the stuff like that from the horse's mouth. But he just glosses right over that so I just knew the book was a bit of a shine job. And as his wife co-wrote the book with him you just know she is always painted in the best possible light. You can almost sense her angel wings .

[Kidsmum]

I've seen Ghost but must confess to never having watched Dirty Dancing  I think if if i ever wrote my own life story i'd have to gloss over a few bits........ like my teenage years 

[Athena]

I really liked both Ghost and Dirty Dancing.

[vodkafan]

I've seen Ghost but must confess to never having watched Dirty Dancing  I think if if i ever wrote my own life story i'd have to gloss over a few bits........ like my teenage years 

 

Haha yes like most of us I think...

[vodkafan]

I really liked both Ghost and Dirty Dancing.

 

Both brilliant films. And Swayze plays likeable characters in both.

[vodkafan]

How To Be A Victorian     5/5

 

Ruth Goodman

 

Ruth Goodman is a social historian who is familiar through TV programs like Victorian Farm where she and two practical research archeologists spent a whole calender year living as 19th century farmers wearing the proper period clothes, eating the food and working the land using Victorian methods. She is therefore a bit of a heroine to me! What was great about her book was the fact that she has tried all these things for real and is able to write about them with complete confidence and give a personal insight that is really helpful to anybody wanting to give authenticity to fictional characters . Little gold nuggets of info like what it actually was like to walk, work and move about in corsets and bustle dress; having to perch on the edge of chairs and approach them at an angle; stuff like that.

The chapters are constructed so that it follows a Victorian through his/her entire day from waking up , getting dressed , eating, commuting, working until going to bed again at night. The last research book I read had the same format but this was much better.      

[poppyshake]

Oh I like her on all the programmes .. she's very knowledgeable isn't she and has such enthusiasm for her subject that it's infectious. Sounds like a great read

[vodkafan]

Oh I like her on all the programmes .. she's very knowledgeable isn't she and has such enthusiasm for her subject that it's infectious. Sounds like a great read

 

Yes - you have to admire the enthusiasm of a woman who will happily make her own re-usable Victorian  cotton sanitary towels  and fill them with moss. And the bit about feeling all her organs go back into their proper places after she takes her corset off. Yikes!

Edited June 14, 2014 by vodkafan

[vodkafan]

Surpassing The Love Of Men            4/5

Lillian Faderman

 

This feminist author is quite famous apparently but must be getting on a bit now. Anyway this book was quite useful for background for the patriarchal society that Victorian women had to put up with and struggle against. The 19th century was the part I was most interested in of course, but it travels

from the end of the 17th through to near the end of the 20th.

It is always a danger when writing a novel to put contemporary ideas and motivations into characters heads when society- and therefore people's internalized views - was based on completely different precepts. I think it will help me a lot.

Anyway I think I have put the cart before the horse in this review and not explained what the book is about! It's basically about women's relationships with each other and how they changed over 300 years.

Any reader of Jane Austen will know that "romantic friendships" were very real and important to women in this era. Women didn't just write flowery love letters to each other because it sounded good. Because women had virtually no power in this time-their lives and marriages and property  were completely run by men- these relationships were their moral support. Nowadays they would call it a support structure or network. These women really did love each other and formed relationships that lasted lifetimes. But they were love relationships not sexual relationships. It was considered an ideal and pure love.  Men also had the same sort of thing going on and love letters of the time exist between men too, all completely innocent. (Remenber "Kiss me Hardy" by Admiral Nelson?) This innocence  reached a high point during the Victorian age when the society of men and women became almost completely segregated and homes were even divided into male and female rooms, so the importance of these relationships became even more essential. It was possible, if a woman did not manage to marry, that she would spend her whole life in the company of other women without hardly ever seeing a man who wasn't a father or brother.

Can you imagine this happening today?!

This all changed at the very end of the 19th century because of Freud (he has a lot to answer for) who seemed obsessed with sex to be honest. I never liked him and I like him less after reading this. I lay it on his carpet that society nowadays is so sexualized.

Anyway,in the public mind in the space of only thirty or so years everybody became aware of sex , the words lesbian and homosexual were invented as perjorative terms wrapped up in scientific and medical jargon, and anybody who loved someone of the same sex-even completely innocently- was made to feel guilty. So the women's vital  support structure was undermined and collapsed in one generation. The author's sources and facts to back this up make really amazing and dramatic reading. There was at the same time a great political struggle going on for women to have more rights and as a method of undermining these efforts women were often accused of being lesbians to weaken the links between them and discredit them.

That's all history now but the main thing for me that was useful was that Victorian society really was run on very different lines that women crossed at their peril. As my book has both male and female protagonists who are masquerading as Victorians I have to be aware of when they are breaking the rules and when not. 

Edited June 25, 2014 by vodkafan

[pontalba]

Great review, James! Sounds fascinating.

[Athena]

Great review ! The book sounds quite interesting.

[Janet]

Sorry to go back a few pages, James, but shame you didn't like the Swayze book.  He was a great actor in the films I saw him in... which weren't many!  The two you mention are great - have you seen Keeping Mum?  He plays a totally different character in that to the characters in Dirty Dancing and Ghost.  Quite an eye-opener.

[vodkafan]

Sorry to go back a few pages, James, but shame you didn't like the Swayze book.  He was a great actor in the films I saw him in... which weren't many!  The two you mention are great - have you seen Keeping Mum?  He plays a totally different character in that to the characters in Dirty Dancing and Ghost.  Quite an eye-opener.

 

Hi Janet no haven't seen that one. I have never seen Road House either, which is supposed to be good. 

[vodkafan]

The Violent Century                          2/5

Lavie Tidhar

 

This is a marmite book for most it seems judging by reviews. I liked it OK and was not put off by the strange style of rendering the dialogue without quotation marks. In fact I remembered reading a WW2 fiction book (the title of which I have long forgotten, but now wish I had again) which was written in exactly that same style and contained many similar episodes. It was about partizans and secret agents.

 

The Violent Century was OK. It started off very interesting..it sort of examines the premise of what would happen if mutants like the X-men had appeared among mankind in 1932. The author's take on it is that they would get caught up in WW2 just like everybody else. Each nation uses them in ways consistent with their national character- America for instances dresses theirs in garish superhero costumes and uses them for propaganda purposes. Britain uses them behind the scenes as spies and secret agents. But when all is said and done they are still human and they get battered and smashed by the war and the wars afterwards. That was the interesting bit of the book really; the actual plot was very thin but the emotional changes they went through was a sort of parallel to the physical changes they had gone through that made them different.

I struggled to rate this book a bit. At first I gave it a 3 but then knocked it up to a 4 for the ending, which does tie things up. Others may not like it at all.   [edit] since writing this review I have changed my mind about this book and now have knocked it right down to a 2 . I think because the story is kind of lazy. It would have been a sharp and interesting short story though. 

Edited August 23, 2014 by vodkafan

[Signor Finzione]

Glad you enjoyed it in the end VF - I think you're right in saying it's a love/hate book.

[vodkafan]

1888- London Murders In The Year Of The Ripper             5/5

 

Peter Stubley

 

This was a great little book , I enjoyed reading it so much. Of course I am a sucker for anything in the 1880s but it was much more than that. For a book obviously a product of research through archives of the Illustrated Police Gazette and other similar newspapers and probably Court histories too, it was not dry at all. The author really evokes a feeling of the times, late Victorian London came alive every time I dipped into the book . As I only bought the book to research police procedures, I did not expect to relish it so much. I even liked the feel of the book itself, with its bendy shiny cover!

One thing that surprised me very much over and over again was the leniency of the Victorian courts. Many people walked away scot free and even if convicted of murder they didn't always hang- only one murderer in the book ended his days swinging from a rope for his crime.

The saddest stories in the book were the poor young servant girls who killed their newborn babies and hid the bodies to be able to keep their jobs. How desperate and wretched these tortured souls must have been! In every case in the book of this type the courts never charged them with murder but always changed it to a lesser crime. I guess they must have figured the memory of what they had done would forever be punishment enough. 

I recommend this book.

[vodkafan]

Singled Out                  4/5

Virginia Nicholson

 

 

This non-fiction book is an exploration of how a whole generation of women survived without men in Britain after the First World War. This was a slightly later period than my usual Victorian research but it had some cross-over relevance. There were already 1 million "surplus" women at the end of the Victorian period (as was brought to my attention by George Gissing's superb The Odd Women) who were sadly the butt of society ridicule and prejudice.  A woman's purpose was accepted by all to get married. A woman who did not was a failure. The First World War in four years swelled this number of women to nearly 2 million. To put this in perspective, at the beginning of the book the author relates the true anecdote of a headmistress of a girl's school who assembles her pupils and tells them that all the men they would have married are dead, and that statistically only 1 in 10 of them will get married.

When you think about that it is really shocking. Not only that, as it is always the young strong men who end up going to war, the best geneseed of a whole generation was destroyed. (I did some checking and found that France and Germany lost even more men than UK). 

So this book chases down the history of how these women got along, what they did instead and how they felt about it. As much as possible the author tries to get at their feelings through their diaries and journals. Some of them felt liberated by it and carved out careers which would have been impossible before while others bitterly missed the children they should have had.

 

At the end of the book the author punches home the point that these women by their existence forced society to change.

[vodkafan]

Secret Ceremonies    4/5

Deborah Laake

 

I found this book mentioned somewhere so I searched out a second hand copy on Amazon. The autobiography of an American girl in the 1970s who grew up in the Mormon church and got married to a Mormon man. I guess when it was written it was quite an eye-opener as the religion was quite secretive; to be honest, it reads like being in a cult.  It's not really about knocking the church though; the focus is really about the woman herself and how she was not prepared for marriage or relationships. She presents her story and lets the reader decide about the Mormon part for themselves, which I like.

In the end internal conflicts led to a mental breakdown and she spent some time in a mental hospital. This part of the book for me brought very interesting comparisons with Girl: Interrupted by Suzannah Kayson.

A quick read and the writing has a sort of honesty about it that I liked.

[vodkafan]

The Ruins Of Time    3/5

Ben Woolfendon

 

A father is obsessed with revealing the mystery of his family history. When he gets ill and dies his grown up son, despite himself, gets drawn in to finish what his father started. That's more or less the whole plot.  3/5 is a bit generous if you have to dissect the storyline and pull the characters apart for a good look. So it's best not to. This moves along well enough but the motivations of some of the characters (notably Elias Crane) are very weak and inexplicable. Certain episodes and bits of dialogue kept me reading though and it was enjoyable, but nothing outstanding.

Edited August 23, 2014 by vodkafan