This weekend I finished “The Circle” by Dave Eggers, an interesting book in itself and even more interesting for the problems of novel-writing that it casts into relief. It does certain things so well, and others so badly, which is something you don’t see that often in fiction. Continue reading
A woman fascinated by vintage clothing who decides to start wearing a corset on a daily basis is a book subject that would naturally interest me. Rachel, my first-person narrator, travels to 1815 and starts wearing a corset (along the rest of the period-appropriate outfit), and I am curious about how that must have felt to her. (Though not enough to actually dress up like that.) Even if the author’s corset — the waist-squeezing, hourglass-figure-imposing kind adopted in the 1830s and worn for the better part of the next century — is different from the c. 1815 model, which left the waist largely as it was, there still must have been a sense of confinement and required uprightness alien to our elasticized age. What would that be like? What practical problems would the author encounter? So when I found a review copy lying around the office, it vaulted to the top of my to be read pile.
“Victorian Secrets” by Sarah A. Chrisman was fascinating, although not in the way I expected and probably not in the way its author intended. Continue reading
A book read twice already, with distinct displeasure, might not seem to deserve a third attempt. But Juliet Barker’s “Wild Genius on the Moors” and Jude Morgan’s “Charlotte and Emily” stirred my interest in Emily Bronte, not merely as a person, but also as an artist. Better prepared, I am reading her book very differently, with a new appreciation for what is, no question, one of the most singular achievements in 19th-century literature. Continue reading
Four days after I finished, finally waking up from the dream that was “The Golem and the Jinni,” which I found as amazing as anything I’ve read in a long time, with its own fevered internal logic. Where else would a mythological Northern European Jewish creature meet a mythological Middle Eastern Arab creature, but in 1900 New York, where immigrants of every kind brush shoulders and start new lives? She’s female, sexually demure, made of clay and able to read minds. He’s male, sexually wild, made of fire and able to sculpt metal with his bare hands. Naturally, they fall in love, since they are apparently the only two nonhumans trying to pass as humans in all of New York, a bond that transcends their many differences. Continue reading
Rainy Tuesday, a rare day off, and I indulged myself as I seldom do, by going to a movie. In the daytime! My choice was “Fill the Void,” an Israeli movie about the insular world of the Haredim. It came to my notice through my Jane Austen Google alerts; the New York Times review, in the lede, compared the heroine to one from Jane Austen; that intrigued me. Living in Brooklyn, one also cannot fail to be intrigued by the Haredim, who seem to go about their lives as if the 20th century, and even the 19th, and maybe the 18th (and the Enlightenment! and the Haskalah!) just never happened. Obviously, it cannot be that simple, but that’s how it looks from the outside.
The Jane Austen comparison was far more apt than the reviewer may have realized. Continue reading
I’m just at the start of my acquaintance with Georgette Heyer, but I feel it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. No one who spends as much time as I have in the Jane Austen space can avoid hearing about her, but until now I’ve been kind of warily “meh.” No longer. This is a writer and a woman to be reckoned with.
Metrics: One thing to know about Georgette Heyer is, 1902-1974. Continue reading
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 