Elizabeth McCoy

What We Lose When We Gamify Reading, well yeah, but this is someone who considers Middlemarch 'a slog'. I'm also, of course, thinking about previous allotropes of this kind of thing - actual libraries you could buy of The Best Books - and of course display them on your shelves - and I'm also recollecting The Provincial Lady who can never manage to actually read That Book That Everyone Is Talking About. Of reading as something that is not, reading that thing that you want to read, when you want to read it, at the speed that seems fit (which may involve stopping and starting and hiatuses).

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If not a smaller, a more connected world than people maybe think: How likely is it that Alfred the Great sent two emissaries to India in the ninth century?:

Alfred’s embassy to India thus appears to be entirely historically plausible: India, with its Christian community and shrine of St Thomas, was probably always the intended destination, and its remoteness from early medieval England the very point of the embassy.

This feels like yet another story that might perhaps account for Why Are There So Few Women In [X] Field which is not down to actual aptitude and drive: There’s a long and embedded history of abuse in chess.

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Home Free: Vivian Gornick, interviewed by Chandler Fritz

Everything depends on the writer’s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional “I.” The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It’s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, “That’s a novel!” But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn’t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.

The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus. Intriguing. When I was employed in an institution which at the time came under the aegis of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office I was obliged to attend an FCO Induction Course. This had very little relevance to my job, and among the proceedings were cautionary films about being got at by Soviet agents. In one case although the surface level involved the patsy being lured by publication in a Red journal his relationship with the tempter seemed to have definite homoerotic undertones.

So, I may have mentioned I would be giving a paper in one of the Fellows' Symposia of the Institution with which I am now affiliated, coming up over the horizon very soon. And I had originally intended to revisit some research I did Before Events Intervened and Do Something with that, but it has not been coming together as I should like, needs more percolating I think. So I am instead returning to a project I put aside when other things supervened and demanded my attention, for which I did a preliminary paper or two, and can spruce up and get, I hope, some feedback on, and maybe kickstart this back into action.

Meanwhile....

I think I mentioned being solicited to give an entertaining and instructive talk on the history of johnnies/baudruches some months hence, which I have a fair amount of material already on hand for. However, what the organisers would like is An Image for publicity purposes, fairly soonish, and REALLY. One is tempted to go with the Dudley Hoard which require a good deal of imagination to reconstruct for their original purpose.

Younger scholar whom I have been somewhat informally mentoring has now submitted their PhD thesis and would like me to read it, and think of what might come up in viva.

The project which I was involved in for some considerable while which went very weird last year, with me being somewhat accidental being left out of the loop for some months due to error in email address, so I never really got the full story, is being revived in a smaller and more defined way as a journal special issue edited by Old Friend and Me.

Meanwhile I am in the process of getting the latest volume of the Interminable Saga prepped for publication.

What I read

Finished A Slowly Dying Cause and she does seem to be grinding these out rather. Also I didn't actually check the details but there were some descriptive passages of places that seemed very similar, or least deploying the same epithets - 'the demilune beach' I think was one - that seemed a bit cut and paste. Also maybe more Havers, but when she finally appeared did we want that plot development??? And something entirely new (or rather, old and heritage) for Lynley to angst about.

Then read the latest Slightly Foxed.

Then onto GB Stern, The Woman in the Hall (1939), which it is longer since I last read than I thought. Still v good but not sure that I will be reccing it for the book group.

Then this already discussed - further thought that it was rather like hearing somebody tell one about book they have read - at least this bore a fairly close resemblance to the original, was not like that scene in one of E Nesbit's Bastable novels in which they talk about Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and all appear to have been reading entirely different book.... But still left a lot out.

On the go

After that I actually started Nicola Barker, TonyInterrupter (2025), Kobo deal/sortes ereader, which I was quite enjoying, and then -

Arrival of Barbara Hambly, Death at the Palace (A Silver Screen Historical Mystery Book 4) so am currently immersed in that.

Next up

And after that, imagine it will be straight on to Cat Sebastian, Star Shipped, which also published yesterday. Then maybe back to TonyInterrupter.

Have just been reading a very odd book - sortes ereader, something it appears I bought when you could still convert Kindle books to Kobo epub, cannot recall if it was something someone had recommended or what.

LH Johnson, Tell Me of a Girl (2018) - independently published, a retelling of The Secret Garden.

I am not sure why. Because usually if people are doing a retelling they are remixing or shaking up in some way? Okay, this did do some kind of vaguely different backstory of Mary's relationship with her mother, but otherwise it followed the story pretty exactly though leaving stuff out, and much of what was actually in the original seemed terribly washed out.

Characters who are vivid presences in the original seemed muted (Martha, Ben Weatherstaff, Dickon, the robin) - and devoid of Yorkshire speech to boot.

One might have expected that maybe a retelling might do what that recent reworking of Katy did and be a bit more disability positive, but no.

Mary Lennox is already a stroppy young person who doesn't exactly need to grab more agency, hmmm?

It's also done in a rather annoying typographical style.

At the end the author indicates that it's not only in dialogue with Burnett's original but with a whole swathe of scholarship on Golden Age children's lit. Maybe it came out of the project for a course???

I could see it sort of working as the basis of a rather moody atmospheric movie version?

Has anyone else come across this? I'm really not sure what to make of it.

Two reading groups - one in person, one online - on consecutive days - plus various assorted frazzlements - has left me not feeling like coming up with the wonted witty badinage and repartee to delight dr rdrz.

(Who said 'What witty badinage and repartee'???)

Moderately entertaining coincidence: RL book group was being hosted in a part of London in which (lightly disguised) work discussed in online group takes place (snarked at by the author). I suspect it has changed Quite A Lot since those days....

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Talking of London: Square Mile strikes back: how the City of London is fighting disinformation about crime. I discover from that that we have a Lady Mayor of London, and upon further research, she is not even the first woman to hold the office but the first to take the style of Lady Mayor, go her.

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Do we not find it annoying when academic publishers do not reveal, until you have actually made a purchase, that their ebooks can only be consumed via their walled-garden app? In this particular instance at least the work was open-access and I had not taken a loss except in the expenditure of time in the process. But really. If you are offering your product as a ebook, I think this should be made clear from the outset.