Elizabeth's Updates en-US Fri, 04 Apr 2025 04:37:47 -0700 60 Elizabeth's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Rating843653788 Fri, 04 Apr 2025 04:37:47 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth liked a review]]> /
Elizabeth liked Anya's review of Don't Look at Me Like That:
Don't Look at Me Like That by Diana Athill
"Meg Bailey is an intriguing and multi-faceted character who feels remarkably contemporary considering the book was written in the 1960's. I enjoyed her journey, and could never be 100% sure how reliable she was as a narrator, which I think was the author's intent. It would be a fun book club book!"
]]> Review7461342989 Fri, 04 Apr 2025 03:15:38 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth added 'Andromeda']]> /review/show/7461342989 Andromeda by Therese Bohman Elizabeth gave 3 stars to Andromeda (Hardcover) by Therese Bohman
I was intrigued by the cozy, yet classic bookishness of Andromeda's cover, as it sat beckoning from the "Staff Recommendations" shelf of my local library. The story seemed interesting enough -- young woman and older gentlemen strike up an idiosyncratic relationship in a Stockholm publishing house -- so I gave it a go. It's beautifully written and translated, with quite a few passages that hit me whang-bang in the thoughts. But as a whole, I was left mostly disappointed, and it felt difficult to escape the impression that Therese Bohman has written a novel her own protagonists would despise.

Let's start with the good stuff for once -- I GET this novel's attitude towards editing. Our mostly unnamed young woman protagonist (we don't learn her name until a key moment that appears calculated to let us know that she is now symbolically her own woman) muses about editing a manuscript as follows:

I placed the cursor in the text and dragged it over the section, which I deleted with one decisive click. I scrolled down, highlighted another section, deleted that too. It felt like clearing an overgrown patch in the garden; as soon as the superfluous text was gone, what remained stood out both clearer and better. I deleted one more paragraph, moved another. When I had a structure I was happy with, I changed the tense throughout the manuscript from past to present. It took a while, but it brought a freshness, a new energy. Then I began to alter all the phrases that annoyed me. I realized I had forgotten my sandwich. I picked it up and distractedly took a few bites before forgetting about it again. Working on Jesper's text was like entering a state I remembered from my childhood--being completely absorbed in an imaginary world I had created, not noticing the passage of time. Like a dream with total presence, a perfect intoxication.


This is exactly how I feel when reviewing documents, except that I use a different metaphor -- chipping away at stone to reveal the statue it was hiding all along. (Although how the narrator managed to do all this in one night for an entire manuscript seems implausible.) I've often thought I could have been good in publishing/editing if I had been brave/rich enough to try (and had any desire to live in NYC, which I don't), and this only strengthens that suspicion. Bohman then made me laugh somewhat madly when the author's only response is, "Brilliant! Now it's finished." You put so much work into this stuff, and responses like that just further confirm your suspicion that the original drafter just wasn't giving things much thought at all.)

So I liked Andromeda's thoughts on what publishing books is like, and even its thoughts on literature, to a certain extent. (I, too, sometimes feel like contemporary literature is so focused on chasing the latest fad, that it overlooks what makes older works worthwhile.)

But the supposed relationship at the center of the book? No, I didn't buy it one bit. It didn't seem good for either of them, and they both (and Bohman herself) take an oddly defensive tone about the whole thing, instead of just -- being friends. And while our Mostly Nameless Young Woman insists there are no power imbalance issues -- they're there. On almost every single goddamn page. Most of this isn't actually because of the age and gender difference, but because of her own lack of confidence and Gunnar's personal nature. If this was a friendship between two people of the same age and gender, something would still be off about it -- it would still be oddly obsessive and somehow hostile to the outside world, and I would still tell both of them that they need to focus on diversifying their relationships so that they could actually improve their lives instead of escaping them.

And we don't actually get to witness the conversations that they have that are supposedly so meaningful (there's very little dialogue in the book) -- we mostly just get told that they're amazing. Unfortunately, this means the book mostly left me with the impression it's really about Gunnar, and that our Mostly Nameless Young Woman is meaningful merely because she's one of the few people left who appreciate him.

When I first started reading, Andromeda reminded me very much of Diana Athill's Don't Look at Me Like ThatDon't Look at Me Like That, which also features a young nameless woman making her professional way in the city. But while the conclusion of Don't Look at Me Like That was challenging and ambiguous, this same complexity ultimately isn't there in Andromeda (although I acknowledge that such nuances can easily be lost in translation).

So yes ... I was ultimately disappointed, and I think Andromeda is actually the sort of shallow literature that its own characters deride. Why? Because if a book's main point is the shallowness of contemporary literature and society (in part because of a hyperfocus on "Issues of the Day") -- and there isn't anything else really there -- it isn't actually a better book. It's still an Issues of the Day book, just written from the opposite side of the coin. ]]> Review7428417544 Fri, 04 Apr 2025 03:13:10 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth added 'The Briar Club']]> /review/show/7428417544 The Briar Club by Kate Quinn Elizabeth gave 1 star to The Briar Club (Hardcover) by Kate Quinn
The Briar Club was dreadful. It's over-written, bloated, and more often than not, non-sensical. But the positive news is that at least I got a good chuckle over the non-sensical parts, so that kept me amused as I skimmed along as quickly as I could so I could have something meaningful to say about it for my book club.

Seriously, it's a bit funny that poor old Harland just can't seem to find a woman to have a relationship with who doesn't live in the Briar House. Dude, get a grip.

I also amused myself trying to identify the areas where I think Kate Quinn used ChatGPT to add "historical color." This started when she had one of her characters muse that the house was just a "tall narrow brownstone on the nicer edge of Foggy Bottom, not some country manor out of a book like those Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries he'd read last summer."

Now, if you go through my list of "Read" books, you will quickly discern that I have read most of Dorothy Sayers' Wimsey novels multiple times, and that they are near and dear to my heart. And as far as I can recall, only one of them really takes place at a "country manor" (Clouds of Witness). Peter himself lives in London (Picadilly), and the books take place in varied locations, from an Oxford women's college (Gaudy Night) to a seaside resort (Have His Carcase) to a London advertising agency (Murder Must Advertise) to a gentlemen's club (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club) to a cathedral town (The Nine Tailors). The only explanation I can give for Quinn to imply that the Wimsey books are full of "country manors" is if she (1) pulled the reference from ChatGPT, which confused Sayers with Agatha Christie, or (2) got Sayers confused with Christie herself. Neither speaks well of Quinn's attention to detail.

Nothing makes me lose respect for an author like a bungled reference to a classic author I adore, so Quinn lost me here. She then cemented my poor opinion a few pages later, when our protagonist Grace suggests to a teenage boy (Pete) that because women don't like being called dames, "Maybe take a break from Mr. Spillane, and try Monsieur Dumas?" Really?! You mean, the Dumas who had the musketeers [spoilers removed] and had Edmond Dantes [spoilers removed]? THAT Dumas? I love his books, but they can hardly be accused of treating women respectfully.

Meanwhile, if Pete really HAD been reading Sayers, he already would have had a wonderful masculine role model in Wimsey. The whole point of the relationship between Harriet and Peter is that it has to be based on honesty, patience, and a form of equality that works for them. And it would have been funny to see Pete walking around trying to be a silly fop like Peter.

Based on those bits above, I have to conclude that Quinn either doesn't understand the books she's referencing or never actually read them. This then made me wonder whether she understands any of the other historical stuff she references. I suspect not, especially as I caught her in some truly wild statements about what it's like living in DC. (No way Nora would enjoy walking 3 miles each way to NARA in heels and a pencil thin skirt in a DC summer -- she'd arrive sweaty, blistered, and exhausted. I lived and commuted in DC for 15 years -- it's hot and gross 6 months out of the year, and not good for walking in 1950s business attire. I just barely managed a mile to and from the metro in sensible walking shoes and whatever I could buy from REI that could plausibly be classified as "business casual.")

Anywho, the above pretty much shows the attitude I took through the rest of the book -- I kept noticing things that didn't make sense to me and laughing about them. At least that was somewhat enjoyable in its own way, but good literature it was not. And as Peter Wimsey's beloved Harriet Vane would say, she'd lie cheerfully about anything, "Except saying that somebody's beastly book is good when it isn't. I can't do that. It makes me a lot of enemies, but I can't do it."

Be my enemy if you'd like -- but this book is not good. ]]> ReadStatus9222853159 Sun, 23 Mar 2025 14:27:32 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth wants to read 'I Hope This Finds You Well']]> /review/show/7428606267 I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue Elizabeth wants to read I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue
]]> Review7428417544 Sun, 23 Mar 2025 13:25:23 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth added 'The Briar Club']]> /review/show/7428417544 The Briar Club by Kate Quinn Elizabeth gave 1 star to The Briar Club (Hardcover) by Kate Quinn
The Briar Club was dreadful. It's over-written, bloated, and more often than not, non-sensical. But the positive news is that at least I got a good chuckle over the non-sensical parts, so that kept me amused as I skimmed along as quickly as I could so I could have something meaningful to say about it for my book club.

Seriously, it's a bit funny that poor old Harland just can't seem to find a woman to have a relationship with who doesn't live in the Briar House. Dude, get a grip.

I also amused myself trying to identify the areas where I think Kate Quinn used ChatGPT to add "historical color." This started when she had one of her characters muse that the house was just a "tall narrow brownstone on the nicer edge of Foggy Bottom, not some country manor out of a book like those Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries he'd read last summer."

Now, if you go through my list of "Read" books, you will quickly discern that I have read most of Dorothy Sayers' Wimsey novels multiple times, and that they are near and dear to my heart. And as far as I can recall, only one of them really takes place at a "country manor" (Clouds of Witness). Peter himself lives in London (Picadilly), and the books take place in varied locations, from an Oxford women's college (Gaudy Night) to a seaside resort (Have His Carcase) to a London advertising agency (Murder Must Advertise) to a gentlemen's club (The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club) to a cathedral town (The Nine Tailors). The only explanation I can give for Quinn to imply that the Wimsey books are full of "country manors" is if she (1) pulled the reference from ChatGPT, which confused Sayers with Agatha Christie, or (2) got Sayers confused with Christie herself. Neither speaks well of Quinn's attention to detail.

Nothing makes me lose respect for an author like a bungled reference to a classic author I adore, so Quinn lost me here. She then cemented my poor opinion a few pages later, when our protagonist Grace suggests to a teenage boy (Pete) that because women don't like being called dames, "Maybe take a break from Mr. Spillane, and try Monsieur Dumas?" Really?! You mean, the Dumas who had the musketeers [spoilers removed] and had Edmond Dantes [spoilers removed]? THAT Dumas? I love his books, but they can hardly be accused of treating women respectfully.

Meanwhile, if Pete really HAD been reading Sayers, he already would have had a wonderful masculine role model in Wimsey. The whole point of the relationship between Harriet and Peter is that it has to be based on honesty, patience, and a form of equality that works for them. And it would have been funny to see Pete walking around trying to be a silly fop like Peter.

Based on those bits above, I have to conclude that Quinn either doesn't understand the books she's referencing or never actually read them. This then made me wonder whether she understands any of the other historical stuff she references. I suspect not, especially as I caught her in some truly wild statements about what it's like living in DC. (No way Nora would enjoy walking 3 miles each way to NARA in heels and a pencil thin skirt in a DC summer -- she'd arrive sweaty, blistered, and exhausted. I lived and commuted in DC for 15 years -- it's hot and gross 6 months out of the year, and not good for walking in 1950s business attire. I just barely managed a mile to and from the metro in sensible walking shoes and whatever I could buy from REI that could plausibly be classified as "business casual.")

Anywho, the above pretty much shows the attitude I took through the rest of the book -- I kept noticing things that didn't make sense to me and laughing about them. At least that was somewhat enjoyable in its own way, but good literature it was not. And as Peter Wimsey's beloved Harriet Vane would say, she'd lie cheerfully about anything, "Except saying that somebody's beastly book is good when it isn't. I can't do that. It makes me a lot of enemies, but I can't do it."

Be my enemy if you'd like -- but this book is not good. ]]> Review235861505 Sun, 23 Mar 2025 13:21:46 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth added 'Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast']]> /review/show/235861505 Beauty by Robin McKinley Elizabeth gave 5 stars to Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast (Paperback) by Robin McKinley
A sweet and classic take on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, one I've revisited numerous times since first reading it as a teenager. Like other McKinley heroines, this "Beauty" (real name, "Honour") is more interested in horses and books than ball gowns and romance, and possesses a thoughtfulness that I appreciate. Her Beast is kind and gentlemanly, with a quiet sense of humour. They're a lovely couple, and the story feels old-fashioned and restful. It won't "challenge" a reader, but honestly, I'm too tired to seek out "challenging" books nowadays anyway. More and more, I find myself just wanting to enjoy simple stories well-told, and this certainly qualifies. ]]> ReadStatus9211688529 Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:48:26 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth wants to read 'An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s']]> /review/show/7420834045 An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin Elizabeth wants to read An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin
]]> ReadStatus9211647764 Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:36:45 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth wants to read 'Loving Frank']]> /review/show/7420806318 Loving Frank by Nancy Horan Elizabeth wants to read Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
]]> ReadStatus9211460426 Thu, 20 Mar 2025 16:41:02 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth wants to read 'The God of the Woods']]> /review/show/7420677418 The God of the Woods by Liz Moore Elizabeth wants to read The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
]]> Review235861809 Sun, 09 Mar 2025 11:28:39 -0700 <![CDATA[Elizabeth added 'Clouds of Witness']]> /review/show/235861809 Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers Elizabeth gave 5 stars to Clouds of Witness (Lord Peter Wimsey, #2) by Dorothy L. Sayers
While Sayers' first Wimsey novel, "Whose Body?" has always felt a bit uncertain to me, as if she didn't quite have a grasp yet on who Lord Peter was (comedian? hero? both?), she absolutely nails everything in "Clouds of Witness." There's some ineffable "Wimsey" quality that all the following books have, and it's truly here for the first time in "Clouds of Witness." And while we're obviously still a long way from Harriet Vane's appearance, this is where Sayers really starts laying the groundwork for Peter's character that will make their romance so satisfying.

And there's something about Sayers' writing I just find so damned reassuring and comforting. Honestly, I think part of it is just her rather old-fashioned outlook, that deals with things in a rather simple, straightforward manner, while still letting them be complicated. That sounds contradictory, but that's the best as I can explain it at the moment. And in today's wild world, sometimes I just need a vacation to a simpler outlook.

Also, huzzah for the Dowager Duchess of Denver:

"My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes." ]]>