De tous les rires et de tous les desirs

BSpec book club figured it was time to check out V. E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, which has broken out of the fantasy scene and garnered a bunch of mainstream recognition, including from Oprah. We had read one of Schwab’s other books a few years ago, which I liked enough that I read the whole trilogy, but it hadn’t struck me as the kind of thing you’d like if you didn’t already like that kind of thing, so we were curious what was different about this one.

The cheap answer would be that it is literary-er, with its plot based on Faust, overthinking main characters, references to all sorts of classical art, and heaping helping of classic literary settings like “New York” and “France.” And sure, it’s definitely a book for people who love big cities and old bookstores and family dysfunction (and who doesn’t)? It’s a book to read when you’re feeling all deep and lonely and you love books but also wonder why you’re stuck reading them in the hours between your job and the next day at your job instead of having meaningful adventures, which certainly made it a good melancholy January lockdown read.

That, however, might make it sound like I disliked it or thought it was pretentious. On the contrary, I absolutely loved it, and it was precisely the kind of pretentious I’m a huge sucker for. The cheesy-ass self-referential ending? Arguing with the Devil about semantics? Cameos by Beethoven and Wagner? Ze simple but restrictive life of ze French countryside contrasted with ze sordid glamour of pre-Revolutionary Paris? Donnez-moi plus! I found it a great comfort read in a self-indulgent sort of way, although as I am unable to indulge in traveling and unwilling to indulge in making other people listen to me whinge about how I wanted to achieve Greater Things In Life than editing tech reports (I do a lot of stuff cooler than editing tech reports outside of work, and also I have money now, which after ten years on publishing wages I am not going to be all ‘90s ennui about), it pretty much only inspired me to dick about with Duolingo French lessons and listen to a bit of Wagner.

I loved the slow meandering tours through various historical settings, and Addie’s halting, difficult exploration of the rules and limitations of her curse, and Henry’s fear of his own mediocrity, the romanticization of used bookstores, and did I mention all the French stuff. All just grand, instantly classic stuff. I’m sure we’ll have a fun time talking about all the stuff it says about The Human Condition and all the other such big philosophical ideas that the characters all fight about.

Gang aft agley

The book that initially won my “big book to read over the course of the year” poll was Magnus Magnusson’s Scotland: The Story of a Nation, a 700-page tome that I picked up at a Harvard Book Store Warehouse sale in 2015. Much like with last year’s Sagas of the Icelanders, I took this as a challenge to read it over the week between Christmas and New Years, so I could start the New Year off already having logged a deceptive number of pages, and read a different book in the poll for the year (this year I’m doing Capital, Volume 1). Unfortunately for me I only got about 300 pages through the book at the time the New Year started, so I’m 10 days and 2 other books in and have just finished it. I could knock out 100 pages a day on the days I had literally nothing else to do, but January hasn’t had very many of those.

The book is in most ways a pretty traditional big old history of wars and kings and parliaments told in chronological order, starting in prehistory to the best of its ability, with most of the page time going to the medieval and early modern periods. One fun thing it does is use a different history of Scotland as a framing device, walking us through the comparison between modern historical understandings of Scotland and that displayed in Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, a very popular and romanticized account that became an instant classic, shaping young Scots’ understandings of their own history for most of the past two centuries.

I know a decent amount of English history and a decent amount of Irish history, but very little about Scottish history except what winds up being peripherally important to English and Irish history, plus a little highly dramatized nonsense about the 1745 Jacobite uprising. So I was very happy to have a “survey course” type book to give an overview of the whole thing, or at least the whole thing up through Sir Walter Scott’s life, and then a lengthy epilogue covering from the 1830s all the way up through the establishment of the devolved Scottish parliament in 1999. I honestly think this should have just been a regular chapter–the bumbling but nevertheless successful heist of the Stone of Scone from Westminster in the 1950s has no business being stuck in an epilogue–but other than that it’s a very straightforwardly organized read. Magnusson also mostly brings a good authorial sensibility to it; there’s not too much editorializing, but he brings the occasional bit of dry humor, and a bit of a personal touch as someone who’s personally been involved in a lot of Scottish heritage work (apparently he was also a well-known TV commentator; in one footnote he notes that he was banned from political commentating on the BBC for a year after he got a little too excited about an upset SNC by-election win in 1967).

I’m not quite sure what to say about Scottish history itself except that in true history fashion it is often quite bonkers. People really have always been getting up to some shenanigans. Scotland also has a number of very funny place-names, some of which is because those names have then become the names of other things (like the river Tweed), but some just because that’s what you get when you goofily Anglicize Gaelic names, or when Scots words wind up identical to English words but meaning something different (I’m not sure what kind of geographical feature a “law” is but it makes Such-and-such Law a weird place-name). And do not get me started on the Stone of Scone (or, for that matter, the Scone of Stone).

It must also be said that in the past handful of centuries or so, Scotland seems to have had quite a cinematic run of bad luck–its being smaller and less populated and less wealthy than its English neighbor obvious had quite a bit to do with its inevitable subsumation under the English–sorry, British–crown, but there are also quite a number of key instances where they could have come out on top if only something hadn’t gone oddly wrong.

Much like Iceland, Scotland is also a good country to read big fat books about in the dead of winter when everything is cold and gray and unpleasant, but you’re inside and have books and whiskey (or something else, if you’re doing Dry January) and like, oatmeal. Maybe I’ll make oatmeal scones next weekend.