bloodygranuaile

For Christmas I got a beautiful set of hardback Jane Austen books. I intend to read them in publication order, and to that end first reread Sense and Sensibility. I had read this before but not for a very long time, I think in college or possibly even high school, and I know I’ve seen the movie but that was also many many years ago.

As her debut novel, this is not Austen at her peak, but it still hits all the classic Austen hallmarks–open talk about money, dryly witty but very mean descriptions of basically all the secondary characters, genteelly prospect-less heroines, problems that would be solved quicker if British people were ever allowed to talk about their feelings, general domestic shenanigans, and at least one person getting gravely ill or injured as a key plot point.

Our main heroine here is Elinor Dashwood, an extremely no-nonsense and scrupulously polite young woman with formidable emotional self-control, especially for a nineteen-year-old. She does most of the sense-having in the Dashwood household, as her mother and sisters are both much more emotionally expressive and inclined toward the romantic. The ne plus ultra of emotional sensitivity is the middle daughter, Marianne Dashwood, a seventeen-year-old who seems determined to embody every stereotype about over-emotional teenage girls that currently exists, although I don’t have much of an idea about how prevalent those stereotypes were in the 1810s or if it’s just Marianne.

The final romances in this one seem a little underdeveloped compared to her later works, but overall that’s OK, because the friendships–both real and the ones that are developed under polite duress and therefore sort of faked, like the one between Elinor and Lucy Steele–take center stage in a way I really enjoy. Colonel Brandon’s friendship with Elinor, which causes several people to think those two should get engaged, is a really lovely and rare example of a strong, selfless cross-sex friendship between two people who are both in love with other people and are able to become really good platonic friends without anything getting weird. The relationship between the girls and Mrs. Jennings, who is vulgar and frequently misreads situations but who does turn out to be a truly good-hearted and reliable person, is also great, and frequently very funny.

When Austen’s books were first published people were really scandalized about how economic they were, and while I think that is very funny because in a society where women weren’t allowed to have jobs, of course economics would be a critical consideration for marriage. But this upset people anyway. I love it, not just because it’s a more realistic way for the characters to talk–honestly, some of them are so blunt about it that I find myself thinking Austen may be laying it on a little thick–but it’s also very funny, because clearly some of these characters are telling themselves the same self-flattering but ludicrously un-self-aware things that the scandalized reviewers were.

Anyway, after many convoluted disappointments and scheming and general domestic shenanigans, Elinor and Marianne both end up happily and comfortably married, and then a movie was made about it with a truly excellent cast, which I should maybe rewatch.

Pride and Prejudice is next! I am much more familiar with that story, as it’s one of the only two Austen novels that I have read more than three times, so I don’t think I will be as surprised as I was in this one (I genuinely did find myself wondering what happened next, or how our heroines were going to get out of this one, because I couldn’t remember how the plot went), but it should be enjoyable all the same.

My yearlong read for 2024 was a very fancy copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which I had never had to read in school, even during the three weeks when were trying to speed-learn Middle English (I think we might have looked real quick at the prologue, but that was it).

The Canterbury Tales is very serious foundational English literature, which is why there are copies of it with leather binding and gold-edged pages and ribbon bookmarks, and all the bells and whistles. But despite what I thought was a decent amount of familiarity with the idea that classics are usually classics because they are good and entertaining and the things that make stories good and entertaining is that they are usually at least a little bit funny and a little bit insane, I was still not quite prepared for how chaotic this work was. The individual tales vary wildly in tone and genre and content and, occasionally form–most of them are told in verse, but an apparently random handful are told in prose. They each have a prologue that connects them back to the frame story, introducing who will tell the next tale and chronicling the general bickering and nonsense between the pilgrims.

A possible alternate title for this work would be “Are The Straights Okay?: The Poem,” and I must say that from my vantage point the straights do not seem to be particularly okay. A bunch of the stories are basically dumb sitcom Boomer humor about how marriage is terrible and the opposite sex is out to get you and women are awful for not endlessly submissive to their shitty husbands, although there are also a number of stories about how the shitty husbands deserve to be humiliated for being shitty. Some of these are very funny, like The Miller’s Tale, in which a young wife and her affair partner (a student who boards with them) play a series of tricks on both the dimwitted husband and a random local who is also in love with the wife, which culminates in tricking the wannabe affair partner into kissing the actual affair partner’s butthole. But there are other times when the various characters on pilgrimage appear to be trying to earnestly dispense worldly wisdom about marriage and men and women and I’m not sure if their ideas about good marriages or bad marriages are more appalling. The prologue to the Wife of Bath’s tale, which for some reason is like twice as long as the Tale itself, is simultaneously a full biography of the Wife’s marriages and completely incomprehensible. Reading it made me grimace so hard I almost got my face stuck like that.

Possibly one reason the straights are not okay is that they are all, regardless of their personal level of devotion, extremely Catholic. Catholicism permeates every word of this book, and not just the beliefs of Catholicism, but the omnipresence of the Church as the main institution in society. Catholicism is essentially hostile to both straight people and non-straight people, but differently. It also employed a huge number of people around the 1390s or whenever these poems were being written. Because it employed so many people, they could not all actually be pure of heart and godly of soul and ascetic of body and all that stuff good Catholics are supposed to be. This is great for the poem, and some of the funniest bits are about various clerically employed people who are bad at their jobs or who at least all hate each other. My favorite Tales in the book are the Friar’s Tale and the Summoner’s Tale, which come one after the other, because the Friar and the Summoner hate each other’s guts. The Friar’s tale is about how summoners are all nosy, greedy douchebags who would frame their own mothers for crimes for a nickel, which has fun ACAB energy. The Summoner’s tale in return is about how friars are hypocritical layabouts and freeloaders whose supposed vows of poverty rake in too much free loot from people with real jobs, and involves a guy tricking a friar into letting him fart into his hand, and then some sort of weird riddle where they have to figure out how to apportion a fart into equal shares and distribute it to all the friars. But my absolute favorite part, and possibly the best single page of poetry in all of English literature, is the prologue to the Summoner’s tale, in which an angel transports a sleeping friar in a dream to Hell, and the friar is like “I don’t see any friars here, is that ‘cause we’re all so good and holy?” and the angel is like “No, they’re around,” and then it turns out that all the dead friars in Hell live inside Satan’s butthole. Hilarious! Very serious classic literature is all about farts and Satan’s butthole, don’t you know.

Another very funny part is The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, where a canon shows up like “I heard we’re telling stories” and his yeoman is like “COOL I HAVE A STORY it’s about a canon who is an alchemist and a FRAUD, all the alchemists are FRAUDS, here’s how they trick people into giving them money DON’T GIVE MY BOSS MONEY” and truly people are people at all times in history (this is, in all seriousness, the point of reading classic literature).

Tragically not all of the Tales are this funny. The worst offender unfortunately occurs right at the end, with The Parson’s Tale, which is not a poem nor even a tale, but merely a 50-page sermon on sin (spoiler: Catholics think basically everything is sin). It ends with Chaucer apologizing for everything he’s written and translated in his life that isn’t appropriately religious, including for writing the naughtier of The Canterbury Tales. This is a huge bummer of a note to end on. I am biased because I am an unrepentant Catholic apostate, but I do think that the literary tradition of the West would be significantly impoverished without that section of poetry about dead friars living in Satan’s butthole.

I don’t know if it was the rainy weather or what during my trip to Maine but after reading The Silent People I decided I had not had enough depressing reading for that trip, so I started the saddest book I had brought: The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. I remembered one or two of them from high school English and the poetry survey I took in college, especially “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which I’m pretty sure is the most famous.

This collection was very good for rounding out my picture of the man behind the poems; it has a good long introduction and timeline of Owen’s life and an appendix that I think was an introduction to an earlier published collection of his works, which features a lot of excerpts from his letters. This was interesting to me just as additional historical background on World War One, but it also does tie in what was going on when specific poems were being drafted, which is pretty cool. The poems themselves are split up into three segments: the first is war poetry, which is what Owen was most famous for; the second is fragments and unfinished poems; and the third is his juvenilia/pre-war poetry, which is interesting but quite frankly not as good.

The war poems are pretty harrowing. That is, after all, the point, and they are executed brilliantly. There’s not really anything new that my sheltered ass can say about them; they are correctly and widely acknowledged as being some of the best English war poems, in a war that produced a large body of excellent poetry.

This summer, at a used bookstore in Maine, for the low low price of four dollars I picked up a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf–the one with the Old English text on the verso-side pages and the modern English translation on the recto sides–and for six months or so have been nurturing cozy visions of reading it in January, the traditional time of year when I get obsessed with medieval and ancient world literature of the frigid North, ensconced in blankets while January happens outside. I kind of originally envisioned doing this as soon as the new year kicked off but I got delayed by the enormous tome that was Menewood, but I am pleased to say that I still got this poem in in two sittings in January. I read Heaney’s magnificent introduction and the first few pages of the poem’s text itself in the bath, which was lovely, and then zipped through most of the poem on Sunday, despite several attempts to slow down and puzzle out what was going on on the left-hand pages.

The very basic storyline of Beowulf is, as many have pointed out, mainly a bonkers action movie. Works like Beowulf have a long legacy in popular culture even if it’s mostly students and scholars that read the poem itself anymore. The poem follows a big damn hero with the strength of thirty men, as he single-handedly arm-wrestles the monster Grendel to death, then fights Grendel’s mom in an epic underwater hand-to-hand combat (he uses weapons this time but he has to find an epic sword in Grendel’s mom’s lair because his regular epic sword wasn’t epic enough), and then at the end of his life he heroically battles a dragon, slightly less single-handedly this time because he needs a young sidekick to witness his epic passing and the sidekick has to do something useful in order to be worthy of being Beowulf’s sidekick. The sidekick’s name is Wiglaf, and he is not a comic relief character like “a sidekick named Wiglaf” would be these days.

The basic storyline is only sort of the point. The point is the atmosphere, and the wild world of mead-halls and war, and the heroic warrior code that makes such great songs even though it seems like such a truly awful way to live it’s amazing that so many human societies stuck with it for so long. Genealogies and gold are apparently also the point; there are a lot of both. Heaney’s somber (mostly), stately (again, mostly), Ulster-inflected translation really brings a certain weight and tone, even if I did have to look up some of the more obscure Hiberno-English and other niche English terms he uses (I had a good giggle at “hirpling,” and then looked it up; it’s a Scottish term for limping). Heaney’s introduction, which I probably didn’t give quite the studious attention I should have given that I was reading it bath (mostly for the sake of not bringing a library book into the bath; I still wasn’t done with Menewood), is tailor-made to be Relevant To My Interests, starting off with some praising of Professor Tolkien for his critical treatment of i>Beowulf as a work of art and not just a historic artifact, and working its way through Heaney’s feelings about the cultural politics of the English and Irish languages.

A notable thing about Beowulf is that although it is a Foundational Work of English Literature, and written from a Christian perspective, the story it tells takes place in the pagan long-ago over in Scandinavia. This is because “the English” didn’t really start to begin to exist as a people until about the seventh century or so when the Angles from Scandinavia and the Saxons from also Scandinavia started to blob together into the Anglo-Saxons of Angle-land, so it’s not like they popped out of nowhere. But this lack of an early English mythology, instead making do with bits and pieces of mythology from elsewhere in Europe because the ancient mythology of the British Isles was all Celtic, saddened the deeply English (and Catholic) Professor Tolkien so much that he wrote all the Lord of the Rings books about it, thus changing the face of fantastic writing forever.

Anyway, as much as I want to check out both Tolkien’s older translation and the slangy new Maria Davana Headley one, the Heaney seems to now be the definitive, “classroom standard” translation and it’s likely to stay that way for a while. The “classroom standard” bit is helped along by not only being a very good translation, but also by having little guidepost notes in the margins, and having the two languages side by side so you can pretend to be studious by gawping at them. If you can do a little actual studiousness about Old English pronunciations then this edition also allows you to put on your most stentorian Gandalf impression type of voice and read it out loud, which I certainly have not done and therefore cannot vouch if it’s nearly as fun as it sounds, it’s just an idea.

This summer I picked up a copy of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s not particularly well-known novel The Rose and the Key, and I figured it would make good spooky season reading once I’d finished rereading Carmilla. And apart from the bit where partway into the month I developed a severe case of Not Being Able To Focus On Anything, For Reasons, it was! The Rose and the Key is nowhere near being a masterpiece like Carmilla, but it’s still got some enjoyable 19th-century gothic nonsense going on. You’ve got your high-spirited but isolated young woman protagonist, some sinister religious zealots–pious in public, vicious in private–a whole host of gently ridiculous village character types, some star-crossed loves and family feuds, and, once the actual action gets rolling, that most sinister of Victorian institutions, the madhouse. (OK, most Victorian institutions are sinister, but the madhouse is a big one in gothics.)

The pacing is very nineteenth-century–slow and meandering in a way that modern writing isn’t allowed to be anymore, at least up until about halfway through, then the pace picks up considerably. The ending felt a bit rushed to tie everything up in a neat little bow. I personally didn’t mind the slow beginning, as I like meandering Victorian setups; I didn’t love the rushed ending although at that point I’d been reading the book for so long I was grateful to get to the end.

While there is some period-typical British bullshit I think that overall the themes explored here retain a certain amount of relevance–pious hypocrites using their public respect, wealth, and incomprehensible paperwork to hurt those who they ought to care for; the vicious neglect and cruelty that can be hidden within materially well-off families; the pathologization of teenage girls’ behavior and emotions; medical and especially psychiatric abuse; the way people rationalize their own terrible behavior. It’d be nice if that stuff was as dated as the way the characters talk and the way they construct their social calendars, but alas.

Overall this is the sort of mediocre novel I prefer when I’m reading mediocre novels these days, because I don’t want to read brightly colored “beach read” type things due to being a dour weirdo, but I will fully admit it’s a fairly mediocre novel. It’s not quite as wackily bad as Varney the Vampyre or The Beetle, and it’s not as genuinely good horror as Carmilla or Dracula or any of the things that have become proper literary classics, but it has its moments and I had a perfectly decent time reading it.

It’s been a while since I immersed myself in the adventures of Upper-Class Twit of the Year Bertie Wooster and his long-suffering valet Jeeves, so in the interest of knocking out a light, fast read in between some longer, heavier ones I’ve got scheduled, I settled in with the ebook of The Inimitable Jeeves, the second volume in P.G. Wodehouse’s infamous series. I may or may not have read this one before, since I’ve apparently only got one Wodehouse book tracked as read on Goodreads but I’m know I’ve read more than that, which means whichever ones I did read I read before I started tracking properly and their memory has been lost to the mists of time.

The Inimitable Jeeves is a series of short vignettes in the life of Bertie Wooster. The vignettes alternate like clockwork between ones that involve the sorry love life of Bertie’s school chum Bingo Little, and ones about something else. One of Bingo’s great character flaws is that he falls in love with about every other girl he sees, and each time is wholly convinced that he has never truly been in love before and this one is totally different from all the other ones. Bingo’s other great character flaw is his habit of continually begging for help from Bertie to sort out the various scrapes his romantinc misadventures land him in, occasionally because he thinks Bertie himself will actually be able to help, but often enough he does have the sense to directly beg that Bertie bring in Jeeves. Intertwined with his romantic escapades, Bingo is always doing things to cause his uncle to cut off his allowance, thus necessitating that most degrading of activities, getting a job. The jobs in question are almost always tutoring jobs, in which Bingo goes out to some country estate or other to teach some gentry stripling to pass his exams, and then he falls in love with the stripling’s older sister or the local parson’s daughter or whatever suitably aged girl is around, and then Bertie and Jeeves have to go visit and push someone into the lake, or what have you.

Not all of these escapades, in town or in the country, involve Bingo’s love life, however. Some of them involve Bertie’s frightful younger cousins Claude and Eustace, who go to Oxford, or at least they go to Oxford until they get expelled for pouring a beverage (there is disagreement about what kind) on one of the higher-ranking teachers (there is disagreement about which one) and get themselves shipped off to South Africa. All the country stories also seem to involve a man called Steggles, an unscrupulous bookie who induces all the gents to bet on the outcomes of various dramas of village life and then interferes shamelessly with the unwitting contestants. The fearsome Aunt Agatha makes a few appearances, one of which goes so poorly that Bertie has to visit New York for several weeks to avoid her.

As always, the adventures themselves are fairly light and silly–and certainly entertaining–but the real comic joy here is Bertie’s voice, an unfiltered torrent of extremely time-and-space-and-class-specific slang from a man with no capacity or inclination to code-switch and not a whole lot of brains. Bertie is a delightfully dim bulb who manages to express his emotions effectively, if not eloquently, with a lot of “What, what?” and “I say” and the occasional petulant “bit rummy.” For some reason I was especially tickled by his referring to London on occasion as “the old metrop” and I intend to become insufferable and start referring to Boston the same way.

Anyway, whether or not I had read this before, I’m certainly glad I read it now, and I need to not wait so many years before getting to the next one. I could probably find them all in a box set, if I looked, and then they’d be sitting on the shelf instead of on Kindle and it might remind me to read them more than one every ten years.

This spring, after some initial resistance, I jumped onto the Dracula Daily bandwagon, and as such have been reading Bram Stoker’s 1982 Gothic masterpiece Dracula in little bits and pieces, some out of order, more days than not for the past few months. Though I have read Dracula before, there was definitely something fun and different about reading it in real-time, playing with the epistolary form by waiting for emails from my dear friends about what they’d been up to, and being in a fandom/giant book club with the most insane minds on the Internet via the Dracula Daily tag on Tumblr. These past six months have been so much fun, and have really forced me to slow down and notice so many delicious and weird little things about the book that usually get lost when I just mainline the whole novel by myself in a few days with no one to discuss it with. It was, of course, also lovely watching so many new readers discover all the ways in which the novel differs from the many pop culture variations on it, and get outraged together over the ways in which movies and such have consistently done Lucy and Jonathan dirty, made Dracula and Van Helsing inexplicably sexy instead of the goofy old men they are, and, most unforgivably, always cut our “laconic,” Winchester-wielding Texas gentleman Quincey Morris.

One of the things that I think was great about this slow, discussion-filled read-through was that it ended up really highlighting not just overlook triumph of craft like the dry humor and the slow mounting terror of Jonathan and Lucy’s plotlines, but it also gave us enough room to simultaneously explore just how very much this story is rooted in being about a bunch of English people in the 1890s, and the ways in which they still are very relatable and relevant to situations and people we know today–Jonathan the young lawyer on his first real business trip, steadfastly ignoring how weird everything is because he can’t afford to be rude or fuck up; Seward the overpromoted young whiz kid making a podcast (with voices) and clinging to his emotional support lancet because he is actually a huge dork; hypercompetent Mina dealing with the guilt and terror by throwing herself into admin/secretarial tasks that keep everyone organized. Every member of Anti-Vampire Aktion is a nerdy jewel of classic literature and it would be nice if someday, someone adapted them all for screen without wholesale replacing them with completely unrecognizable simulacra.

But also: the chicken paprika recipe! Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat! The disrespectful zookeeper! Seeing from Jonathan’s violent demeanor that he was English! VAN HELSING’S CORN METAPHORS. I had forgotten how fucking funny this book is! It’s nice to read with a population that is primed to zero in on everything that could be joked about and ensure it is joked about good and hard. 10/10 would take a lit class with Tumblr University again.

In my bag o’ trashy summer reads I decided to pick what I think may have been the fluffiest book on my TBR shelf, or what at least looked like it: The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee, which I had picked up during a friend’s book cleanout last fall.

The book follows three English young persons as they go on the traditional Grand Tour sometime in seventeen-whatever-the-fuck, which is promptly derailed by a series of avoidable and less-avoidable hijinks. Our narrator is Monty, a disaster bisexual (emphasis on the “disaster”) who is very close to getting disinherited if he doesn’t get his head on straight one of these days. Monty likes partying entirely too hard, his own appearance, and his best friend Percy. Monty dislikes his physically abusive father, taking anything remotely seriously, and babies. His traveling companions are his aforementioned lifelong best friend Percy, the biracial illegitimate nephew and ward of some respectable admiral and whomst Monty has been in love with for several years, and Felicity, Monty’s bluestocking younger sister whomst is being packed off to finishing school instead of the kind of school she’d like to go to (i.e. a real one, like medical school), most of which do not admit women.

The book–and the Tour–start off with a variety of Animal House-like embarrassing escapades that could probably have been avoided if Monty wasn’t quite so committed to drowning everything his father has done to him in every drop of liquor in Europe. Things get disastrous in a somewhat less predictable way when Monty steals an innocuous-looking puzzle box from the Duke of Bourbon during a sexcapade gone wrong with the duke’s mistress in the duke’s apartments in Versailles. This sets them on a series of extremely Boy’s Own adventures that include getting ambushed by highwaymen, getting kidnapped by pirates and eventually joining them (of course), a short stint in jail, seeking a magical McGuffin in an ancient tomb, all that sort of thing. The only thing missing was a Texan. (This book might have taken place a bit early for that, actually; I think that was more of a nineteenth-century thing.)

It was extremely entertaining and while I don’t think I’d bother to give it a reread, I could certainly see myself picking up the sequel next time I wanted something very fluffy and eighteenth-century-flavored. Especially since I’ve heard the sequel has more of Felicity.

Lately I have been generally In A Weird Mood so I decided to continue my Arthuriana kick by tackling a book I have been vaguely intending to read for decades, but have been hesitant to pick up for the past 8 years or so: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. Bradley has been dead for 20 years and I acquired my copy because a friend was throwing his away, so no money has gone to Bradley (obviously) or whoever is running her estate. It’s hard to get excited about reading a book by someone who committed child abuse, even if they are dead. But The Mists of Avalon was A Really Big Deal in the world of Arthuriana and in fantasy writing generally, and until quite recently it was especially considered a really big deal specifically as a feminist work, and I wanted to see for myself what the big deal was.

And I can see why it was a big deal, because the book is magnificent. It is not fun or uplifting or girl-power-y and I no longer particularly like to go anywhere near the word “empowering,” but I don’t think it’s that in quite the way people tend to use it these days, but it is magnificent. At nearly 900 pages long, with teeny text and written entirely in a ‘80s-understanding-of-formal-Dark-Ages-style, it’s slow going for a fantasy novel by my standards–I can usually zip through 500 pages of fiction in a weekend these days if I don’t have much else to do, so 900 ought to only take three days of reading or so, right?--and it’s incredibly dark and fucked up, full of dubious ‘80s understandings of Dark Ages life and religion.

Morgaine, half-sister to King Arthur, is our protagonist but not really our hero; not only do we know she’s going to fail, but the story is predominantly an exploration of her consistently making bad choices that seemed to make sense at the time that mire her deeper and deeper into a self-created landscape of ruin and isolation as she, in short, gets everyone she’s ever loved killed, either accidentally or on purpose. Morgause, Morgaine’s aunt, is a power-hungry schemer, but also seems nice enough in her own way until she sort of wanders down the path of becoming a casual serial murderer as well. The various priestesses of Avalon become increasingly vicious, and brutal plotters against Arthur and anyone else in their way as they–quite understandably–seek to prevent the old religion from being wiped out by the Christian religion and its dedicatedly woman-hating priests.

Most of the Christians also suck, with Queen Gwenhwyfar being one of the worst–also a major viewpoint character, Gwenhwyfar is sometimes sympathetic, but is also a piously self-hating Christian fanatic. Her internal torment and self-hatred about her love for Lancelot does absolutely nothing to make her any less intolerant toward anyone else who fails to live up to the standards of sexual purity that she doesn’t live up to herself; she’s overtly nasty to anyone who follows or even tolerates any aspects of the old religion and constantly pushes Arthur to wage holy war against it; and she’s flatly bigoted against anyone with physical deformities, with apparently no idea whatsoever that this constitutes a character flaw about which she might want to at least try to keep her fucking mouth shut. But I guess when you’re the High Queen of Britain you’re allowed to just constantly insult people’s appearance and everyone around you has to consider you kind and gracious anyway? Idunno, I know the characters in this book are working off different moral codes than me but it really struck me how much all the other female characters sneak around to do evil things but Gwenhwyfar is just openly a huge bitch without provocation on a regular basis, and yet whatever other criticisms the other characters have of her, everyone seems to think she’s nice.

There are two different Merlin characters–”the Merlin of Britain” is a title here, not a name, like the Lady of the Lake–and both are advocates of a sort of “all religions are really one religion anyway” assimilationist path that sounds really tolerant and high-minded if you ignore that a) the Christians are absolutely not going to go for it and b) the practical effects of this sort of acquiescence-masquerading-as-syncretism will fall a lot harder on the women than on the men, and the Merlins, however dedicated to the Goddess they consider themselves, are still men, and can get away with more than the priestesses under Christian rule. The machinations of the Merlins and their attempts to play both sides end up driving a lot of the conflict between the forces of Avalon and the forces of Christianity. Both Merlins are very annoying, but then again, most characters in this book are annoying. It’s not a book you read to personally like anyone.

The sexual content is pretty dark and fucked up too, and it is here that it is hardest to even temporarily put aside in one’s brain that Bradley enabled her husband’s pedophilia. Parts of the book speak eloquently about the injustice of selling off teenage girls in marriage to men much older than them, and how this alienates girls from their own sexuality to the point where some characters are surprised, after many years of marriage, to discover that they have one. Lancelet, the greatest and knightliest of all of Arthur’s great knights, is tortured-ly bisexual and at one point he and Arthur and Gwenhwyfar have a threesome, which I think is supposed to be shocking, although–while I certainly found it a bit surprising that it was included in the book–it is one of the less creepy encounters in the entire 900 pages. Morgaine is nearly as obnoxiously self-serving and hypocritical in her thoughts on sex and religion as the pious adulteress Gwenhwyfar is; she is constantly drawing a distinction between the Goddess-given magical rites of sexuality and mere “animal rutting,” but the distinction doesn’t seem to have any actual criteria other than how she feels about it, and is mostly invoked based on whether or not she wants to be contemptuous about any given encounter. (IMO, Morgaine’s religious snobbery around sexuality–and, frankly, the sacramentalization of sexuality in a lot of these New Agey religions that Bradley was part of and their noble-savage-y understanding of ancient fertility cults–is more of a mirror to the Christian priests’ obsession with sexual purity than she thinks.) Morgaine, frankly, is a great protagonist because she is a fascinating psychological study in being very active and scheming but somehow never taking any responsibility for her own actions, because she is smart enough and philosophical enough to rationalize doing whatever she wants to do and then convincingly tell herself that she had no choice when it turns out badly.

Reading this book was a deeply strange experience. When I was reading it I couldn’t put it down, but frankly, often once I’d put it down I’d hesitate to pick it back up. I wish I’d read it ten years ago before we knew what we know now about its author, so that I could have just read the damn book, instead of also testing my ability to read a book as just the book when the author is a) terrible and b) safely dead. Anyway I think I’m glad I read it, even though I have mixed feelings about having found it to be such a powerful book, and I don’t think I’ll be rereading it anytime soon (or ever).

While there’s more Arthuriana to be read, the last one sitting on my TBR shelf in hard copy right now is an antique-looking edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Mort d’Arthur. According to his Wikipedia page Malory might also have been a rapist, but at least it’s unconfirmed that that’s even the right Thomas Malory. I’m getting very tired of learning things about authors.

The 69th book I read in 2021 obviously had to be a comic novel. I went with Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which has been sitting obliviously on my Kindle since I read Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog god knows how many years ago.

This classic travelogue concerns three young men of the nineteenth century–our narrator, J., and his friends George and Harris–and their dog, Montmorency, as they decide to take a two-week boating excursion up and down the Thames. Unsurprisingly for a comic novel, things go poorly and everyone makes fools of themselves. Three Men in a Boat is basically the 19th century predecessor to works like EuroTrip or the National Lampoon’s Vacation series.

There is not, per se, a plot; the trip in question is more of a structure to hang jokes upon, the structure in question being the length of the Thames. Many of the jokes don’t really have anything to do with the trip at all; our narrator continually digresses and goes on random tirades about everything from British history to additional stupid things that George, Harris, Montmorency, and himself had done at other times. The narrator’s main trait is his absolutely stunning lack of self-awareness, which works quite effectively to ensure the reader never feels too much sympathy for him and instead thoroughly enjoys his constant discomfort. (It is also the closest thing to a deep insight into the foibles of human nature that the book provides, although it might be giving it credit for more subtlety than it has to characterize it as “commentary” on the levels of lack-of-self-awareness that the human mind is capable of. It is just Jokes At J.’s Expense.)

The two biggest issues I had with the book are neither of them the author’s fault; one is simply that my cheap ebook version replaced what I assume were illustrations with odd little notations that served only to tease me that I was missing out on illustrations, and the other is that it has been just over 130 years since the book was written and I simply don’t know enough about the 1880’s English boating scene to follow half of what they’re talking about. I don’t even know much about the modern American boating scene; I’m not rich enough to be part of it.

At any rate, if you like laughing at self-absorbed Englishmen, this book should elicit many a sensible chuckle.