cattytrona's reviews
205 reviews

Time in a Red Coat by George Mackay Brown

slow-paced

3.0

war as technology, technology as history, history as ever growing up behind you, from vague fairytale shapes to a detail orientated moment in a proper-nounéd place. really interesting, enjoyed the reveal of what it was doing, how it was moving through time. but man, was it hard going sometimes. really difficult to pick up.
the very end reminded me a little bit of the victoria mccandless section in poor things - fantasy as a way to understand the realities of a difficult woman’s difficult life, in a time when that language had to lack? not sure. might be a delusional link to draw.
really interesting museum portrayal, if i come back to this, it may be for that.

The Antiquary by Walter Scott, Walter Scott

3.0

i really struggled to find a good synopsis before reading, and that might be because takes a while for the plot to emerge — although luckily there’s a good succession of dramatic events to string you along until then — but when the book reveals its operation in the second half, it picks up and makes for a lot of fun drama. in general, this is a lot more fun than my brief dalliances with scott allowed me to imagine. it’s probablt most held back by length, an occasional lack of clarity, and the fact that it predates a lot of similar genre works, which make it feel more predictable than it was maybe intended to be. still, i liked it, and i really would recommend it, particularly for people who are curious about scott but intimidated by like, the history of waverley or the length of ivanhoe. both things i’m guilty of, but feel better able to cope with now.

for what it’s worth, the plot is something like: an antiquary with a musty outside (but a heart of gold) and a young man of mysterious origins meet in a coach, and the latter is inducted into the former’s society upon reaching their destination, falling into company with a range of characters, including a beautiful young love interest, a hotheaded soldier, a dying earl, a german conman, and the world’s best beggar, and navigating such episodic adventures as a duel, a storm, a treasure hunt, the last secret of an old woman, daytrips.

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey

4.0

i like how this series is structured around discovering things. like every few pages, a revelation, a (re)discovery. it’s fun. it’s fun to see a world’s history open up like this, particularly when that history is sometimes today’s history and knowledge (you can’t just go to strange planets guys! they have atmospheres!)

there’s nothing quite as compelling in terms of character work as lessa’s emergence in the first book, but the politics is more compelling. it is a shame how lessa is kind of defanged and turned into the ultimate weyrwife in this one, but i guess it wasn’t so much her story as in the first book, so i chose to imagine she’s still being rude off-screen whilst we’re following robinton or whoever. nothing against robinton, i think it’s good how the series is like ‘look at all these hot young dragon riders. now here’s a normal semi-alcoholic old man as a major player’

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

4.0

i found this really powerful for two thirds: made me feel different, awake, ready to change my relationship with the world, i think. and then the weather changed, and it got greyer, and i only read the last part, rather than feeling it. it's a book that's meant to be read outside, i think.
and that doesn't mean the last part was bad, i was just in a different frame of mind reading it, and so it didn't work the same way. there's something quite exciting about that: i know, knew even as i was reading it, that on a reread, my experience would be different, that different moments and messages and strands would resonate. that's cool, right. a finite book creating a very different experience each time. on this read, i really loved the chapter about clearing the pond, it made me think about what i want from where i live, how i want the outdoors around me to be.

Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark

3.0

• made me realise how little i know about the lord lucan case, in that it's just become a sort of phrase without an etymology, a shorthand for mysterious goings on.
• always surreal to read a 21st century spark. what do you mean 'laptop computer'?
• i'm not sure i'm convinced by myself on this, but if i wanted to be provocative in a room full of scottish literature scholars, i might say something like "there's major sparks and there's minor sparks. an example of a major spark is the prime of miss jean brodie, and an example of a minor spark is literally any of her other novels." it's just that prime is really powerful in its ellisions, jumps and gaps, whereas in her other novels, that style consistently makes me feel like i missed something, am scrambling a bit to keep up.

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

4.0

really vibrant, entertaining, and shocking as a historical document. i don’t know if i’d ever grasped, for all the secondary school german history i did on the wars, how nazism was just in everyday life like that. that it was a political stance and a visible movement. this book makes it feel significantly more recognisable to me, where history and horror had sort of abstracted it into something beyond conception.
reading this so soon after minor detail also felt notable, as novels that are also personal accounts of lived life alongside oppressor states. two important books.

Half-Life of a Stolen Sister by Rachel Cantor

3.0

this is the story of the brontës, told pretty straightforwardly in content, except that it’s often in funny little sections and switches perspective and form a lot — oh, and is sort of set in the modern day. 
which worked for me! i found the americanisms jarring, and the updated book titles particularly unnecessary, but apart from that, i liked the modern resetting. and i would have liked it less if it was more literal, less experimental. but as it was, i felt it captured sort of how the brontës exist. they’re forever being brought into the modern world when evoked in discussions of feminism and femininity and relatability, and ultimately because they’re being read/talked about/written in the present. but they are historic figures, and cannot be totally here, and so this story still keeps them at arms length, sat in a nebulous past, by how they speak and what they wear.

the form leads to vagueness about characters at times, holes in their lives and development, some poeticism instead of motivation, but again, i think there’s something admirable in that, in this instance, because they’re not characters, they were real, and i think the vagueness owns up to a failure to be able to know them fully now, a lack in the archive and emotional, friendly knowledge too.
a couple of criticisms, still:

1. aforementioned americanisms although i am british and cantor’s american, so the extra friction they cause is probably unintentional.
2. lack of real engagement with female connection outside of family members. wasn’t nell a lifelong friend, knew emily and anne, wrote charlotte letters constantly from when they met at school, was on the trip when anne died? wasn’t elizabeth gaskell an important literary connection for charlotte and key myth maker, shaping how we know the family today? i’m not a big brontë person, so maybe i’m off about this, but feels like rewriting history to refocus so much of charlotte’s later life on love, and to reduce nell to a gossip-receiver and perhaps rival, and give gaskell’s personal knowledge to anonymous men. but again, holes.
3. given the brontës were responsible for some all-timer metaphors, there’s a lack of memorable language and image work in here, for me.
4. found the very last moment of the book a bit perplexing? just felt like an odd theme to reemphasise at that point, although i appreciate it’s making the point that it’s death all the way down, all the way through.

as a final note, i thought the deaths were really well written and rendered in this — which is lucky because they truly keep coming

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

3.0

sent a message this morning when i was about 40% through (am currently on holiday, so finishing this in two days is not necessarily a comment on the book in any direction), which read, im struggling to see how this is going to shape into a plot beyond ‘navigating life is tricky for smart hot women’. i still think i stand by that summary, although i’d maybe add the detail that they’re also straight-coded skinny women, because the latter in particular becomes clearly clarified. most of the book is just verbs or amateur verso. the small actions and big conversations of the book do eventually erupt into a sort of emotional whirl climax which i found both recognisable and striking, and which give the plot its conclusion and therefore retroactively its form, but i wasn’t sold by the resolution enough to forgive it its earlier dawdling. 

i think i’ll come back to that. i picked up the book - my first rooney - because i heard it did emails, and i really did like how it was so conscious of the digital as a material part of navigating both the physical and intellectual world. it’s pretty unusual to me to read something which so specifically portrays spaces and ways of being i know: reading annie ernaux essays online and tapping social media icons and henry james and google maps. which is to say that i am also a pretentious english graduate in my 20s living in broadly the same part of the world.

but which isn’t to say the novel completely captures my life. there are constantly these maddeningly frank conversations - and i mean that jokingly literally, in that i feel that if i were to have a single talk like any of these, i would go instantly mad, like i’d just stared at a cthulhu, bc i am dramatically unused to that level of real chat in everyday life. the way these characters talk is so alien to me. it’s tiring and people don’t like it! — which at least the book does recognise. but so much of the text is this, in dialogue or email, and it becomes a bit numbing after a certain point. it’s particularly jarring when one of the characters is criticised for not being a sharer, when every discussions anyone ever has — him included — is a dmc. i think this is a good, interesting book, and the 3 star rating is merely a signal to myself not to rush to reread, and this is mostly why i’m warning myself off: because to get to the truths and observations that matter and resonate, you have to read through so much dull, deep sharing.

my love life also looks nothing like these romances, which is fine. in a moment where there’s so much doom around even straight relationships, where discussion around love is so often reduced down to tropes, and graphs showing rising misogyny and declining meet cutes, it’s nice to read romance in the shitty modern world given serious, largely-realistic representation. altho i did have to laugh at myself bc i caught myself being a bit shocked at the fact sex was being very clearly and coolly depicted, and then realised it was because all the other romance forward books i’ve read recently have been victorian at the latest. i am not anti sex scene i am just momentarily poisoned by historic morals as i catch up with the entire literary canon sorry!!

rooney’s prose is largely boring, but always effective, and the novel is really well written and communicated. there’s stuff i really admire in it, like how dialogue gets jammed together all in one paragraph - because conversation does often function as one single unrolling piece. i also liked the distance between the characters and the narrator, the way they’re often observed - or even put behind a closed door - with only noise or expression, external signs, for the narrator to supply, to puzzle out who they are. on the one hand, it does lead to those unimaginable convos, bc frank expression is the only way to regularly get into character heads, but on the other hand, hooray for having a narrator with a presence! henry james would be pleased!

final note on the ending

altho i do admire the friendship climax it builds to, it’s so brief, easily resolved, and smoothed over by the men, before everything reverts to perfect domestic harmony. who are these men? how are they so dreamy and empath coded? i understand men can be good, and right for women sometimes, and stuff, but god it felt so tidy, so conservative. so millennial, in some ways, in that you can sense that rooney, or her characters, have aged into idealising settling down. i’m a few years younger than her, and also not really a sally rooney type, for all that i did english and have brown hair and a fringe, and so it read as unconvincing and a little cowardly to me, for it all to work out

Marriage by Susan Ferrier

4.0

lady emily you will always be famous!! (this is obvi a wry joke, given she's a supporting character in a forgotten novel, but it's also indivative of a great tragedy, in that i've never met a character more worthy of being played in a tv drama adaption by an up-and-coming english actress who in 10ish years will have settled into a mildly mainstream hollywood career, in which marriage (bbc) is nought but a random footnote for her most committed fans. does this sentence make sense? tough)

ferrier is kind of an astoundingly readable writer - and you never feel it more than in the one chapter written by her friend, where the pace slows right down. but most of the book flies by, in a way which belies the time that's passed between writing and reading, because it reads so well. sure, there are tangents into tastes and philosophies of the moment, but if you're open to a little skimming, there's no impediment there.

marriage is not really a romance, which the austen comparisons unfortunately force expectation of - even though that is to ignore the secondary nature of the romance in, like, mansfield park. but i think the novel's just as interesting (if less transportive, sweeping) for its ironic disinterest in marriage plots. it's about marriage, not just weddings, and all that comes with and after it: affection, boredom, household management, regret, children, family, death, tragedy. and all from the perspective of women, in a way that's probably more radical than today can give it credit for. there's also something cool in the structure, and how time is taken out of the plot proceedings to be recieved into the rooms of various marriages, not least because the brief, satirical swings into random lives and loves seems to mimic the function of women's social lives at the time: it's all family, with only these fleeting visits into other houses to set templates or form ideas of what relationships might be.

not a life-changing book, a low four stars, but enjoyable. as much worth time and study as several more prominent classics

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith

4.0

an interesting tour of highsmith’s writing, in both verb and noun senses of the word. does a really good job of breaking down the stages of a story. have notes i want to go back over