The Sleepless Reader

A disclaimer that Lyndsey (@teadevotee) is a friend from my early book blogging days, and one of the few bloggers I actually met in person. So please don’t think me biased if I say this was a great book, both as a biography of one of the most prominent British suffragettes, and a brief history of the movement itself.

As Lyndsey pointed out, Lady Constance was an unlikely suffragette – a top-echelon aristocrat, introvert, devoted to family and mother, for whom she sacrificed a budding career. Her path towards becoming a militant suffragette is remarkable and, even after finishing the book, still a mystery.

Lady Constance is not an easy person to understand, so I enjoyed the parts where Lyndsey explored her contradictions, intentions, tendency towards martyrdom and obsession, and relationships with the people around her. The book gives you the facts, and asks you to look at them from different perspectives. For instance, Lady Constance disguised herself as a working-class suffragette to experience what prison was like for women that didn’t receive special treatment because of their class. She paid dearly for that experience… but did she do it to make a point about class, or to prove herself to the movement’s larger-than-life leaders?

The history of the British suffrage movement in general is fascinating and led to hours spent on Wikipedia. (Do you know the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette? Now I do!) The description of the movement’s escalation of violence, is especially relevant considering ongoing discussions about terrorism, and its causes.

If I met Lyndsey again for tea and waffles I’d shower her with questions, but the one that’s still haunting me days after finishing the book is: what do you think would’ve happened to the suffragette movement and its cause if World War I hadn’t happened?

Any good recommendations on the women’s suffrage? 

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Other thoughts: Fingers and Prose

Sweetland is the story of a 70-year-old man resisting the resettlement of the island where his family has lived for 12 generations. At the start of the book he’s one of the only two people who still hasn’t signed the very profitable deal to leave the island. There’s major pressure from his neighbors to take the money because it’s a “all or none” deal and he starts being a victim of pranks and anonymous threats.

I’ve a weak spot for novels set in remote islands. Newfoundland seems a fertile ground for them (Latitudes of Melt, The Shipping News, An Orange from Portugal) so it’s no wonder that my favorite thing about this book was its sense of setting: the isolation, the cold, the claustrophobic community life, the inevitability of a dying life style.

I’m also sure that when thinking about it in the future I’ll also remember that selfish feeling of being upset because the author didn’t take the story where you wanted it to go! #readersproblems

It’s a slow book that ends up not being so much about the relocation as about loss, getting old, community and ties to the land. I didn’t really connect a lot with the characters but was interested in knowing where their stories led. There’s this mixture of humor and tragedy in the writing that make you unsure whether they’ll get a happy ending or not. (Books like that make me a bit anxious, but maybe that’s a good thing?).

On the audio, John Lee has a very particular intonation that, although interesting, is distracting. He uses it in all characters, even if they have distinct voices, so it becomes very difficult to forget there’s such a thing as a narrator.

Overall an enjoyable book about a place I’m curious about, but not an Armchair Audies winner. I can see it turned into a movie soon!

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Other thoughts: largehearted boy, buried in print, Becky’s Books, Feminist Mexican Reads,  A Bookworm’s Works, Sophisticated Dorkiness, Lindy Reads and Reviews,

Happy 25 April everyone! Day of Freedom, of the Carnation Revolution, the end of a 50-year dictatorship and colonialism. I wish I was in Lisbon right now, walking down the Avenue, singing with the crowd.

Reading wise, for the last few days I’ve been totally emerged in Antonia Fraser’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII. I keep forgetting how much I enjoy well-written, chunky biographies of women in history (Juliet Barker’s The Brontës is another great one).

Recently finished listening to The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece by Jonathan Harr, also a non-fiction on another favorite topic: art history, restoring, forgery and detectiving. It was a quick listen and interesting enough, but more suited for a long magazine article.

Then immediately started listening to the last title in my Armchair Audies category – Little Big Man by Thomas Berger (apparently there’s a Dustin Hoffman film adaptation?). I wasn’t too excited because it’s 20 HOURS LONG and in a meh genre  – western – but it’s also a satire and it’s turning out to be pretty funny. In a strange way it reminds me of Barbara Pym and Dorothy Whipple.

That’s it. What about you, reading anything interesting?