World Citizen Challenge | Fizzy Thoughts

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2009 Challenges – the wrap-up post

30 December 2009

This year I signed up for three challenges. Oh wait, no…I signed up for four, but after a few pages of Sookie, I backed out of the Sookie Stackhouse Challenge. But the other three…those I finished.

Way back in January I signed up for Eva’s World Citizen Challenge. I stated I was going for my major (read five books in three categories). At first, I thought I had totally blown it on this one, but looking back over the books I read this year, I discovered some that actually worked for the challenge (although I might be stretching it a bit). However, my final list looks vastly different from the original list.

What I said I would read:

Politics:
Making War to Keep Peace: Trials and Errors in American Foreign Policy from Kuwait to Baghdad, Jeanne Kirkpatrick

History:
Queen Isabella, Alison Weir
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir

Memoir (travel writing):
Shadow of the Silk Road, Colin Thubron
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown, Paul Theroux

What I really read:

History:
Eleanor of Aquitaine
The Widow Clicquot

Economics:
Freakonomics

Culture/Sociology:
True Pleasures

Autobiography:
A London Child of the 1870s
Lipstick Jihad

I also committed to Dewey’s Books Challenge, which I plowed right through:

And finally, I participated in Carl’s R.I.P. Challenge, which was so much fun that I ended up reading six books.

In 2010 (yegads, I can’t believe it’s the end of a decade!) I’m looking forward to the Women Unbound Reading Challenge (actually, I’ve already read a few for this one…I love this challenge!) and the South Asian Author Challenge. Two or three challenges is about my limit, so I might join another one at some point, but unlike some of you all, I’m not going challenge crazy.

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A London Child of the 1870s

22 December 2009

A London Child of the 1870s
Molly Hughes
200 pages
First published 1934

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For the FTC, because you’re so special: I bought this book from Persephone Books…you should check them out, as they are Very Cool.

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The Persephone blurb:
‘We were just an ordinary, suburban, Victorian family, undistinguished ourselves and unacquainted with distinguished people.’ Thus Molly Hughes in one of the great classics of autobiography, A London Child of the 1870s (1934) in which she describes her everyday life in a semidetached house in Islington as the youngest of a large, characterful family. On first reading, writes Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, A London Child seemed ‘the most perfect and moving record of ordinary life in English’ and when he re-read it twenty years later ‘Molly’s book seems to me more painful now than it did when I first read it, but still finer as writing. Here is an ordinary life rendered truly, and joyfully, with a voice at once so self-abnegating yet so gay and funny and precise that we are reminded, in the end, of the one truth worth remembering, that there are no ordinary lives.’ As Adam Gopnik says, it is Molly’s pictures of everyday life that most stick in the mind: traveling by bus to the West End, making toffee in the afternoon, walking to St Paul’s on Christmas Day…

This book provides a glimpse into a young girl’s life in the 1870s, a life in many ways vastly different from our own. While Molly’s older brothers all went to school, she stayed home. Yet, Molly has no regrets…she describes her childhood as full of joy, filled with imagination and amusements. It’s interesting to read how Molly and her mom just accepted her father’s dictates about what was and wasn’t proper for Molly. Despite her mother’s untraditional upbringing, she was still fairly traditional when it came to her own daughter.

The introduction by Adam Gopnik is also fascinating, as he writes about his own history with this book and gives some insight into what happened to Molly after the book ended.

While this autobiography doesn’t tell of a famous person’s famous escapades (the reason I usually avoid autobiographies), it does give the reader a glimpse into middle class life in the 1870s. If you’re at all interested in history, this is good stuff. And since this is an autobiography, and it’s historical, and it’s set in London, I am counting it towards Eva’s World Citizen Challenge (for which I really need to figure out where I stand). I’m also counting it towards the Women Unbound Reading Challenge. There may not be a whole lot of unbound-edness happening, but it does offer some contrasting experiences.

unbound2smaller A London Child of the 1870s

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Eleanor of Aquitaine

17 January 2009

Eleanor of Aquitaine

Alison Weir

1999

346 pages

I finished Eleanor. Yay me.

This book really should have been titled Eleanor, who lived in the Middle Ages and who was wife of Louis, King of France, and then wife of Henry II, king of England, and mom to lots of kids, but especially Henry, the Young King who never got to be king, and Richard the Lion-hearted, and King John. Because let’s face it. She may have been an important woman, but there’s not a whole lot in the historical record about her (other than she endowed this abbey and she begatted that kid and she bought some tapestries). So her story could have been told in oh, about 50 pages. The rest is just filler, in the form of men. Most especially men named Henry and Geoffrey and John. I kid you not. There were so many Geoffrey’s running around it was incestuous.

So big disappointment. I was all excited to read about a strong female historical figure. Unfortunately, I mostly got dead white men. And much as George W. would prolly disagree, dead white men do not good history make. Oh…excuse me…my politics are showing.

To further confuse matters and make the story even more stultifying, most of the characters seemed to be distantly related. An example:

Eleanor married Louis, king of France. Louis already had two daughters from a prior marriage. Eleanor gave him two more.
They got divorced, for many possible reasons. The official version was that they were 4th cousins. A fact they conveniently forgot when they got married.
So then Eleanor married Henry, future king of England. And also her cousin. Third, I think. And Louis remarried, too. I forget who. I don’t think they were cousins, although there’s a good chance they were. There seemed to be a lot of that going on.
They all had more kids.
And then one of Louis’ daughters gets engaged to one of Eleanor’s sons.
They would have gotten married, except King Henry had an affair with her and she had a kid. Or two.

There’s a whole lot of ick going on there. Oh, and I almost forgot! There’s a rumor that Eleanor had an affair with Geoffrey (Henry’s dad Geoffrey. Not to be confused with Henry’s brother Geoffrey. Or Henry and Eleanor’s son Henry. Or Henry’s illegitimate son, also named Geoffrey.) before they were married. She did her future father-in-law. As I said, a whole lot of ick going on. Although I think Henry bonking (and impregnating) his son’s fiancee takes the cake.

However, according to the book, they did all celebrate Christmas happily together on many an occasion. Details of the celebration were not provided. I shudder to imagine.

I read this for the World Citizen Challenge. And boy do I feel wordly. If anyone has a less incestuous recommendation for my next history selection, I am open to suggestions.

Seriously. Because I can be serious, you know. Well, almost. This is one of those typically staid and serious history books that I try to avoid. The kind that give history a bad rap and make people dread the subject. If you like your history served up with a side of ivory tower seriousness, then this is the book for you. If you’re more of a historical fiction, Maus taught me more than I ever learned in high school type of learner, than skip this baby.