H G Cocks, Classified: the secret history of the personal column (2009): not at all bad, if a bit slight, inclined to generalisation about context and somewhat a bit simplistic in characterising various decades (and it does rather do conventional periodisation, but that's one way to slice up the data, after all). He's dug up some interesting stuff, it's an easy read, it's got nice vignettes and anecdotes and there's even some analysis. This isn't just one of those books doing 'look at funny stuff about the past and how weird people used to be'. And it's good to let people know that virtual relationships, or at least relationships not mediated within pre-existing communities and social networks, have a much longer history than people think and are not just a product of the internet. And that a lot of the anxieties about them go back quite a long way.
Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007). Very, very good: not just a nuanced and extensively researched insight into a relatively neglected corner of World War II history, but an examination of the role of popular culture in the construction and erosion of memory, gender and the overlooking of women's contribution, etc.
Martha Sherrill, The Buddha from Brooklyn: A Tale of Spiritual Seduction (2000) A disturbing book about how the desire to lead a more spiritually-meaningful life can lead to all sorts of disasters for individuals and communities and the problems arising when a spiritual tradition is imported from somewhere where it has deep cultural roots, to one in which it doesn't, and the misunderstandings and misinterpretations that occur. In addition, interesting on a cult-like development around a female spiritual leader.
Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008). A thick and very readable account of the late Victorian/Edwardian reformer - socialist, pacifist, early environmentalist, and above all, homophile and advocate of reformed intimate relationships.A good solid biography which does a lot of setting in context. Strongly recommended
Susan Sontag, Reborn: early diaries 1947-1964 (2009). Elliptical, sporadic, cryptic, needing quite a bit of editorial intervention by David Rieff (Sontag's son) to contextualise in editing, very much not telling a linear story of her progress from intense teenager to public intellectual - reading lists, comments on books, angst about relationships : surprisingly (perhaps) compelling as a read.
Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet: A personal history, with jigsaws (2009). The nearest thing I've ever come across to G B Stern's delightful 'rag-bag chronicles' in the way it takes random objects and obsessive interests and free associations from these and bits of personal history and anecdote and weaves them together. It's more self-consciously erudite and scholarly than Stern - even when Drabble is describing her own rather random researches into the history of jigsaws and other games and puzzles.Interesting thoughts about the attraction of patterns and apparently pointless time-filling activities.
Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (2007). This is a really excellent book - it's not (what it might have been) a simple celebratory history of a book that grew from a duplicated handout to an international phenomenon. Although it does include the well-researched history of the evolution of OBOS, it does an admirable amount of myth-busting and problematising and is a far richer offering altogether. Among other things Davis's endeavours to situate OBOS in the development of feminist (and other) theorising around the body, making a good case that it did actually have theoretical things to offer about dealing with the actual effects of being embodied in particular ways, as well as its commitment to working from the specifics of individual experience rather than a grand impersonal narrative. Davis's discussion of the migrations of OBOS is fascinating and provocative, where the spirit of the original has been retained but not bogged down by irrelevant specifics. She also strongly emphasises that there are strong local feminist traditions worldwide and a constant to and fro flow of ideas from country to country, as ideas are taken and examined and adapted or transformed. Strongly recommended.
R Proctor and L Schiebinger, eds, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008). This is a wonderful book - it's not perfect, because the whole subject is just at its beginning and things are only beginning to be thought about and defined. And in a volume of edited essays (pretty interdisciplinary) there are going to be some which resonate more than others. But it opens up new perspectives and vistas and generates 'aha' moments. It is about the opposite of epistemology: instead of how knowledge is constructed, it's about how unknowledge is constructed. So it deals both with the things that people don't know (because they're not looking or their mindset means they can't even see certain things) or that they believe wrong things about. There are several articles which deal with the ways in which 'science' is deployed to confuse scientific findings (e.g. over the risks of smoking, or on environmental issues) and the spurious appeal to 'balance' in the debate as if both sides had equal credence. And, of course, sexism is interwoven - there's the lost history of West Indian herbal abortifacients, and the convoluted knowledge/ignorance around the female orgasm. Some of the articles are dense, and some are a bit dry, but it's exceedingly worthwhile reading
Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (2007). A wonderfully rich study of the women of a particular family of the C19th Chinese literati class, who, as a result of a local culture in which female learning and cultural activity was valued, and a family tradition of the same, were respected poets, writers and calligraphers. Densely researched, yet presented in a very readable fashion. All sorts of fascinating material about women's lives and the various possibilites and constraints, the impact of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion, etc etc
Celia Robertson, Who Was Sophie?: The Two Lives of My Grandmother - Poet and Stranger (2008). The fascinating and distubring story, recounted by her granddaughter, of Joan Eason, who as a young woman had her poems published by the Hogarth Press and moved a little in the Woolf circles, became a friend of Naomi Mitchison, but ended up as not quite a bag lady after marriage, emigration to Australia, the break-up of her marriage, return to the UK and a period in mental institutions, estrangement from her family for many years etc. Her long published poem. 'Amber Innocent' is included in full in this volume (at one point she had a huge bonfire of her manuscripts).
Kitty Hauser, Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (2008): can see why this book has been so praised by reviewers, because it does that thing of an individual life as insight into elements of the person's social, cultural, intellectual and temporal context rather well.Though I am infuriated by the lack of proper footnotes. I would also have liked a bit more attention to gender issues.
Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008): an intriguing if rather dense read: rather heavier going than Mendlesohn's critical thought in action in her book on Diana Wynne Jones, which I much enjoyed.
So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (2008) - mostly from the latter part of her life, and from a fairly small number of correspondents. The rather idiosyncratic arrangement by correspondent rather than chronology means we keep circling back to various episodes, which is somehow a bit disconcerting. Also, I thought we could do with rather more editorial annotation. But still well worth reading.
***
Fiction (mostly)
A S Byatt, The Children's Book (2009): a lovely, lovely rich fruitcake of a book, though one that is so dense and layered and full of resonances between different parts of the story that the first read is going to miss a lot. A compelling narrative, even though it moves across such a large cast of characters. A few minor quibbles with historical details that probably no-one else would notice,
but Byatt gets it pretty much right - the quibbles are very minor in contrast to what is well done and effective and authentic for period.
D E Stevenson, Miss Buncle's Book (1934). I think in my youth I read several of Stevenson's books (the titles elude me...) This was charming and amusing - a spinster in A Typical Literary English Village turns to writing a novel, rather than keeping chickens, when in economic straits. Wackiness ensues...
Several really outstanding works of fantasy: Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest, Jo Walton's Lifelode and Sarah Monette's Corambis (brings this series to a very satisfactory conclusion) were very different (all 2009), but all of them I belted through under narrative compulsion and now need to re-read for all the things I missed or the significance of which I missed the first time through Mike Carey's Thicker Than Water (2009) keeps up the standard of the previous Felix Castor novels and ratcheted up the complications and thickened the worldbuilding considerably.
Marilynne Robinson, Home (2008). Asolutely wonderful: grabbed me just as much as Gilead did: Robinson is thoroughly excellent at making very ordinary things seem compelling and very small things full of deep pregnant significance. Okay, there is one final plot twist which is not going to come as a surprise to anyone who has read Gilead, although it is a revelation to Glory.
Jo Walton, Half a Crown (2008). A wonderful conclusion to this superb trilogy: the extrapolation of what 1960 might have been like was spot-on. Even if the ending was, relatively, happy, it came at high cost, and, although the actions of the central characters were important, they were happening against a background in which popular feeling against the system did seem to be emerging, in a way that seemed historically very plausible indeed. All sorts of small clever touches.
H G Cocks, Classified: the secret history of the personal column (2009): not at all bad, if a bit slight, inclined to generalisation about context and somewhat a bit simplistic in characterising various decades (and it does rather do conventional periodisation, but that's one way to slice up the data, after all). He's dug up some interesting stuff, it's an easy read, it's got nice vignettes and anecdotes and there's even some analysis. This isn't just one of those books doing 'look at funny stuff about the past and how weird people used to be'. And it's good to let people know that virtual relationships, or at least relationships not mediated within pre-existing communities and social networks, have a much longer history than people think and are not just a product of the internet. And that a lot of the anxieties about them go back quite a long way.
