Category: reviews

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Historical Fiction Sites

I want to write soon about Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games but it is taking me a long time to finish it, not because I am not enjoying it, but because it is so wonderful that I am savouring it slowly, like a box of Vosges truffles that you eat one a night for fear they’ll be gone too soon. So in the meantime, I thought I would list a few of the websites discussing historical fiction that I have found and liked over the past few months. I am doing this because many of these I did *not* find through a simple google search, but rather by tracking my way through a forest of links.

The first place to start is the Historical Novel Society. They publish reviews of recent historical novels (in print, for members) and have a twice yearly magazine. They also hold a yearly conference that seems to move between the States and the UK.

My favourite site for historical fiction, however, is the blog, Reading the Past, which is maintained by HNS reviewing stawart, Sarah Johnson. She is a university librarian with a knowledge of historical fiction that is both deep and wide-ranging, and I have spent many fun hours digging through her archives. She keeps track of reviews, deals, book covers, gossip, and much more.

I am intrigued by another blog, C.W. Gortner’s Historical Boys, which plans to concentrate on men who write historical novels. I am enjoying his author interviews so far. And how can I resist the blog of someone who has written a novel about Juana la Loca? What a wonderful figure to explore.

Historical Fiction is a bulletin board/web forum whose members discuss historical novels about all times and places. They also have a section where they post reviews. I haven’t spent much time here, but I like the breadth of what they talk about.

That’s probably enough for today.

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What I’m reading now

Doris Lessing

I woke up to good news this morning.

By coincidence, I recently finished rereading a couple of my favourite novels by Lessing, so I am vividly aware of all the reasons why this Nobel prize is so richly deserved. One of these was the volumes that make up The Diaries of Jane Somers, the tales that Lessing famously first submitted under a pseudonym to her usual publishers. They rejected it. It’s a story that, depending on temperament, either cheers or depresses beginning novelists. Rereading the novel as I did, right after The Golden Notebook, it is impossible not to recognize it as Lessing’s work. The relationship between Jane and Joyce, her boss at the shiny upscale magazine where they both work, in the Diaries mirrors and develops that of Ella with her magazine boss, Patricia Brent in the Golden Notebook. They’re both books about women, about how women work and love and tend friendship and despair and grow.

But by saying Lessing writes books about women, and that is why I love her, is putting her in a box too small to hold her. The Golden Notebook is a perfect example of how she evades simple characterization. It is a great feminist novel, and has been hailed as such. It is also a novel about Africa, a novel about mental illness, a novel about post-war disillusionment with Communism. Any of these alone would have been a triumph. But all of these subjects that make up the preoccupations of Anna Wulf are married to an exciting experiment in form, the five notebooks and the novella, “Free Women,” through which Anna attempts to knit back together the fragments of her shattered self, to revision herself as an individual living in society.

Som of the reports of Lessing’s prize are dwelling on her underwhelmed, to say the least, reaction to the honour, like this report from the Associated Press. But I thought this part was great:

Lessing brightened when a reporter asked whether the Nobel would generate interest in her work.
“I’m very pleased if I get some new readers,” she said. “Yes, that’s very nice, I hadn’t thought of that.”

It’s about the books and the readers, not the prize. I like Doris Lessing.