I'm reading the Memoirs of Lady Trent
Jul. 13th, 2019 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyDragon Naturalist.
Interesting setting there - it's basically Victorian England but all the country and language names are different, as are the months, and I think everybody's Jewish. Or, more accurately, a great many characters from her home country have names out of the Old Testament (including, notably, the eventual queen Miriam) and whenever we get a detail of their religion and how it interacts with culture or diet I think we're supposed to think "Jewish" instead of "Christian" or "Ancient Rome" or whatever. (Very specifically, they don't eat pork and she's much more revolted by accidentally eating pork than by eating insects for months on end. Also, the author specifically states that she sits shiva to mourn a death, which would seem to be a telling quote. However, our main characters are none of them terribly religious, so we don't get much in the way of specific details, and actual scriptures cited bear only a passing resemblance to real world ones... that, or my knowledge of the Bible is even scantier than I thought.)
Also, their mysterious ancient civilization (think "Egypt") was worldwide, while the Ancient Egyptians mostly stayed in Egypt. It's not clear how much their map resembles our map, but this mysterious ancient civilization has outposts in the equivalent of the Americas, in Asia, in Oceania, in Africa, in the Middle East, and throughout Europe. (Question to be left for the reader: did they have the equivalent of Columbus, or did Old and New World analogs always know about each other after the fall of this mysterious ancient civilization?) And it's left quite an impact on folklore and religion, though nobody really knows who the heck these people were or why they fell so rapidly.
These books have some very slow-moving plots, as you might expect from travel memoirs. International politics do eventually catch up with her in every last one, but they take their sweet time, and her dramatic discoveries are more likely to be "Dear God, I've pissed everybody off in this strange foreign village by being totally incompetent and unbearably rude!" than "My goodness, here is this amazing dragon!" - though she does discover something about dragons AND about the mysterious ancient civilization in each and every book. (And usually something about modern geopolitics, though she does seem to try very hard not to.)
Indeed, even after she discovers in book 5 what has become increasingly obvious to the reader, that the ancient civilization did not merely worship dragon-headed gods but was actually composed of dragon-headed people, and they still exist (obviously, or what the hell was the point of building up to this?), she spends the next month or so... tending their yaks.
It's all "AAAH! I'm surrounded by actual dragon-headed people!" for a few minutes and then "Tend the yaks, get some vocabulary, tend the yaks, wonder how they trained their yak-herding dragons, hide from the other dragon-headed people who are visiting the village, make a conclusion about their draconic society, tend the yaks."
I enjoyed this series quite a bit, which is why I'm nearly at the end. If you don't enjoy slow-moving books written roughly in the style of a Victorian travel memoir, though, don't waste your time.
Interesting setting there - it's basically Victorian England but all the country and language names are different, as are the months, and I think everybody's Jewish. Or, more accurately, a great many characters from her home country have names out of the Old Testament (including, notably, the eventual queen Miriam) and whenever we get a detail of their religion and how it interacts with culture or diet I think we're supposed to think "Jewish" instead of "Christian" or "Ancient Rome" or whatever. (Very specifically, they don't eat pork and she's much more revolted by accidentally eating pork than by eating insects for months on end. Also, the author specifically states that she sits shiva to mourn a death, which would seem to be a telling quote. However, our main characters are none of them terribly religious, so we don't get much in the way of specific details, and actual scriptures cited bear only a passing resemblance to real world ones... that, or my knowledge of the Bible is even scantier than I thought.)
Also, their mysterious ancient civilization (think "Egypt") was worldwide, while the Ancient Egyptians mostly stayed in Egypt. It's not clear how much their map resembles our map, but this mysterious ancient civilization has outposts in the equivalent of the Americas, in Asia, in Oceania, in Africa, in the Middle East, and throughout Europe. (Question to be left for the reader: did they have the equivalent of Columbus, or did Old and New World analogs always know about each other after the fall of this mysterious ancient civilization?) And it's left quite an impact on folklore and religion, though nobody really knows who the heck these people were or why they fell so rapidly.
These books have some very slow-moving plots, as you might expect from travel memoirs. International politics do eventually catch up with her in every last one, but they take their sweet time, and her dramatic discoveries are more likely to be "Dear God, I've pissed everybody off in this strange foreign village by being totally incompetent and unbearably rude!" than "My goodness, here is this amazing dragon!" - though she does discover something about dragons AND about the mysterious ancient civilization in each and every book. (And usually something about modern geopolitics, though she does seem to try very hard not to.)
Indeed, even after she discovers in book 5 what has become increasingly obvious to the reader, that the ancient civilization did not merely worship dragon-headed gods but was actually composed of dragon-headed people, and they still exist (obviously, or what the hell was the point of building up to this?), she spends the next month or so... tending their yaks.
It's all "AAAH! I'm surrounded by actual dragon-headed people!" for a few minutes and then "Tend the yaks, get some vocabulary, tend the yaks, wonder how they trained their yak-herding dragons, hide from the other dragon-headed people who are visiting the village, make a conclusion about their draconic society, tend the yaks."
I enjoyed this series quite a bit, which is why I'm nearly at the end. If you don't enjoy slow-moving books written roughly in the style of a Victorian travel memoir, though, don't waste your time.
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Date: 2019-07-14 05:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 05:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 07:02 am (UTC)I never imagined that as a child, re-reading the same few* books again and again.
* for a specific, highly unusual definition of "few", natch. Actually, I don't think there's been any point in my memory** when I didn't have easy access to well over 300 books specifically geared to my age, reading level, and interests, and typically much more than that. But when I say "few" I mean "I read all of them at least twice already".
** except when I was literally stuck in school or on the bus or on a plane or in a foreign country. Then I had less than 300 books at my disposal.
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Date: 2019-07-14 07:13 am (UTC)Yes, Segulism is Not!Judaism, vs. the more common Not!Christianity in fantasy. I forget if there are any religions that aren't analogous to a Jewish sect.
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Date: 2019-07-14 07:20 am (UTC)Though I'll note that Segulism is a missionary religion, quite unlike contemporary Judaism. That's one radical departure from analogy, though I suppose it has its precedent in some books of the Bible.
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Date: 2019-07-14 11:43 am (UTC)Note on the "this is based on Judaism rather than Christianity," the dates the narrator uses for her introductions etc. appear to be from Hillel's Hebrew calendar, and IIRC put the events within around a century of the real-world time they were written. However, it's long enough since I read them that I'm not sure whether it's a century earlier than us (which fits the quasi-Victorianness) or a century later. (I'm writing this comment in 5779.)
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Date: 2019-07-14 05:01 pm (UTC)I did notice the year dates, but I wasn't sure how much weight to put on them compared to real-world Jewish calendar years.
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Date: 2019-07-14 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2019-07-14 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 06:40 pm (UTC)Although this sentence made me laugh:
It's all "AAAH! I'm surrounded by actual dragon-headed people!" for a few minutes and then "Tend the yaks, get some vocabulary, tend the yaks, wonder how they trained their yak-herding dragons, hide from the other dragon-headed people who are visiting the village, make a conclusion about their draconic society, tend the yaks."
LOL!
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Date: 2019-07-14 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-15 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-15 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-15 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-15 02:47 am (UTC)Greenie — An unfortunate incident with a dove — My obsession with wings — My family — The influence of Sir Richard Edgeworth
When I was seven, I found a sparkling lying dead on a bench at the edge of the woods which formed the back boundary of our garden, that the groundskeeper had not yet cleared away. With much excitement, I brought it for my mother to see, but by the time I reached her it had mostly collapsed into ash in my hands. Mama exclaimed in distaste and sent me to wash.
Our cook, a tall and gangly woman who nonetheless produced the most amazing soups and soufflés (thus putting the lie to the notion that one cannot trust a slender cook) was the one who showed me the secret of preserving sparklings after death. She kept one on her dresser top, which she brought out for me to see when I arrived in her kitchen, much cast down from the loss of the sparkling and from my mother’s chastisement. “However did you keep it?” I asked her, wiping away my tears. “Mine fell all to pieces.”
“Vinegar,” she said, and that one word set me upon the path that led to where I stand today.
If found soon enough after death, a sparkling (as many of the readers of this volume no doubt know) may be preserved by embalming it in vinegar. I sailed forth into our gardens in determined search, a jar of vinegar crammed into one of my dress pockets so the skirt hung all askew. The first one I found lost its right wing in the process of preservation, but before the week was out I had an intact specimen: a sparkling an inch and a half in length, his scales a deep emerald in color. With the boundless ingenuity of a child, I named him Greenie, and he sits on a shelf in my study to this day, tiny wings outspread.
Sparklings were not the only things I collected in those days. I was forever bringing home other insects and beetles (for back then we classified sparklings as an insect species that simply resembled dragons, which today we know to be untrue), and many other things besides: interesting rocks, discarded bird feathers, fragments of eggshell, bones of all kinds. Mama threw fits until I formed a pact with my maid, that she would not breathe a word of my treasures, and I would give her an extra hour a week during which she could sit down and rest her feet. Thereafter my collections hid in cigar boxes and the like, tucked safely into my closets where my mother would not go.