By popular1 demand, here is the less-video-more-words version of TL;DR. I agree, a quick email once a fortnight (this is the plan for both video and text content this year) is easier to both consume and ignore. They’re also available on my website if you ever have need to delve into the dusty archives.
Shall we begin?
Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion*
Published 1918, but then revised in 1938 and again in 1941 after English movie adaptations (there had been previous versions released in German and Dutch) (the English version also wasn’t My Fair Lady, that was released in 1964).
Pygmalion is based on part of Ovid’s ancient Greek poem The Metamorphoses*2, in which the sculptor, Pygmalion, falls in love with an marble sculpture of a woman he named Galatea. Because the gods like to mess people up, Aphrodite made her human.
If you’ve seen My Fair Lady, you know most of this story – about half the film is based on the play. Eliza Doolittle is a street flower seller who encounters Henry Higgins, a phonetics professor, and overhears him say he could teach her to speak properly so she could work in a shop. The next day Eliza turns up on Henry’s doorstep demanding elocution lessons. Henry’s new friend and phonetics colleague, Colonel Pickering, bets Higgins that he’ll pay for Eliza’s lessons, if Henry can pass her off as a duchess.
Ultimately, Eliza passes this test, despite the misgivings of Henry’s mother and housekeeper about what will happen to Eliza after the men have had their game. The men have no conception of the implications for Eliza of living between worlds – she’s no longer a street flower seller, but she’s also not a well-born or married lady.
Eliza and Henry have an out-and-out fight about it in which, if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know they realise they’re in love and the music swells. But in the play, Eliza declares she will marry Freddy, a young man born into a class he can’t afford to live in. She decides she’ll marry Freddy and support him. Happily ever after, the end.
It turns out audiences and directors right from the beginning wanted Eliza and Henry to end up together and staged the play that way, so in the published version of the play there’s a ‘sequel’ where Shaw meticulously documents all the ways in which Eliza would never marry Henry, and what her life looks like married to Freddy. They open a shop.
If you’ve not seen My Fair Lady, you should. Eliza and Henry play off against each other excellently, while Eliza’s dad Alfred is a cautionary tale of what happens when you’re happily poor, but then come into money and have to acquire a middle-class morality.
3.5 stars. Loverly, yeah?
Susan Herbert: Cats Galore: A Compendium of Cultured Cats*
Published 2015
This is my kid’s. A friend bought it for her on a trip to Europe this year, because kidling is obsessed cats. It’s pretty cool, it has famous paintings, books, and movie scenes, recreated with cats.
That’s it. Just pictures.
3 stars. I’m counting it as a book.
Ian Reid: The Short Story
Published 1977
This is a really short – like, 5-chapter work – on the definitions of short stories, where they evolved from, some key names in short stories like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathanial Hawthorn, Katherine Mansfield, and some examples of the form and a brief look at things like novellas and the short story cycles. I just started an English degree and although I’ve enrolled in a Masters, I’m doing the intro to English first year hand-holding English subject, where some of the focus has been short stories. Hence, this book on the recommended reading list. Anyway, it’s clearly dated but not a bad starting point for students starting out, like me.
2 stars. It’s fine, but lots of academic works are dry and not read for enjoyment.
Robert Eaglestone: Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students*
Published 2017
I can’t remember if this is on the recommended reading list for uni or if I just saw it referenced on a lecture slide and thought yup, I’ll put that in my brain
I’m glad I did put it in my brain because it really drills down into exactly why would you study English in the first place, then puts the ‘why’ into a bit of context with a montage of the highlights in theory (which is the different styles of approach scholars have had both to English criticism, and to justifying their discipline existing). Finally, it finishes off with a little bit of what English students actually learn, things like how to distinguish plot and narrative, a bit about character, tone, mood. It’s pitched at late high school or early uni, and if that’s you then I highly recommend.
3.5 stars. I love it when academics make their books easy to consume.
Bill Bryson: The Secret History of Christmas
Published 2022
I need to say from the outset that I think Bill Bryson should not narrate his own books. He has a lisp, and he’s a mumbler, and I say that as someone who edits her own videos and knows exactly how annoying a mumbler can be. But this is an Audible original, which means the only way to get hold of it is to listen to it. It’s part of the Audible Plus catalogue in Australia which means if you’re an Audible member you can access it for free.3 Which is awesome, because it’s literally only 3 hours long and I won’t part with a credit for a book less than 15 hours, preferably 40.
Apart from the mumbling, I like Bill Bryson’s work. His humour doesn’t always work for me, but the research is there. It’s easy to breeze through. This is obviously not a ‘secret’ history of Christmas, but it’s full of trivia you might not know, or might have forgotten, and you can be the WELL ACTUALLY guy at Christmas when someone tries to give you Saturnalia bullshit. The chapters are broken up into Origins, Strange Customs, The Near-death of Christmas, Santa, and Christmas foods. Some of the little anecdotes I recognised from his book from 2010, At Home: A Short History of Private Life*, which incidentally was the first book I ever bought on Audible
3 stars. It definitely put me in a festive mood though, so I guess the combination of history and Christmas is a winning one, for me.
Joan Lindsay: Picnic At Hanging Rock*
Published 1967
Influenced directly by Kelly at Curatorially Yours, I was keen to actually read this piece of Australian cultural heritage.
On Valentine’s Day, 1900, girls from the Appleyard College for Young Ladies - a Bendigo private school designed to fleece money out of rich parents and guardians in return for ‘educating’ young ladies - head out for a Picnic at Hanging Rock.4 While most of the girls and their chaperones are enjoying a postprandial nap, four students wander off to investigate the Rock closer, and only one comes back. A teacher also disappears, without as much fanfare.
Although the mystery of what happened at Hanging Rock is central to the story, it’s the impacts of the mystery on those left behind that is key here. Ultimately, the mystery isn’t even solved - one of the missing girls is recovered, but has nothing useful to add to the investigation. The fact that it remains unsolved is something I really enjoyed, although on Wikipedia there is a brief synopsis of the excised final chapter in which the mystery is only deepened in a thoroughly surreal way.
3.5 stars. Mysterious mystery is mysterious.
Madeline Miller: Galatea*
Published 2013
Does this even count as a book? It’s 37 pages long.
You may recall from earlier in this missive that Shaw’s Pygmalion is a retelling of Ovid’s Pygmalion. Miller’s retelling asks what Galatea thinks of all this. What happens after Aphrodite wakes her up. Pygmalion, and the townspeople where they live, think she’s cold and unfeeling - well she would be, she literally used to be stone. She was a perfect marble sculpture, but how does that translate as a human?
3.5 stars. Borrow it from your library.
And, here is the 2022 reads part 12 video:
One person who is not my mum said they’d subscribe, and that was good enough for me
This appears to be the best entry-level price & translation, unless you have access to the Loeb
By ‘free’, you (and I) already need to be giving money to Amazon/Audible
We appreciate a book that does what it says on the tin
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