And I'm back....

Yes, I got to hold the baby. Third time seemed to be the charm. The first time I held her, I was unsure of how (the last baby I had much experience with was my brother, more than 35 years ago now). I think she sensed that and started to get upset. (For a small baby, she's strong: she can arch her back and kick and she can kind of scoot backward if she is on the floor on her stomach). The second time she was passed off to me while her mother ran to get a diaper (she was wet and I was the only other person available at the moment).

The third time, she had been fed and changed and burped, and just needed to be held upright for a while (she gets reflux, which is probably what used to be called "colic" back when I was a baby, and needs to be upright for a while after eating). Then she fell asleep and didn't fuss.

I will confess: very tiny babies are not terribly interesting to me. I mean, yes, she's interesting inasmuch as she's related to me. She's interesting in that she's hit several developmental milestones fairly early. But small babies don't DO much. (Maternal instinct, I do not seem to have it.)

I think I'm glad I didn't become a mother. Several of my friends teased me and told me I'd "want one of my own" after spending time around the baby but the thought of being 100% responsible for another human's life scares me - babies can't feed themselves, they can't change themselves, they can't even really tell you what needs to be done when something needs to be done (though my brother seems to be able to differentiate between a "hungry" and a "needs diaper changed" cry) - it is totally on the parents to take care of that and do it right. And even though my brother shoulders half of the duties (well, he can't feed her, unless they're using the bottles), still, it's a lot for each of the parents to deal with. They kind of sleep in shifts - one is awake or half-awake the first part of the night, the other one will get up around 2 am or so to deal with any problems between then and mid morning.

Other than that, I did some knitting. And I did do a fair amount of reading. I finished "They Found Him Dead," which was a pretty good mystery, even if I guessed who the guilty part was about halfway in. (I really don't read the Golden Age mysteries for the mystery, per se, I tend to read them for the characters and the setting and the escapism).

I also got maybe 1/3 of the way into "His Majesty's Dragon" today....farther than I had got before and the book does get more interesting (There is, for example, one breed of dragons that will only consent to a woman rider, so there are women training alongside the men in the corps.) I do rather like speculative fiction, or those kinds of "what if, what would happen, how would history have been different..." stories, and the idea of a sort of proto-air-force using dragons is an interesting one. (Some breeds can breathe fire, others can spit acid or....there's some other chemical agent some of the dragons can spit, I can't remember what now).

I also completed "Howard's End is on the Landing." This is part a discourse about books and book-preferences, part a bit of name-dropping (I did not know before, but Susan Hill is apparently a British author of fairly long-standing; she knew some of the Sitwells and W. H. Auden and met Roald Dahl a couple of times....) She remarks that name dropping in the fashion she was going to can be a "tiresome, but harmless, trait." (I am inclined to agree. It's interesting enough to read stories of Roald Dahl, whose books I read extensively as a child, less-so to read about some editor of an obscure series of diaries by a Victorian-era clergyman). 

However, it is interesting reading about reading lists, especially when the author recognizes that her preference may not necessarily be your preference, and she accepts that as okay. (I think the only author whose books she snarked about a bit was Barbara Cartland). She openly admits she can't get into Austen, although she acknowledges there are masses of people who love her novels - and observes that it is a failing in her, rather than in them, when it comes to not being able to enjoy them. She also speaks of her embarrassment when she pushes Wodehouse (who must be a favorite author; in her short-list of 40 "desert island" books she has two of his works) on someone and they aren't amused by that type of humor.

She is also a big fan of Dickens and spends some time speculating on which she thinks is the greatest of his novels ("Bleak House," which I just finished, is close to the top, and I tend to agree with her - it's probably the best of the ones I've read, though I also have to admit I liked "Great Expectations" much). In the end she goes with "Our Mutual Friend," saying it is the one of his novels she believes to be without flaw.

She is also a big fan of Anthony Trollope, and actually speaks with dismay about how some of her literature professors scoff at him, apparently mainly because (a) he made money off his work (though Dickens did, also) and (b) he would sit down and write a certain number of words every day, in a very workmanlike fashion - and he was also employed by the Royal Post at the time. (Perhaps the idea of someone starving in a garret for their art is sufficiently romantic, that someone who is comfortably well-off while doing writing is looked down upon?)

Another reason may be that Trollope strove to achieve more realism in his writing than Dickens did - she writes of Dickens' "pantomime villains and bizarre grotesques" (and yes, that's true, and actually, that's part of the fun of Dickens, I think) but also his "sentimental heroes and pasteboard heroines," which are perhaps not so wonderful. Of Trollope, she notes: "[his] characters are such as you might have met every day if you had moved in the worlds of politics and great houses, parishes and Victorian cathedral closes." She remarks on how fully-imagined and totally believable Trollope's worlds are (at least the ones related to what he knew best - Victorian politics and church life. I did find the one "departure" novel of his that I've read  - "La Vendee" - which is set in post-Revolutionary France - was less believable (but still enjoyable to read)). She selects "The Way We Live Now" as the Trollope masterpiece to inhabit her short-shelf (also because it exists as a standalone novel, rather than the Barsetshire or Palliser novels do. Though she does also include "The Last Chronicle of Barset" as well). I have read neither of those but have copies of both on my shelf - perhaps one (most likely "The Way We Live Now," because it's a comparatively-small Penguin paperback edition (though it's still a brick of a book - something like 900 pages) should be the next "big" and "challenging" novel I read. I've read others who have described it as Trollope's "best" or "most insightful" book.

Reading about her reading Trollope makes me want to read Trollope again. Some day I will go through the Palliser novels in sequence; I've read "Phineas Finn" and "The Eustace Diamonds" but haven't read the others in the series. ("Phineas Redux" would be the next one, but I'd have to go back and pick up an earlier novel or novels).

Anyway, "Howard's End is on the Landing" is an enjoyable book if you are the sort of person who likes to read about the delights and prejudices of another reader. (And I like her perspective better than that of the other chap I wrote about a while back - the one who thought book clubs were stupid, and that you were wasting your time unless you were reading Literature with a capital L, and that sort of thing). One other thing I like about Hill's book is she devotes a (short) chapter to the practice of "slow reading" and notes her bafflement with people who boast about reading hundreds of books in a year, that sort of thing. Some books CAN be read fast - but there are others that are so much better read slowly. And seeing as, for those of us reading for leisure as adults, we are not going to be tested on it or made to write reports or anything like that - well, it's nice to take six or eight months to read slowly through something like "Middlemarch" (another favorite of mine, though she notes - and I am not sure as to why - that she thinks it is not the best Eliot novel to read as a first Eliot novel) rather than racing through and missing some of the depth of the book.