Reddy-reads - Reddy Reads

Magrat: "He will make friends easily" she whispered. It wasn't much, she knew, but it was something she'd never been able to get the hang of.

Nanny Ogg: "A bloody good memory is what he ought to have," she said. "He'll always remember the words."

Granny Weatherwax: "Let him be whoever he thinks he is," she said. "That's all anybody could hope for in this world."

When I was a kid I read a ton of books that were definitely not appropriate for my age. One of two things would happen:

I was too inexperienced to understand what I was reading, and it had no effect on me.

I understood what I was reading, and I leveled up.

Bonus: why did you pick the one you did?

...Or tell me the options are wrong and [your write-in candidate] trounces both of them

if you pick up a large rock in a stream you might just find an angry guy

book of the month: august 2024

I'm still doing book of the month, just not every month. (Book of the month = pick a book from the "to read" pile; if I don't finish the book by the end of the month it does in the donation box and gets added to the amnesty list)

August's book was The World for a Shilling by Michael Leapman. I finished it! It was good :) It's nonfiction about the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.

Summary:

Conceived as a showcase for Britain's burgeoning manufacturing industries and the exotic products of its Empire, the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace was Britain's first national spectacle. This book examines the story of how the exhibition came into being; the key characters who made it happen (from Prince Albert, who was credited with the idea, to Thomas Cook, whose cheap railway trips ensured its accessibility to all); and the tales behind the exhibitors and exhibits themselves, from the Koh-i-noor diamond to the more quirky inventions on display - Queen Victoria was very taken with a bed that physically ejected its occupant in the morning, for example. One quarter of the British population had visited the exhibition by its close; this is the story of how it fired the imagination of the era.

I was interested in this book because The Great Train Robbery (Crichton) and At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson) both mention/talk about this event. It just stirs my imagination. (Also, not going to lie, I kinda also got vaguely interested because of the Fallen London game.)

This book contains a lot of descriptions of things. Not even descriptions of events, but whole chapters describing the contents of different exhibits. AND YET it was an interesting and easy read. I believe that is a mark of the author's skill.

One thing I wish I could have gotten more of a taste of is like... detailed-verging-on-fictionalized descriptions of specific moments. For example, the book opens with this description of a group of people from one village who traveled to the exhibition. For many of them it was their first (and possibly only) time to visit London. When they arrive, they were practically an exhibit themselves as the city folk goggled at the country visitors. It really engaged my imagination and gave my compassion/empathy something to hang off of. I wish there had been more scenes like that, where small moments in peoples' lives were used to illustrate a larger point about the event/about society at the time. (For example, that was used to introduce how this event was very much once-in-a-lifetime for many of the attendees, and highlight how unusual the Exhibition was for its opportunity for people from different classes and backgrounds to mingle.)

My biggest criticism is that it didn't stick the landing--if you pick this book up (and you might want to! I liked it!) just skip the last chapter entirely. It was a downer and it didn't add anything. I don't know what editor allowed that in. The book opens with a lovely illustrative moment, and it should end with an illustrative moment.

Overall, very happy I bought and read the book. I would recommend it to people interested in this part of history (but, like me, are not serious scholars of history), and I wouldn't recommend it to people who don't already have an interest.

What is this book for you?

In a literal sense, I re-read several Discworld books as a kid that fell to bits (not sure why, but ‘Interesting Times’ in particular). As a teenager, this was ‘High Fidelity’, ‘The Prestige’ and Brett Easton Ellis books, none of which I’ve returned to since!

I don’t re-read much as an adult, except that I listen to the audiobook of ‘I, Partridge’ every few months and read ‘A Christmas Carol’ every December and revisit short stories by Kelly Link, George Saunders and Carmen Maria Machado quite often.

How about you?