Reading Wednesday(ish)
Aug. 8th, 2019 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
copperfyre The two books I've finished recently inspired very different reactions in me.
The first is The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, which inspired a lot of anger. So much so, in fact, that I remembered I could go be grumpy here about it a good six months after I last made an entry (so far I have also raged about this to my parents, my partner, and three friends, and I am probably not done yet).
The book is an investigative journalism/true crime look at the theft of 299 birds (including a whole bunch of birds collected by Alfred Russel Wallace when he was wandering around ruminating about natural selection) from The Natural History Museum at Tring, stolen by Edwin Rist, a flautist, who steals them to a) make stupid salmon flies out of (not to actually fish for salmon with, oh no! This book reveals this whole world of people tying Victorian Salmon Flies, which are idiotic salmon flies made with feathers from incredibly rare birds, basically for the aesthetic, because there sure isn't any actual advantage to making your fishing flies out of Bird of Paradise feathers as opposed to chicken feathers, and also none of these people are actually fishing with these flies anyway, they're just making them and showing them off), and b) to sell them to other people so they can make these stupid flies and so he can buy a gold flute.
AND THEN HE GETS AWAY WITH IT. COMPLETELY. WITHOUT SHOWING A SHRED OF REMORSE OR A HINT OF 'HEY MAYBE THAT WAS A SHIT THING TO DO'. And it's not that they don't catch him, or they have insufficient evidence or anything, no, they know he did it (though there are questions about whether he had any accomplices), the whole thing goes to court, and he gets off scot free, isn't even stopped from graduating from his degree at the Royal Academy of Music, and then goes off and joins the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
The other anger inducing bit is the whole fucking community of Victorian salmon fly tying, who are just blatantly trading endangered bird feathers and bodies through things like eBay, and - guess what - getting away with it. And the community absolutely absorbed about 60 of the stolen birds and just decided that was okay, who cares about the fact that some of these were collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the late 1800s, fuck all of that, let's tear the feather out and make these bullshit flies out of them, science, what's that, crime, doesn't matter, what really matters is me following these instructions some pretentious Victorian aristocrat wrote about making flies with cotinga and Bird of Paradise feathers. Because heaven forbid we just dye chicken feathers to be the right colours, no, it really does seem that the whole forbidden fruit element of using rare bird feathers is super important to a lot of these people.
And one of the really gutting things is that 299 birds are stolen, and they recover about 200 of them, but only 100 of them have their museum labels left on - i.e. who collected it, when, where, what species it is - so the rest, and the piles and piles of loose feathers they also collect, are essentially useless for any kind of further research. I actually thought the author did a good job of conveying the magnitude of this loss. I'm an ecologist, I've worked in natural history museums, I'm really passionate about the importance of natural history collections, but I understand these are all slightly niche interests, and the questions "But why do these 150 year old dead birds matter, why not make flies out of them?" is a question I can see people having, so I really appreciated the backstory the book went into about Wallace, and about collections, and about the science that has been done and that can still be done, with these old dead birds, as well as the historical significance. And also just how damn much museum collections people care about their collections.
I don't blame the author of this book for the rage it induced in me, because clearly he is just as frustrated, and he tries so incredibly hard, but I guess that's the peril of true crime books, sometimes - often? - there is no satisfying resolution, because the world sucks, and rich white men commit crimes and get away with them and no-one cares. There's a bit near the end where he goes 'In the war between knowledge and greed, it sure seemed as though greed were winning' and that's basically the take away of this book.
So, yeah, I'm very angry about Edwin Rist and also this whole bullshit end of fly tying.
And the second book I read was - luckily - not about true crime, fly tying, or people gutting natural history collections, but it did involve crime! Murder, in fact. What Angels Fear by CS Harris is a Regency England murder mystery that gleefully embraces all tropes of the Regency England murder mystery genre (this is a very specific genre, I grant, and admittedly I have only read three series in it, but so far all of them have hit most of these tropes, so I'm reasonably confident calling them tropes). I also spent the entire book trying to work out if it was going to do a genre switch from 'historical murder mystery' to 'fantasy historical murder mystery' by introducing vampires.
Spoilers: no vampires, our dashing hero (who, of course, is an ex-army officer who left the army under dubious circumstances, has a difficult relationship with his family and a past tragic love affair, and who wanders around London getting told by everyone that he really does believe in honour and justice even if he denies it) just has inexplicably amazing senses and reflexes.
No rage was induced by this book, so I actually have a lot less to say about it, but I enjoyed it! I was very entertained that by a quarter of the way through our hero - called Sebastian St. Cyr, though in my head he just kept being Our Hero - had been accused of two murders, recruited a Plucky Street Orphan as a sidekick, and had stolen a body, and there was still so much book to go! I'm apparently just a sucker for historical murder mysteries (this is not new information about myself, I admit) especially when they're having this much fun. I want to pick up the next book in the series, so clearly it worked for me! (And only partly because I'm pretty sure I've pegged the future love interest, and I want to see if I'm right.)
The first is The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson, which inspired a lot of anger. So much so, in fact, that I remembered I could go be grumpy here about it a good six months after I last made an entry (so far I have also raged about this to my parents, my partner, and three friends, and I am probably not done yet).
The book is an investigative journalism/true crime look at the theft of 299 birds (including a whole bunch of birds collected by Alfred Russel Wallace when he was wandering around ruminating about natural selection) from The Natural History Museum at Tring, stolen by Edwin Rist, a flautist, who steals them to a) make stupid salmon flies out of (not to actually fish for salmon with, oh no! This book reveals this whole world of people tying Victorian Salmon Flies, which are idiotic salmon flies made with feathers from incredibly rare birds, basically for the aesthetic, because there sure isn't any actual advantage to making your fishing flies out of Bird of Paradise feathers as opposed to chicken feathers, and also none of these people are actually fishing with these flies anyway, they're just making them and showing them off), and b) to sell them to other people so they can make these stupid flies and so he can buy a gold flute.
AND THEN HE GETS AWAY WITH IT. COMPLETELY. WITHOUT SHOWING A SHRED OF REMORSE OR A HINT OF 'HEY MAYBE THAT WAS A SHIT THING TO DO'. And it's not that they don't catch him, or they have insufficient evidence or anything, no, they know he did it (though there are questions about whether he had any accomplices), the whole thing goes to court, and he gets off scot free, isn't even stopped from graduating from his degree at the Royal Academy of Music, and then goes off and joins the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
The other anger inducing bit is the whole fucking community of Victorian salmon fly tying, who are just blatantly trading endangered bird feathers and bodies through things like eBay, and - guess what - getting away with it. And the community absolutely absorbed about 60 of the stolen birds and just decided that was okay, who cares about the fact that some of these were collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in the late 1800s, fuck all of that, let's tear the feather out and make these bullshit flies out of them, science, what's that, crime, doesn't matter, what really matters is me following these instructions some pretentious Victorian aristocrat wrote about making flies with cotinga and Bird of Paradise feathers. Because heaven forbid we just dye chicken feathers to be the right colours, no, it really does seem that the whole forbidden fruit element of using rare bird feathers is super important to a lot of these people.
And one of the really gutting things is that 299 birds are stolen, and they recover about 200 of them, but only 100 of them have their museum labels left on - i.e. who collected it, when, where, what species it is - so the rest, and the piles and piles of loose feathers they also collect, are essentially useless for any kind of further research. I actually thought the author did a good job of conveying the magnitude of this loss. I'm an ecologist, I've worked in natural history museums, I'm really passionate about the importance of natural history collections, but I understand these are all slightly niche interests, and the questions "But why do these 150 year old dead birds matter, why not make flies out of them?" is a question I can see people having, so I really appreciated the backstory the book went into about Wallace, and about collections, and about the science that has been done and that can still be done, with these old dead birds, as well as the historical significance. And also just how damn much museum collections people care about their collections.
I don't blame the author of this book for the rage it induced in me, because clearly he is just as frustrated, and he tries so incredibly hard, but I guess that's the peril of true crime books, sometimes - often? - there is no satisfying resolution, because the world sucks, and rich white men commit crimes and get away with them and no-one cares. There's a bit near the end where he goes 'In the war between knowledge and greed, it sure seemed as though greed were winning' and that's basically the take away of this book.
So, yeah, I'm very angry about Edwin Rist and also this whole bullshit end of fly tying.
And the second book I read was - luckily - not about true crime, fly tying, or people gutting natural history collections, but it did involve crime! Murder, in fact. What Angels Fear by CS Harris is a Regency England murder mystery that gleefully embraces all tropes of the Regency England murder mystery genre (this is a very specific genre, I grant, and admittedly I have only read three series in it, but so far all of them have hit most of these tropes, so I'm reasonably confident calling them tropes). I also spent the entire book trying to work out if it was going to do a genre switch from 'historical murder mystery' to 'fantasy historical murder mystery' by introducing vampires.
Spoilers: no vampires, our dashing hero (who, of course, is an ex-army officer who left the army under dubious circumstances, has a difficult relationship with his family and a past tragic love affair, and who wanders around London getting told by everyone that he really does believe in honour and justice even if he denies it) just has inexplicably amazing senses and reflexes.
No rage was induced by this book, so I actually have a lot less to say about it, but I enjoyed it! I was very entertained that by a quarter of the way through our hero - called Sebastian St. Cyr, though in my head he just kept being Our Hero - had been accused of two murders, recruited a Plucky Street Orphan as a sidekick, and had stolen a body, and there was still so much book to go! I'm apparently just a sucker for historical murder mysteries (this is not new information about myself, I admit) especially when they're having this much fun. I want to pick up the next book in the series, so clearly it worked for me! (And only partly because I'm pretty sure I've pegged the future love interest, and I want to see if I'm right.)
