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Reading Wednesday(ish)
Aug. 8th, 2019 09:25 pm 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.
( Spoilers and also anger and capslockiness )
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 on the vampire front follow )
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.
( Spoilers and also anger and capslockiness )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 on the vampire front follow )
