In Which We Discuss War & Peace - Chapters X and XI

Chapter X

Prince Vasili has kept a promise made to Princess Drubetskaya - who is also referred to as Anna Mikhaylovna within the same paragraph - and gotten her son, Boris a job.  Yay!  He doesn't get to be on Kutuzov's staff though, despite his mother pushing for it.

Darling Bory was raised in Moscow with/by rich relations, the Rostovs, two of whom are named Nataly.  Because the characters in this book needed to be even more confusing.  It is St Natalie's day, which, google tells me, is at the end of July.  Countess Nataly Rostov is forty-five and has had twelve children.  Bloody hell; even the narration thinks she looks tired.  Apparently, lots of people are visiting and the Count is being very fancy and greeting them all in French.  He is clean-shaven; that means he's modern, at least as far as Peter the Great was concerned, though Pyotr Alekseyvich Romanov was over a hundred years dead by the time this book was published, so what does he know?  I can't locate a source right now, but I do remember reading that the cold was a reason some men pushed back against the beard tax; perhaps Count Rostov is rich enough to stay warm in Moscow without a face blanket.  The beard tax was repealed in 1772, so it's not that he was just too cheap to pay it (being rich and cheap is not a contradiction; that's how people stay rich).

The count is manspreading like a man who enjoys life while talking about the weather "sometimes in Russian and sometimes in very bad but self-confident French".  I quite like the Count, he sounds silly.  The Count's butler is Dmitri Vsilevich.  I just looked him up, and he is also known as 'Miten'ka' - bets on when that name will show up?

The countess is sick of talking to people, but agrees to speak to Marya Lvovna Karagina and her daughter.  I don't think they've shown up before.  They're gossiping about Pierre, mostly about the fact that he was raised by wolves and his father is ill.  They think Pierre's bear-dancing and other shenanigans - which they blame on his "modern education" - will make Count Bezukhov (Pierre's father) worse.  Personally, I have a feeling that the stuff he gets up to with Anatole and Dolokhov has been going on since we found out how to make alcohol.  Marya Lvovna Karagina is shocked that there was a bear, so it's not just me.

Apparently, they decided to take the bear to visit some actresses.  When a policeman tries to halt their shenanigans, they tie him to the bear's back and let it have a swim in the canal, copper attached.  This is quite good gossip, I'm glad the countess let Marya Lvovna Karagina and her daughter in.  Dolokhov and Anatole are "regular brigands"; Dolokhov has been demoted, Pierre has been sent back to Moscow, and Anatole has been ordered out of St Petersburg ('you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here!').  The ladies try to be shocked, but get the giggles when the Count starts laughing.

They then move on to gossiping about Pierre's money.  His father has scores of bastards, so no money, but Pierre is his favourite, so maybe money.  If Pierre doesn't get it, Prince Vasili will, because his wife is - let me look this up - Aline Kuragin nee Bezhukova, Count Kirril/Cyril's sister, and Pierre's aunt.  I accidentally spoiled a future plot element for myself finding that out, but I won't tell you about it.  Apparently, Cyril/Kirril is also Anna Mikhaylovna's mother's second cousin, and the godfather to darling Bory.  Perhaps he's in for a share of those forty thousand serfs and millions of rubles.  Prince Vasili is visiting Count Cyril, presumably to check the will has been written correctly.  Count Ilya Rostov is still giggling to himself about the bear and the policeman.

Chapter XI

Countess Rostov is bored of her visitors now.  Before they can leave, the youngest Rostov, thirteen-year-old Nataly/Natasha, runs in, followed by darling Bory, and some other relatives.

Now if the youngest is thirteen and Countess Rostov is forty-five, Natasha was born when she was around thirty-two.  Twelve children then implies multiple births or that she started around the age of twenty, or possibly younger, if she had a little break.  At least she got the nappy stage over with all at once.

Darling Bory is contrasted with "the count's eldest son", Nicholas.  Which bloody count, Tolstoy?  I'm going to assume Rostov.  Yep, I checked, this is Nikolai Rostov.  He and darling Bory are the same age, and while darling Bory is tall and fair, Nikolai is short and dark.  Darling Bory mocks Natasha until she runs away and then has to go and fetch her when they all agree to go out.  This party is less fun than the one with the bear.

In Which We Discuss War & Peace - Chapters VIII and IX

Chapter VIII

We are still with Pierre and Prince Andrew; the latter is counselling the former against marriage.  Prince Andrew envies Bonparte's freedom to pursue a goal without a woman hanging around his neck like a millstone.  Like he'd be Emperor of France if only he were single.  Poor little princeling.

Prince Andrew's current passion to be single is contrasted with how very languid he was at the party.  Which, to be fair, sounded like a very dull party.

Pierre has always been a bit jealous of Andrew, so he doesn't quite understand what he's whining about.  Andrew also disapproves of the Kuragins, including Anatole (who I am still fond of, so far).  Pierre agrees not to hang out with them, at least for now (despite the fact that he's staying with them).

Chapter IX

Pierre immediately changes his mind about hanging out with Anatole, because he remembers that Anatole is fun.  Also, he already promised Anatole that he would attend, so he can't go back on that even though he just swore that he would.  The narrative calls him a "weak character".  He was raised by wolves, what do you expect?

Anatole is playing cards and drinking; Pierre is far too sober, so they fix that.  Anatole has been playing with Dolokhov, who is poor, but usually wins so it doesn't matter.  He and Anatole are famous playboys, or rather, "rakes and scapegraces".  I know 'rake' refers to men who carelessly impregnate women, but who knows what a scapegrace is?  Google says 'rascal'.  Anyway, they've decided to break a window because they can't sit comfortably on the sill and the footmen couldn't open it wide enough.  Dolokhov is now betting that he can sit outside on the sloping ledge and drink a bottle of rum.  Sounds like life in uni halls.

I've gone off Anatole a bit.  Pierre decides to make the same bet - presumably, to fit in with his new macho friends, or because he likes the look of the money they're handing to Dolokhov.  Anatole talks him down, and he decides to dance with a bear instead.  I forgot to say; there was a bear there the entire time.

In Which We Discuss War & Peace - Chapters V, VI, and VII

Chapter V

Anna is very sick of Napoleon and thinks it's ridiculous that he gets to be in charge of things.  The vicomte thinks that "good" French society will be destroyed forever.  Pierre shows his raised-by-wolves-ness by describing Napoleon as having a "great soul".  Le gasp.  Cue ladies fainting and so on.  Well, what do you expect from someone educated abroad?  He thinks that when you set out to do something, you should commit to it, and that Napoleon did that to the point of assassination, keeping the positive parts of the revolution while destroying the negative.  Prince Andrew has decided to support Pierre - which one was Prince Andrew again? - because he dislikes the vicomte.

Okay, I googled, and Prince Andrew is Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky and he is married to the pregnant Princess, whom I can't recall if I've mentioned before or not.  She wasn't doing much anyway.  Prince Hippolyte tells a silly story to change the subject.

Chapter VI

Pierre is an ungracious lout who does not know how to leave a party, but he is also sweet and naive, so Anna forgives him.  He was raised by wolves, after all.  Prince Hippolyte may or may not have tried to feel up Prince Andrew's wife.

Pierre is in Russia in order to choose a career, and appears to be staying with the Bolkonskys.  His dad has given him some money and told him to pick one and get on with it.  He's been doing that for three months.

Chapter VII

Pierre is very blunt, but Lise - Princess Bolkonsky - agrees with him, that war is unnecessary and she can't see why men like it so much.  She also calls her husband Andre.  So he might be called Andre, Andrew, or Prince Bolkonsky.  You see why I found this book confusing and decided to keep notes.

Anyway, Lise is trying to set her husband up as an Aide-de-camp -personal assistant - to the emperor.  Prince Andrew seems less enthused about it.  Apparently, he has taken Lise to live with his father and sister and leaving her there while he goes off to war.  He appears to love Lise much less than she loves him, which perhaps they should have figured out before marrying and conceiving a child.  Possibly not an option for royalty.

In Which We Discuss War & Peace - Chapters II and III

I was considering splitting these posts up so each covered five sections each, but I figured that would be harder to stick to.  My comments on chapter I are here.

Chapter II


Anna's drawing room is filling up with rich people, including Prince Vasili's not-Anatole children and Princess Bolkonskaya, who is a relative of the princess they want to set Anatole up with.  I've been trying to remember where I've heard of an Anatole before, and I think it's Kerensky's first name in Red Shirts.  Princess Bolkonskaya has brought embroidery to the party.  I like her.  I bring my knitting and cross-stitch all sorts of places.  I bore easily.

Pierre has also shown up.  He is, apparently, very rude, through a mixture of confusion and naivety.  He doesn't realise how importance it is to hear an old woman he doesn't know talk about how royalty will save them from war.  Apparently, he is the bastard son of a count and was educated abroad; perhaps this is code for "raised by wolves".  Anna is worried about him, while she's trying to be a good hostess and force her friends together, like a big smashed-together melting pot.

Chapter III

So, Prince Vasili's non-Anatole son (Hippolyte) has brought a friend, Vicomte Mortemart, who sounds like an arrogant prat.  He "evidently [considers] himself a celebrity" but is being very modest and hanging out with Anna Pavlovna, who is "serving him up as a treat to her guests".  Anna is also very pleased to be talking to a vicomte.  What a star-fucker.  Apparently, Princess Helene is very beautiful and very cleavage-y, and yet also modest.  Her brother, Hippolyte - these are Prince Vasili's children - looks just like her, but is hideous.  Perhaps this is the origin of the trope that hideous men suddenly become irresistible women when in drag.  Apparently, it has to do with him being dull and stupid.  How very Roald Dahl.

In Which We Discuss Serial Reader and War and Peace

When I was younger, I owned a lot of books.  They topped out at about three-thousand, most of them from charity shops.  My grandmother would take me down her local high street and I'd pick up fifteen or twenty for £10.  It was magical.  Some of my favourite books are the ones I found in that way.  When I was twenty-four, I donated most of them back to charity shops because I'd moved twice by then and never, ever wanted to move all of those books again.  Now I own about a hundred physical books and another two hundred on my Kindle.

A small selection of my old collection, circa 2012.

I bring that up because there was a subgroup of books that I collected but never actually read, for the most part.  The old Penguin Classic paperbacks.  I was always going to read them "someday", and I justified getting rid of them by the fact that the Kindle editions are free.  Despite that, I still haven't read most of them.

One app that's helped me there is Serial Reader.  Serial reader takes those classics, cuts them up into bitesize pieces (5-15 minutes of reading), and sends them to you one day at a time.  If you have the paid version, you can read ahead, while the free version limits you to that one piece.

Another bit of backstory; I'm planning a trip to Russia, hopefully this year, if funds allow.

Serial Reader on my iPhone.

In short; I'm trying to read War and Peace.  I did try once before, and very quickly got confused as to who was who (which is, apparently, a Russian thing), so I'm going to take notes on each section as I go.  There are 235 of them.

Incidentally, I am also carrying on with my Stephen King project.  I'm just bogged down in Dreamcatcher at the moment, and also slightly addicted to Kristin Painter's Nocturne Falls series, of which I devour a book every three days or so.  That's loosely connected as well; I'm up to The Dragon Finds Forever featuring "Puff the magic MMA fighter", a Russian dragon shifter.  He's just breakfasted on syrniki.  Which I was already planning to make next week, despite my lactose intolerance, because they sound amazing.

War and Peace: Section 1

Sparknotes are here, if preferred.  I'm not reading ahead, but I am checking them at the end of each section, to see all the pretty nuances that I missed.

It's 1805.  Prince Vasili Kuragin is being told that the Buonapartes have taken over Genoa and Lucca (google: those are Italian cities).  So this little speech is about war, and it's taking place during a peaceful, high-society function.  Okay.  Anna Pavlovna is a 'maid of honour', which I don't think means head bridesmaid here, and she's a favourite of the Empress Marya Fedorovna.  Apparently, she wrote her invitations in Frence, presumably to be fancy.  England does that.  All our fancy words (beef, mansion) are from French while are commoner words (cow, house) are from German.

Apparently, the prince is also a count, and Anna Pavlovna may also call herself Annette Scherer.  You see why I was confused.  They are being very polite and courteous while speaking in fancy French.  I wonder if they are smiling?

Anna Pavlovna is afraid of revolution.  Another google search; the Russian Revolution occurred in 1905 and War and Peace was first published in 1869.   Austria does not wish for war and is betraying Russia, who must stand alone.  The English are suspicious and commercial (true), and is refusing to evacuate Malta, which sounds like us.  The emperor is Alexander, and this prince has a son and a daughter, and a youngest whom Anna doesn't like, Anatole.  She wants to marry him to Princess Mary Bolkonskaya, who is a relation of his.  Not unusual for princes.

From Genomes Unzipped (linked in text)

The Prince is tempted because Anatole is expensive and the princess may be rich.  Anna agrees to start matchmaking, while complaining - jokingly, I think - that it makes her feel old.

I quite like the name Anatole.  I hope he's in this a lot, he sounds fun.

In Which We Discuss Writing

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes (because I can't find the exact quote I want), "when you know the details of a thousand cases, it would be very odd if you couldn't solve the thousand and first".  That's how I feel about writing.  I read so much that it would be very odd if I didn't come up with my own stories, and I do.    The oldest is one I came up with when I was ten years old; that's nearly two decades.  I've been trying to write them down for years and I tend to trail off, or get tangled up....

Anyway, I'm trying something new.  I'm using a spreadsheet!

I took a lot of inspiration from this blog post.  I already use spreadsheets for finances, grade-tracking, and schedules, so it makes sense to me to use them for writing.  As well as organising timelines and scenes - which has made a huge difference to how real my worlds feel - it's also been useful for tracking word counts.  If you're interested in NaNoWriMo specifically, there are some great spreadsheets here!

To be clear, I don't want to be a full-time writer.  I don't want the stress of rejection, or to spend all day with my own thoughts.  I just want to get these stories out of my head into the best versions possible.  When/if that gets done, I guess I'll self-publish and see if anyone wants to read them.

In Which We Discuss the Fact that I'm a Working Class Feminist Who Enjoys Atlas Shrugged

I cannot and do not attempt to speak to Ayn Rand's intentions with this post.  I can only speak to my interpretation of Atlas Shrugged, which allows me to enjoy the book when so many others like me do not.

Atlas Shrugged is something of a controversial novel.  It focuses on Dagny Taggert, an heiress and second-in-command (though, realistically, in charge) of a railroad company, founded by her grandfather and run by her brother.  A key fact in why it's disliked is that it describes a world in which people's value comes from what they create and provide for others, and in which people can be split into creators and 'second-handers' who only take from the creators and do not provide value to others in any way.  Looking at it from our culture, that's an incredibly harsh viewpoint.  It has the unstated assumption that everyone is born with the same opportunities, which isn't the case in our society, and it doesn't address cases in which people are elderly, or ill, or lacking in opportunities.  That simply never comes up in the book.

The interpretation that allows me to enjoy the book is the assumption, firstly, that Atlas Shrugged is a work of science fiction set in a similar but non-identical world, and, secondly, it isn't intended to describe the entire population; instead, it's intended to describe a specific set of highly privileged people who could and should be doing more with their privilege instead of taking it for granted.   People who should be taking responsibility, doing what they say they will, and doing it to the best of their ability.  I find that inspiring, as a goal for me personally.  Dagny is also contrasted with her brother James, who has had the exact same privilege as her plus that of being born male, and older, and automatically the heir to Taggart Transcontinental.  That support my interpretation; Dagny's accomplishments are built on her privilege; the contrast is with why James didn't try to achieve the same, not why someone less privileged didn't.

I also like that Dagny is proud of her accomplishments.  People should be proud of what they achieve.  I got excellent grades last term, because I worked hard for them.  The fact that other people also worked hard and didn't achieve those grades may speak to their lack of privilege compared to me, which I should be careful not to forget, but that doesn't mean I didn't deserve my achievements and shouldn't be proud of them.  I intend to do even better this semester; I've been getting up early and sticking to a schedule which allows me to achieve what I intend to achieve each day, as well as attending workshops at my university's learning commons to learn how to do things better.

The story, for me, seems to be about the spirit of communism overtaking America, a country Rand saw as the very antithesis of it.  Not communism as intended, and as people hope it will be; communism as it was in China and in Russia, where Ayn Rand grew up.  One of the symptoms of this infection is incompetence, and I can definitely relate to that.  Dealing with call centres where people don't associate cause and effect and literally just say random words that they don't understand and no one seems to think that this is a problem.  That's only a tiny level of what people in communist countries experience, but even on that level, I can understand why Rand dreamt of competence, of people who knew what they were doing and just got on with it.  I've also read a little on communist China and North Korea; civilisations where you were/are expected to act as if the most ridiculous things are true, and the goal wasn't to get things done but to shift the blame.  I get why you'd want to get as far away from that as possible, if you'd grown up with it.

Another factor, for me, may be that I grew up in an abusive household where, again, the goals were to shift the blame and what happened wasn't based on reality or facts but on shifting moods and outright lies.  I think, because of that, I get a great deal of satisfaction when Rand's characters say the equivalent of "no, that's bullshit, this is true".  Within the confines of Rand's imagined world, their statements are true and clear and simple, and that is such a relief to me.

I also like some aspects of how romantic relationships work, in Rand's world.  You go for the people who like you back and who inspire you to be a better person.  That's lovely.  Dagny isn't ashamed of her sexuality or of being a mistress, and although I'm not really cool with the idea of adultery, I do like that she is open about her sexuality.  I do think Ayn Rand is mistaken in writing as if the specific submissive fetish she and Dagny (and, full disclosue, I too) share is universal for all women.  It isn't.  I get it though; it's a combination of being submissive but also proud; submitting to someone 'unworthy' isn't satisfying or enjoyable, it's just degrading and fake.  So, again, because of my specific circumstances, I can relate to it on that level.  However, I do feel that Rand glosses over how difficult it can be for women, especially at the time, to rise to the top economically.  Dagny doesn't go out of her way to help other women, and there are very few other women in the same position.  Rand seems to prescribe to the theory that the reason women aren't in positions of power is because most women just aren't as good as men, because if they were, they would be.  That isn't true, and I really dislike that opinion.  But, because I'm used to a world in which men are in power and women are invisible, its not an excessive hardship to ignore that specific element here, either.   The same goes for people of colour; they just don't really exist in Rand's world, but then, they don't exist in lots of fictional worlds so, while it's not okay, it's not a problem unique to Atlas Shrugged.

So, thoughts?  Do you like or dislike Atlas Shrugged?  Why or why not?  What troubles you about it?  What do you enjoy?

In Which We Discuss My 28th Year

So...I got a little behind!  I turned twenty-nine on the twelfth of August; these are the books I read prior to that day.  My time's been taken up with preparing for the second year of my degree and with writing.  For the former, I've been using coursera courses and the module descriptions to assign pre-reading for myself.  I've struggled to stick to my study schedule, but I'm least I'm struggling now and not after the semester begins!  As for the writing, I've recently begun using spreadsheets and trying writing exercises, which I'll be sharing here.