Reading: The Far Side of the World

The Far Side of the World is the tenth of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, which means I'm now halfway through the series. (Counting the remaining books to work this out I discovered that I own two copies of The Wine-Dark Sea - does anyone need one?) This one takes Jack and Stephen, once again on board the Surprise, round Cape Horn and into the vast expanse of the South Pacific in pursuit of a US naval ship, the Norfolk, which has been sent to prey on British whalers. As always with O'Brian's novels, though, it's less about the ostensible mission and more about the smaller incidents and accidents of day-to-day shipboard life, dealing with extremes of weather and all the difficulties resulting in a large group of people co-existing in a small space for a long time. It is, as always, a delight; I read O'Brian much more for the prose and the characters than I do for the plot, and the descriptions of the voyage, the weather, the marine life and occasional landfalls are wonderful. There are also many delightful interactions between the characters; I particularly enjoyed the sequence where Stephen falls overboard (surely not, I hear no-one at all cry) and he and Jack, who has dived to his rescue without a moment's hesitation, become separated from the ship and are rescued by a boat of Polynesian Amazons, while Jack's tendency to misquotation results in some very funny moments. A lovely book to immerse myself in.

Reading: Fun Home

Fun Home is a memoir by Alison Bechdel (yes, Alison Bechdel of the Bechdel-Wallace Test) in the form of a graphic novel. I picked up a copy in the Turl Street Oxfam bookshop a while ago, where it was shelved under SF because the Turl Street Oxfam bookshop clearly can't get their heads around the concept of non-SF graphic novels (I found Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis there under SF as well) and picked it up today mostly because I am trying to reduce the size of the physical TBR pile a bit before I go on holiday taking only my Kindle, and I knew it would be a quick read.

It's a story of an odd, slightly gothic childhood in smalltown Pennsylvania - the "fun home" of the title is actually funeral home that is the family business, and as a small child Bechdel identifies her family with the Addams Family - but it's mostly the story of Bechdel's relationship with her father, who died in what may have been an accident and may have been suicide in 1980, when she was twenty, a few months after her coming out to her parents had prompted her mother to tell her about her father's string of affairs with other men (often the teenage boys from his high school classes who he hired as babysitters and to help in the garden). Rather than being told chronologically, each chapter looks at Bechdel's early life from a slightly different angle, sometimes returning to the same events more than once. It's full of literary references, which seems appropriate given that her father was a high-school English teacher as well as directing a funeral home, and books were a key point of connection between father and daughter. It's clever, interesting and equal parts sad and funny, while Bechdel's drawings complement her text perfectly; I liked it a lot.

Reading: The Hunting of the Snark

I can't remember exactly how old I was when I first read Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark - probably ten or so - but I've loved it ever since for its delightful silliness. It's a verse epic in eight fits, telling the tale of an ill-fated voyage in quest of the Snark, a creature whose exact nature is specified, undertaken by a crew with a motley assortment of unlikely occupations. It is utterly nonsensical, but also rather touching in places (I particularly like the unlikely friendship between the Butcher and the Beaver), and frequently very, very funny.

I recently acquired a copy of the Tate edition with Tove Jansson's illustrations (originally commissioned in 1959 for a Swedish-language edition) and her drawings, which are very reminiscent of the pictures from the Moomin books, odd and sometimes a little creepy, complement the text beautifully.