Bibliography
Sep. 27th, 2013 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyThe Cloistered Elite: A Sociological Analysis of the English Public Boarding School - John Wakeford
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feanelwa lent me this ages ago, and the move reminded me to read it. It was published in 1969, and goodness is it frightening when you think about the implications. Essentially Wakeford uses the model of the total institution (something I'd not really come across before but of which Thinking Allowed recently gave a brief overview of in the context of Erving Goffman's work) to analyse the public school and its effect on the young men who attend them. The young women get some attention, but the focus is on the chaps and the sorts of ways in which homogeneity and conformity are imposed upon them at a young age. It's fascinating, not least because some of the reactions to circumstance (for instance, a class internally policing its high achievers so that the rest of the form isn't pushed too hard) also materialises in other classrooms. However, it's the total institution element which is so unnerving, and the effects of that conditioning upon the young men as they move into their adult lives. Of course, as a work published in 1969, it may or may not have much to say about the public school system now - but it certainly sheds light on the men in senior positions who were in the system at that time.
Stone Heart - Charlie Fletcher
I read this as part of a general query into whether I will offer something for LonCon3's academic track. It's technically a children's book, but with an intriguing element - a young boy becomes shifted into a world where statues can move, and enters the war between human-shaped and animal-shaped statues. There's a lot of explicit rhetoric about levels and shifting and different Londons, which makes the space-theory part of me happy. There's also some attempt to deal with the emotional bruising of being a teenager whose parents have split up or died (or indeed both), which is clearly the YA/difficult-life-stuff-happens element, and I suspect will probably become a bit more interesting later in the trilogy. Lots of familial tension (again, as one might expect from the genre), but a lot of history too - not to mention a real love of London and how it works. I'm debating reading the other books - if I put an abstract forward, I really should - but I did rather enjoy this despite clearly not being the target audience.
Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
This also was recommended by people in my trawl of the literature on London and Stuff, and while it's no good for the direction my thinking is going for LonCon and beyond, wow. I can't remember the last time I was actively sad when a book ended. It's a lovely mix of police procedural, puzzle/crime solving, and fantastical magical historical webbing. Peter Grant, a young officer in the Metropolitan Police, is just coming off his two years of beat work and is about to be assigned to a deadly dull paperwork unit - when he happens to talk to a ghost who has witnessed a really unpleasant and peculiar murder. Things go downhill from there, with Peter becoming an apprentice magician, discovering that technology and magic do weird things to each other, and meeting the two spirits of the Thames in order to negotiate a peace agreement. Because, y'know, keeping the Queen's peace applies to the mythical as well as the real world.
(There is Classical Content, in that there's a time travel journal that goes back to Roman London and beyond, but sadly it's not going to fit in with what I'm thinking. But still, Romans!)
As I say, I thought this was fabulous and really enjoyed it, and have the next book on reservation at the library already. So there we are.
feanelwa lent me this ages ago, and the move reminded me to read it. It was published in 1969, and goodness is it frightening when you think about the implications. Essentially Wakeford uses the model of the total institution (something I'd not really come across before but of which Thinking Allowed recently gave a brief overview of in the context of Erving Goffman's work) to analyse the public school and its effect on the young men who attend them. The young women get some attention, but the focus is on the chaps and the sorts of ways in which homogeneity and conformity are imposed upon them at a young age. It's fascinating, not least because some of the reactions to circumstance (for instance, a class internally policing its high achievers so that the rest of the form isn't pushed too hard) also materialises in other classrooms. However, it's the total institution element which is so unnerving, and the effects of that conditioning upon the young men as they move into their adult lives. Of course, as a work published in 1969, it may or may not have much to say about the public school system now - but it certainly sheds light on the men in senior positions who were in the system at that time.Stone Heart - Charlie Fletcher
I read this as part of a general query into whether I will offer something for LonCon3's academic track. It's technically a children's book, but with an intriguing element - a young boy becomes shifted into a world where statues can move, and enters the war between human-shaped and animal-shaped statues. There's a lot of explicit rhetoric about levels and shifting and different Londons, which makes the space-theory part of me happy. There's also some attempt to deal with the emotional bruising of being a teenager whose parents have split up or died (or indeed both), which is clearly the YA/difficult-life-stuff-happens element, and I suspect will probably become a bit more interesting later in the trilogy. Lots of familial tension (again, as one might expect from the genre), but a lot of history too - not to mention a real love of London and how it works. I'm debating reading the other books - if I put an abstract forward, I really should - but I did rather enjoy this despite clearly not being the target audience.
Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
This also was recommended by people in my trawl of the literature on London and Stuff, and while it's no good for the direction my thinking is going for LonCon and beyond, wow. I can't remember the last time I was actively sad when a book ended. It's a lovely mix of police procedural, puzzle/crime solving, and fantastical magical historical webbing. Peter Grant, a young officer in the Metropolitan Police, is just coming off his two years of beat work and is about to be assigned to a deadly dull paperwork unit - when he happens to talk to a ghost who has witnessed a really unpleasant and peculiar murder. Things go downhill from there, with Peter becoming an apprentice magician, discovering that technology and magic do weird things to each other, and meeting the two spirits of the Thames in order to negotiate a peace agreement. Because, y'know, keeping the Queen's peace applies to the mythical as well as the real world.
(There is Classical Content, in that there's a time travel journal that goes back to Roman London and beyond, but sadly it's not going to fit in with what I'm thinking. But still, Romans!)
As I say, I thought this was fabulous and really enjoyed it, and have the next book on reservation at the library already. So there we are.
