Twenty years of Reading the Past: some highlights and reflections

I started posting regularly at Reading the Past twenty years ago this week, in late March 2006. This was during the heyday of blogging. The historical fiction blogosphere was a vibrant place, with new reviews going up daily and avid discussions taking place online across the globe.

The publishing industry didn’t know what to do with book bloggers, these so-called amateur reviewers who set their own rules and didn’t answer to an outside authority. Newspapers’ book sections were being eliminated (sound familiar?), and so the groundswell of individual, enthusiastic online voices could no longer be ignored. We had several hugely popular BookBloggerCons in NYC, held just before BookExpo at the Javits Center, as well as meet-and-greet opportunities where I met reviewers and publicists I’m still in touch with today. The book blogging community is awesome.

In some circles, though, bloggers weren’t exactly seen as respectable. Even by (especially by) many literary authors with new books out.

Writer Richard Ford, famously, had strong opinions about bloggers. To quote from the NYT article linked above (“Are Book Reviewers Out of Print,” Motoko Rich, May 2, 2007):

Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

Living here in the Midwest, on the outskirts of a small university town 45 miles west of Terre Haute, this was starting to feel personal, but these comments were more galvanizing than discouraging. Reviewing skill isn’t based around geography. Bloggers continued to write and review as we’d always done.

A corner of my bookish basement in the rural Midwest. It’s not a bad place to be.

And now, a couple decades later, as publishers continue to adjust to the myriad ways books are being discussed and discovered, individual voices have become more important than ever.

Book blogs still exist, of course, though the terminology and format have adapted to reader preferences. I remember the first time, a few years ago, I got an email from someone saying she enjoyed my historical fiction newsletter. It hadn’t occurred to me beforehand that my blog had become a newsletter, but the posts did go out over email, so a newsletter it now was. I’m happy with that.

For this major anniversary, I decided to dig through the archive and highlight 20-odd posts that felt significant or memorable in some way, or at least representative of the different types of content I’d been writing. These are in no particular order. For longtime readers of this site, some may be familiar, but hopefully recaps from these older posts will draw your attention to interesting books you haven’t read before.

In 2010, I interviewed author Sarah Dunant about her novel Sacred Hearts, historical fiction about a reluctant new arrival to a convent in 16th-century Ferrara. This was pre-Zoom. For this low-tech interview, I phoned her at her hotel room on one of her US book tours (arranged through her publicist), and I scribbled things down as fast as I could.

Years ago, I wrote up a series of posts called “Reviews of Obscure Books,” covering novels that were super rare, long-forgotten, or both. I may revive it someday. Diana Norman’s witty and profound King of the Last Days, set during the reign of England’s Henry II, is a book I wish would be brought back into print. For a time it had been reissued as an ebook, I believe, but I can’t find it anymore. Her Adelia Aguilar medieval mysteries written as Ariana Franklin, set during the same era, are easier to find.

A favorite review, from 2007, for Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow, about the Brontë sisters. Loved this book! The US title of this novel is Charlotte and Emily (poor Anne, always getting left out).

All the historical novel titles you could ever need. Are we sensing a trend in book naming conventions here? This started with All the Light We Cannot See and went absolutely crazy.

In 2013, I took part in the online historical fiction course called Plagues, Witches, and War run by professor and historical novelist Bruce Holsinger from the University of Virginia. It was on the Coursera MOOC platform. This course is still free and still running, so if you’re in search of deeper background on the genre, its history, and its practitioners, I recommend it. As one of the course assignments, we were asked to describe a primary source we’d found in an archive and write about it. I found an interesting one housed at the Library of Congress website, but deeper investigation led me down an unexpected path. Read more at A Puritan Maiden’s Diary: The Early American Primary Source That Wasn’t. The title gives away my conclusion, and the research was fascinating. I emailed the LC afterward about the supposed primary source, and they removed it from their archive.

Sharyn McCrumb’s The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the Depression, is based on a real-life court case. I enjoy reading McCrumb’s novels not only because of her beautiful settings, but because they offer plenty to talk about, even if not everything works for me. Her The Ballad of Tom Dooley, based on a traditional Appalachian folk ballad, is another such.

Reading lists covering trends and other popular topics: women in science and math, Jewish historical fiction, women and WWII, the Tudor era, and books with memorable cover designs.

Unintentional travel-by-novel. I have a habit of doing this, visiting a place and discovering afterward that I’d recently bought a novel set there. Such was the case with Chris Nickson’s The Crooked Spire, set in medieval Chesterfield, England, and with Elizabeth St.John’s The Lady of the Tower, set partly at the Lydiard Park estate in Wiltshire. In the instance of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, I visited Bletchley Park over a year before reading the novel, and memories of the trip definitely enhanced the reading experience.

Just because these are really good books: Lynn Cullen’s Twain’s End (about Samuel Clemens’ relationship with his secretary Isabel Lyon); Maryse Condé’s re-creation of her grandmother’s life, My Mother’s Mother; Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, a mystery of 1920s Bombay (which now has many sequels); and Sally Gunning’s The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, one of the author’s winning historicals of colonial Massachusetts.

And to wrap things up, some more recommendations, all set in the agricultural regions and towns of the Midwest: Laird Hunt’s Zorrie, a woman’s ordinary yet uncommon life across 20th-century Indiana and Illinois; Laurie Loewenstein’s Unmentionables, in which a progressive female lecturer finds herself stuck in small-town Illinois in 1917; Michelle Hoover’s The Quickening, about women’s lives in the farming region of early 20th-century western Iowa; my interview with Rosslyn Elliott about Fairer than Morning, her inspirational romance set in Rushville, Ohio in the 1820s; The Island of Doves by Kelly O’Connor McNees, set on Mackinac Island (Michigan) in the 1830s; and Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen, who pairs her offbeat characters with a setting of the northern Minnesota backwoods in the late 1930s. If you think of this region as “flyover country,” read these novels to get a glimpse of the cultural history and fascinating stories found in smaller places.

Whether you’ve been visiting this site for twenty years or only the last twenty minutes, or something in between, thanks very much for reading.