Review: BBC History Magazine Delivery Options

As a long time fan of BBC History Magazine I was frustrated when my bifocals were no longer up to the challenge of it's text. It is a beautifully designed magazine, the sort I enjoy flipping through as much as I enjoy reading. Unfortunately the effect of small fonts and bold colors meant slow going. So last year I started exploring my iPad options.

My first stop was Zinio. The subscription price was reasonable and I read other magazines with this app. Unfortunately, the thing that makes Zinio ideal for those is not enabled for the BHM. When reading articles in some magazines, Zinio brings the selected article up in a pop up window, allowing you to enjoy the layout without sacrificing readability. For BHM you can only pinch and zoom - moving the entire page and being forced to zoom it back before turning the page. It's tedious, but not impossible. My life doesn't lend itself to tedium, so I have 12 issues all half read in my Zinio library. A big change from my cover to cover preference.

Next I gave Amazon a shot. With the Kindle Fire on the market I assumed the BHM would be a full color magazine with all the detailing I adore. It was very much not. Large blocks of black and white text, tiny tokens of art begging for space on the page, the effect was to make me appreciate even more the artistry of BHM's staff. Kindle for iPad rendered BHM high school textbook dull. I quickly abandoned it. It was a can of Ensure when I wanted a full meal.

The last option under consideration was the native iPad app. I use a few Newsstand apps. The lack of consistency across them is similar to the lack of consistency across Zinio, but with a further irksome aspect. Each Newsstand app requires it's own password and it's own operation quirks. While the magazine in the iPad app is the most attractive (and possibly the most readable) it still lacks complete immersion. The iPad native version of BHM is my favorite, so I committed for a year. We'll see how that stacks up against my Zinio experience.

I didn't try Google Play out - but there is always next year. BHM has a roundup of your delivery options with prices per country as well. It's interesting to me that unlike American based magazines UK Print subscribers have to pay extra for a digital version. The U.S. market has a weird convention that buying a paper version means free access to the digital one. I think digital delivery is a medium that hasn't quite matured but my eyes hope we find the right balance soon.

Review: Her Ladyship's Companion by Joanna Bourne

 Oh, Joanna Bourne. 

While some girls have it bad for sparkly vampire triangles, I am all about the traditional regency with a cliff and a few dead governesses. Give me a mysterious guardian and his young imperiled ward over melting folds and throbbing pleasure poles any day of the week. I am all about the nicest room she's ever had and the strange dysfunction of the new household. With all of this being true, how did I ever miss Her Ladyship's Companion? (I can answer that, actually. In 1983 I was buying most of my books used. As well, I was an imprint snob. Signet and Dell Candlelight were my drugs of choice.) While I am sorry that I read Her Ladyship's Companion already knowing the primary players, I can't regret coming to it so late in it's life. Too many beloved authors never published again. Imagine, however, a world in which Bourne had continued publishing gothics, a world where I could find a backlist dozens of volumes deep. I can never be new to Carla Kelly or new to Edith Layton, but I could have been new to Joanna Bourne, if Joanna Bourne hadn't gone and had a life. 

What's done is done! The popularity of Downton Abbey makes this the perfect time to republish older Regencies. The spoiled daughter of the house, the frustrated member of the house party, the acerbic and all seeing matriarch. and of course, always, the young ingenue trying to discover true love before someone kills her. In this case Giles has recruited the unfortunately named Melissa to act as a companion to the lady in question. He'd have done better to replace the recently deceased governess of the house, but putting Melissa in a slightly different role gives her a broader view of the action. Is someone trying to kill the young master? Is he a lonely and overly imaginative child? C'mon! They have a cliff AND an island! What do you think?

Her Ladyship's Companion also features the first appearance of Bourne's personal Rothgar, the beloved Adrian Hawkhurst, I expected Bourne would have reinvented these characters for her newer works but Adrian certainly works both as Hawker and as the charming houseguest we see through Melissa's eyes. A reader approaching Her Ladyship's Companion looking for a modern tale may be slightly disappointed, but the fault lies in their desires. In 1983 Bourne delivered a pitch perfect tweak of the gothic regency and it holds up very well today. I longed for a shelf full of books just like it as soon as I closed the cover. Is that always the effect of Joanna Bourne? In some ways, she hasn't changed her style at all.

Review: The Autobiography by Elisabeth Sladen

This is a far better book than it needed to be. Isn't that the hallmark of Elisabeth Sladen's career? Without her careful attention, would Sarah Jane Smith have been the icon she became? Of course, Sladen was far more than just Sarah Jane Smith. She was a wife, a mother, a theater actress and a woman with a serious work ethic. In that order.

Sladen preserves her private life in what is largely a career memoir, but when she does dip into her personal situation it is to illustrate a career moment. Given a choice between her family or herself, Sladen chooses her family. It answers the question of why she wasn't a larger star in her post Doctor Who years and it also answers how she and her husband were able to manage a two actor marriage. Elisabeth Sladen, for all her career regrets, lived a life that placed the personal above the professional. I respect her even more for putting her humanity above her ambition.

The Autobiography is so clearly in Sladen's voice that the fan in me felt the loss all over again when I closed the book. Even when telling of her frustrations and personal conflicts Sladen looked for a brighter side of things. The joke is always on her, the buck always stops at her desk. She is not one to ignore professional conflict, neither is she one to belittle the person with whom she conflicted. Sladen follows every bitter memory with a tasty one. The result is the reader feeling as though they have spent an afternoon with her, hearing her actor tales firsthand. Sladen reveals that she, like many of us, thought Eccleston ended his Doctor Who run too soon. Perhaps he was the wiser man, as one who has watched several leave the role Sladen knew that the drop from star to mortal is stunning. The show is the star and the actors merely participants.

I don't know how a reader who is not a fan of Doctor Who would respond to this book. Although Sladen discusses her early days and her post Who days it is largely a story of her days as Sarah Jane Smith. Sladen understands where her core fans reside and she meets them there. From her frustration with the BBC's failure to properly monetize in America to her appreciation for Whovian loyalty, Sladen knows the audience for this book. When she began, she had no idea she was ill. I wonder if she would have changed it? Would the sharp feelings be further muted? Perhaps it is for the best that Sladen set the manuscript in a drawer, forgotten, and let her family decide to bring it to market. As the book ends and the afterword begins, Elisabeth Sladen (like Sarah Jane Smith) is looking forward to her next adventure. Neither of them will be forgotten.

Here A Duke, There A Duke, Everywhere A Duke, Duke...

Snow White's First Clue, a photo by meoskop on Flickr.

I am on Duke Overload. I closed the final page on Eloisa James Winning The Wallflower and thought if I see one more Duke, even Mr. Nukem, I would scream. I realize that the Duke has become the go to guy for Romanceland, he is the Greek Billionaire Tycoon of UK set novels. (Look what's happened to the Greek economy. We are experiencing an epic ducal bubble.) Why is The Duke currently so prevalent? Is it an ultimate power grab? I don't understand it. Why would our heroine want to be a Duchess? Wouldn't she know some seriously unhappy women already holding that title? A wise heroine only needs to consider the Devonshire family tree to know that a satisfying life is not a Duke away. Now our heroines are choosing between multiple Dukes.

It rather makes my head hurt.

The Duke is a creature of entitlement and power. He has wide ranging responsibility and has been raised in an isolated chamber. His world view is one of insular concerns and privileged assumptions. Even when our Duke is carefully grown outside the petri dish of his breeding and catapulted to the higher realm, his concerns are not our concerns. When I read about someone's patrician features or evidence of nobility hidden beneath the dirt of their lowered circumstances I wonder what our problem is.

Do you not know any rich people?

I know a great number of them. For every absolutely wonderful person there are a thousand more. Maybe two thousand. Conversations among the socially concerned and wealthy in America are enough to make you stick a fork in your brain. The deep divide between worthy people and unworthy people is a thin veneer on the ingrained class and racial biases of many of the elite classes. When all you have is knowing you are better than someone else, you say stupid things (like Newt Gingrich's epic assumption that poor children have no work ethic). When you tell me your hero is a Duke I see Newt, I see Trump. When her refined breeding cannot be denied, I see Paris Hilton or Ivanka. (Actually, Ivanka looks she'd be fun to spend an evening with. That said, I don't see her leading a rally against the anti-semetic clubs of the Palm Beaches.) Romanceland is full of compassionate conservatives. I just don't buy it because I know them. Everything changes when it goes from the abstract to the concrete, from giving the Haitian maid a bonus to your son marrying her.

Romance used to examine class with a little less awe. Maybe it still does and I've had a bad run. I do know I have read books this year with the heroine picking coins out of mud (still with her delicate bones speaking to her better beginnings) and starving brothers and desperate times. It just seems the noise of eugenics and class is getting louder. There's a passage in an upcoming book where the hero muses he can't be understood. No one of his current class can comprehend where he came from and no one of his former class could comfortably walk in his current one. Why then are we so eager to embrace the highest most exclusionary class of all? I don't think birth equates worth or wealth opportunity. Too much wealth is toxic. Too little is toxic.

Give me a Magistrate over a Duke.

Review: BBC History Magazine

 But wait, you might be saying, this is not a book. It's not even an e-book. You're right. I can't deny that BBC History Magazine is, by it's own admission, not a book. It occurred to me that some readers may not be aware of this really outstanding publication. It seems like a lot for the American reader to spend on a magazine, I know. I take advantage of the Christmas subscription rates. December often brings a sharp reduction. (The normal digital price hovers around $7 USD, the paper issue around $8 USD.)

Yet this is one of the very few things I still purchase in paper format. Without fail, without question, without blinking at price fluctuations when I did not have a subscription. For the price of an Agency paperback I get hours more of enjoyment. I listen to the podcast as well, but never before reading the issue cover to cover. Sometimes, rarely, I disagree with BBC History utterly. Challenged on an article referring to Native Americans as 'Indians' the Letter Column asserted that 'Indian' was the correct (indeed preferred) American term even citing the Bureau of Indian Affairs as proof. Let's just say it's not as simplistic as it was made out to be.

Those sort of quibbles aside, BBC History consistently offers excellent and engaging history made completely accessible. Want to know what the streets of Tudor London smelled like? They've got you covered, right down to why it was bad but better than the Seine. Wondering if the Roman Occupation was all that? Britannia has a defender in BBC History. If I had to give up an expenditure in my entertainment budget, this magazine would be one of the very last items to go. We don't have an American magazine of this caliber, obsessed as we are with WW2 and the Civil War. A magazine that would delve into King Philip's War or the Trouble With Trumans? Not easy to find, and often slanted to a certain political point of view to boot.

If you've a magazine of the same quality as BBC History, please recommend it to me. If you've never checked out BBC History hit their website up to sample the wares.