Wednesday Reading Meme
Oct. 30th, 2024 08:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Vivien Alcock’s The Haunting of Cassie Palmer. Cassie is the seventh child of a seventh child, and her medium mother expects great things of her, much to Cassie’s horror. But when Cassie discovers that her mother is a fake (or at least occasionally fakes her seances), she decides in a burst of relief to go to the cemetery to test her own supposed gifts and prove them fake too, once and for all. But instead she raises a ghost! Oops. An eerie and unusual ghost, as one would expect of Alcock, although I didn’t think this was one of her best.
Similarly, The Looking Glass War is perhaps not one of John Le Carré’s best, although possibly I did it no favors reading it so soon after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I went into it with the attitude “What fuckery is the Circus up to now?” and was therefore unsurprised when the Circus was indeed up to fuckery, although I was a bit surprised that LeClerc didn’t seem to realize he’d been played at the end when Smiley shows up at LeClerc’s operation all “Game’s over! Time to pack up your fun little wargame that we’ve enabled by giving you wildly out of date tech so you could send your agent across the Iron Curtain to certain doom.”
Not surprised that the Circus sacrificed an agent to certain doom for no better reason than to do one down on a rival agency, but surprised that LeClerc the leader of the rival agency doesn’t appear to grasp that this is indeed what just happened. (Young agent Avery meanwhile is sobbing into his hands because he didn’t realize that the agent was expendable. “You made me do it for you, made me love him!” he accuses, and everyone else just ignores him because honestly. So vulgar.)
What I’m Reading Now
You may be interested to learn that we have a brief continuation of Jane Eyre’s fairy theme in Shirley. After Robert Moore fails to take his leave of Shirley and Caroline at a fete, Shirley impetuous drags Caroline down a shortcut to cut him off on his way home. “Where did you come from?” Moore demands. “Are you fairies? I left two like you, one in purple, one in white, standing on the top of a bank, four fields off, but a minute ago.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Last week I posted about reading Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Adventure, andlittlerhymes piped up that she’d loved that book and the sequel. “THE SEQUEL???” I screamed. Of course I had to request The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure through ILL.
Vivien Alcock’s The Haunting of Cassie Palmer. Cassie is the seventh child of a seventh child, and her medium mother expects great things of her, much to Cassie’s horror. But when Cassie discovers that her mother is a fake (or at least occasionally fakes her seances), she decides in a burst of relief to go to the cemetery to test her own supposed gifts and prove them fake too, once and for all. But instead she raises a ghost! Oops. An eerie and unusual ghost, as one would expect of Alcock, although I didn’t think this was one of her best.
Similarly, The Looking Glass War is perhaps not one of John Le Carré’s best, although possibly I did it no favors reading it so soon after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I went into it with the attitude “What fuckery is the Circus up to now?” and was therefore unsurprised when the Circus was indeed up to fuckery, although I was a bit surprised that LeClerc didn’t seem to realize he’d been played at the end when Smiley shows up at LeClerc’s operation all “Game’s over! Time to pack up your fun little wargame that we’ve enabled by giving you wildly out of date tech so you could send your agent across the Iron Curtain to certain doom.”
Not surprised that the Circus sacrificed an agent to certain doom for no better reason than to do one down on a rival agency, but surprised that LeClerc the leader of the rival agency doesn’t appear to grasp that this is indeed what just happened. (Young agent Avery meanwhile is sobbing into his hands because he didn’t realize that the agent was expendable. “You made me do it for you, made me love him!” he accuses, and everyone else just ignores him because honestly. So vulgar.)
What I’m Reading Now
You may be interested to learn that we have a brief continuation of Jane Eyre’s fairy theme in Shirley. After Robert Moore fails to take his leave of Shirley and Caroline at a fete, Shirley impetuous drags Caroline down a shortcut to cut him off on his way home. “Where did you come from?” Moore demands. “Are you fairies? I left two like you, one in purple, one in white, standing on the top of a bank, four fields off, but a minute ago.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Last week I posted about reading Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Adventure, and
littlerhymes piped up that she’d loved that book and the sequel. “THE SEQUEL???” I screamed. Of course I had to request The Fantastic Dinosaur Adventure through ILL.
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Date: 2024-10-30 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-30 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-30 08:32 pm (UTC)Plus: prime election fraud! Letting any old being who wanders in off the Fay Paths vote, I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS THE NATION COMING TO.
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Date: 2024-10-30 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-30 08:56 pm (UTC)"How did he do on his first hundred days? ... Oh. I see. Well, heat up the iron shoes, then!"
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Date: 2024-11-01 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-01 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-02 10:27 am (UTC)\o/ Delighted to hear about the continuing fairy themes!
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Date: 2024-11-02 06:44 pm (UTC)