![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Feb. 19th, 2025 08:17 amWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
Daphne Du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall, a book that is part memories about Cornwall during Du Maurier’s youth, partly a history of Cornwall, and partly a series of colorful local legends about smugglers and tinners and eccentric vicars etc. My favorite was the tale of the most recent eccentric vicar, who installed ten foot walls around the vicarage, bought about a dozen savage dogs, and installed a box at the end of his drive so all deliveries could be made at a distance.
The locals begged the church to appoint a vicar who might occasionally do vicar-y things like “visiting the sick and dying,” but as the vicar was still giving the Sunday service every week (in a church with pews filled with cardboard cutouts, as his parishioners had fled), the Church pled that its hands were tied.
I also finished Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, which is fine, but not as detailed as I’d hoped about the actual work that servants did.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward in Vanity Fair! Does anyone care about spoilers for a book that is over 150 years old? If you do, they are upcoming so please look away.
My Waterloo predictions were exactly backwards: Rawdon Crawley survived, while George Osborne died with a bullet in his heart, too swiftly even for Amelia to rush to his bedside to weep.
Amelia has now spent the last SEVEN YEARS in mourning. Mr. Thackeray, Amelia is so boring. Mr. Thackeray has foreseen this complaint and assures us all that female readers who think Amelia is boring are just JEALOUS because the men LIKE HER SO MUCH, but Mr. Thackeray, this is not jealousy-inducing when the character in question is all, “I could never return your feelings, for I remain in deep mourning for the husband who barely give two pins about me.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Feeling a yen to continue on with the George Smiley books. Next up is The Secret Pilgrim.
Daphne Du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall, a book that is part memories about Cornwall during Du Maurier’s youth, partly a history of Cornwall, and partly a series of colorful local legends about smugglers and tinners and eccentric vicars etc. My favorite was the tale of the most recent eccentric vicar, who installed ten foot walls around the vicarage, bought about a dozen savage dogs, and installed a box at the end of his drive so all deliveries could be made at a distance.
The locals begged the church to appoint a vicar who might occasionally do vicar-y things like “visiting the sick and dying,” but as the vicar was still giving the Sunday service every week (in a church with pews filled with cardboard cutouts, as his parishioners had fled), the Church pled that its hands were tied.
I also finished Lucy Lethbridge’s Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, which is fine, but not as detailed as I’d hoped about the actual work that servants did.
What I’m Reading Now
Onward in Vanity Fair! Does anyone care about spoilers for a book that is over 150 years old? If you do, they are upcoming so please look away.
My Waterloo predictions were exactly backwards: Rawdon Crawley survived, while George Osborne died with a bullet in his heart, too swiftly even for Amelia to rush to his bedside to weep.
Amelia has now spent the last SEVEN YEARS in mourning. Mr. Thackeray, Amelia is so boring. Mr. Thackeray has foreseen this complaint and assures us all that female readers who think Amelia is boring are just JEALOUS because the men LIKE HER SO MUCH, but Mr. Thackeray, this is not jealousy-inducing when the character in question is all, “I could never return your feelings, for I remain in deep mourning for the husband who barely give two pins about me.”
What I Plan to Read Next
Feeling a yen to continue on with the George Smiley books. Next up is The Secret Pilgrim.
