osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: dorothy sayers

What I Just Finished Reading

Loads of books! I went on a short vacation this weekend and did not take my computer, and I read piles of books and also did a lot of hiking and even got to see a couple of movies for my women film directors project, one by Agnes Varda & another by Dorothy Arzner, about which I will write reviews… later.

And by “piles of books” I mean three. (And I also finished Enid Blyton’s Last Term at Malory Towers before I headed out on the trip. The last of the Malory Towers books! How shall I get my boarding school fix now??? Probably the Twins at St. Claire’s or the Naughtiest Girl, this is actually not a difficult question at all.)

I finally got to read Dorothy Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club! Which I believe means that I am out of Lord Peter books, aside from Five Red Herrings which I have been Warned Against, which on the one hand is sad, but on the other… well, none of these books have Harriet Vane in them, now do they?

I also read E. K. Johnston’s Queen’s Shadow, which I thought was supposed to be super femslashy? - but now it occurs to me that it may have been Johnston’s Ahsoka that was supposed to be super femslashy, hmm. This one does include the delicious (and repeated!) line “My hands are yours,” but Padme and Sabe are separated for most of the book which does cut down on just how femslashy it can get.

Mostly what this book made me feel was exasperated at the prequel trilogy for just how criminally is underutilized Padme. Given that the trilogy is about, you know, the fall of the Republic, her political plotline should have gotten AT LEAST equal billing with whatever shenanigans Anakin was up to… but NO.

And! Last but far from least! Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls, which is the third book I tried for my reading challenge “a book outside your (genre) comfort zone,” - and third time’s the charm! Because I really liked this book. In fact, I liked it so much that I’m going to have to write a longer review of it; for now I will just say that it was really refreshing to read a book about quote-unquote “bad” girls in which the bad girls, although they sometimes suffer from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (and sometimes those slings etc. arise from the fact that their behavior is socially unacceptable), never suffer a comeuppance.

What I’m Reading Now

Henry Louis Gates’ Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, which is… well, it’s about as cheerful as you might imagine, from that title. It’s so depressing to read about Reconstruction, because the more I learn, the clearer it gets that the only thing that might have really changed the outcome was a lengthy Union military occupation, and even then… I’m not sure there’s a military occupation long enough that southern whites, at the end of it, would have gone “Oh yeah, white supremacy IS bad, maybe we should try… racial equality?”

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided that I should take advantage of the fact that I’m still working on Honeytrap to cram in at least one more Soviet history book: Anna Larina’s This I Will Not Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow which has been on my list… probably since I studied Soviet history in college.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week I zoomed through Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Baby, The Year of the Fortune Cookie, and The Year of the Three Sisters, and I could have read the final book in the series (actually a prequel) The Year of the Garden except I wasn’t ready for it to be over yet. The books are about a Chinese-American girl growing up in Cincinnati and the ebb and flow of her friendships over the years: for instance, one of her friends starts going to a different school and their friendship suffers for the separation, even though they do remain friends. It’s such a realistic progression, but also one that books often don’t reflect.

I also finished Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women, which frustrated me in exactly the same way as many of See’s other books, and yet this frustration has never dimmed my desire to read her new books as soon as they come out. There just aren’t that many adult historical fiction books centered on women’s friendships.

And I finished Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, which is a delight, because Sayers knows the advertising milieu so well because she worked in advertising herself - in fact she namechecks her own most successful campaign: Lord Peter’s Whifflets promotion will be “the biggest advertising stunt since the Mustard Club.” There’s also a self-insert in Miss Meteyard, the firm’s only female copywriter, who told an aspiring blackmailer to “publish and be damned” - which is just what Sayers told a man at her firm when he tried to blackmail her.

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started reading Annie Barrows’ Nothing, and I realize that the conceit of the book is that it’s a YA novel where nothing happens - no mystical powers, dystopias, dramatic love affairs, etc - but there are interesting ways to write stories about nothing much happening and three chapters in I’m not convinced that Barrows knows how to do this.

What I Plan to Read Next

The final book in the Anna Wang quintet, The Year of the Garden.

Also Elizabeth Wein’s A Thousand Sisters is on hold for me and the library says it should be here any day now and I soooo wanted it to come before I went on vacation, but it didn’t. :( But when I get back, it should be there!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, which has made me want to read his other books, of which there are many… because if there’s one thing I need, it’s a new author to follow, right?

I put off reading Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place because I got the impression somewhere that it was a self-righteous tract about how lying is always a sin, even if you’re lying to the Nazis to protect the Jews hidden in your attic. But now that I’ve read it I’m pretty sure this is actually just the way some Evangelical readers interpret the book, because Corrie had some relatives who followed this philosophy and it worked out for them, through either divine intervention or luck, depending on your view.

Corrie herself lies when necessary, although with pangs of conscience, because she had been raised in the belief system that lying is always wrong. But she doesn’t only lie when forced to it, but actually practices lying: the family shakes her awake at midnight to simulate a possible arrest by the Nazis, so she’ll have practice answering “We have no Jews here” rather than mumbling, groggy and disoriented, “Oh, they’re behind the false wall.”

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is another book I put off reading, in this case because I had the impression that Antonia gets raped at some point in the book, which also turns out to be incorrect. Maybe I should try to stop gathering impressions of books that I haven’t read, although probably it’s not entirely avoidable.

But actually in this case the delay worked out well, because I don’t think I would have appreciated the book as much when I was younger. It’s a slow book, with a lot of description of the Nebraska prairies and the different immigrant groups settling the country and not a lot of action: the narrator, Jim Burden, is often an onlooker rather than a participant, a little bit in love with Antonia and some of her friends (also strong immigrant girls), but not so much that the book ever becomes a love story. Or rather, it’s about love of a time and a place rather than a person.

What I’m Reading Now

The very first chapter of Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women burnt up my hope that maybe the heroines would remain friends for the entire book, but it also got me all invested so I kept reading. All of See’s books seem to have this ur-scene where the heroines’ friendship shatters when they confront each other over some great betrayal - I don’t know why she feels the need to repeat it over and over, but I should probably just accept it and stop hoping for something else.

And although it does share this tic with See’s other work, this book is one of her best - perhaps not quite up there with Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but then that is the first See book I read so it may have an unfair advantage. The Island of Sea Women is set on Jeju Island, where women deep sea divers are traditionally the main support for their families, and this portrayal of a traditional society where women have a lot more power and freedom than in many traditional societies is so interesting.

I’ve also been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, which is an unexpectedly delightful look at office culture in interwar Britain. Lord Peter has taken a job as a copy writer for an advertising firm in order to investigate a murder, using his two middle names, Death Bredon, and yes Dorothy Sayers did in fact give her detective the name Death, Lord Peter is the Most Extra and I love it.

What I Plan to Read Next

evelyn_b, we had talked about maybe reading Kristin Lavransdattar in tandem. Are you still interested? I’ve acquired a copy, so we could start whenever is convenient for you.

I’ve also realized that Andrea Cheng’s The Year of the Book, which I read last year, is in fact the first book of a five-book series (although alas there will be no more after that: Cheng died a few years ago), so now I want to read them all.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I did loads of reading this week! So much so that I wish I’d waited to post last Wednesday’s reading meme till I’d finished Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, just to make this week’s a little less cluttered. Sayers has a real gift for coming up with uniquely chilling methods of murder - not gruesome, but chilling - in this book and Unnatural Death as well.

Usually I don’t include short stories in these round-ups, but I thought I’d mention Marie Brennan’s “From the Editorial Page of the Falchester Weekly Review,” just in case there are any fellow fans of her Lady Trent books on here who haven’t heard of it. Lady Trent exchanges increasingly sharp letters with a scientist who claims he has discovered a cockatrice.

I finally finished Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter! I’m afraid the book and I never clicked: it’s pretty much 200 straight pages of pure nature writing, and I can do about two paragraphs of nature writing before my mind starts to wander, but if nature writing is your jam then this book seems like exactly the sort of thing that you might like.

And, prompted by the 25 Must-Read Books for Women list, I read Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye, which is crushing - crushing - crushing - and I want to read more of her books - possibly once I’ve had some time to recover from this one, though, because did I mention it is crushing.

AND ALSO (deep breath) I finished Maria Thompson Daviess’ The Road to Providence, which is a piece of early 20th century fluff about a singer (often referred to as “the singer lady”) who is referred to a doctor in the idyllic small Kentucky town of Providence after her vocal cords were “frizzled” when she drank a glass of ice water right after a performance. Do they fall in love? Is the sky blue?

One thing that struck me: everyone in town expects the doctor to provide them with updates on his patients as a matter of course. (“How’s ol’ Miz Bostick doing today?” and questions of that sort.) I imagine if some rando asked he might not comply, but everyone in town knows everyone else, so in a sense they all have an interest, although obviously not one that would entitle a doctor to breach patient confidentiality today. When did that norm change?

What I’m Reading Now

Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons, Jackson’s second of her two cheerful memoirs of minor domestic chaos. The more I learn about Jackson’s life the more these memoirs seem more fictional than her actual novels: her husband comes across as such an absent-mindedly benign figure, when in real life he cheated on her constantly and insisted on telling her about it. Why can’t you at least pretend to hide your cheating like a normal cad, Stanley?

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m starting another book on my list of 25 Must-Read Books for Women: Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Winifred Holtby’s South Riding, which I enjoyed so much I now want to read Holtby’s other novels (particularly Anderby Wold, which is also set in Yorkshire)… which are no longer readily available, so it may take me some time to track them down. But then the general critical opinion seems to be that South Riding is Holtby’s masterpiece, so it may be just as well not to rush on to other books right after reading it.

I’m also thinking about rewatching the miniseries South Riding to compare the two - my recollection (based on watching the miniseries years ago) is that the overall effect of the miniseries is much grimmer than the book, possibly because the focus is not so wide-ranging as in the book - so when tragedy strikes, there are fewer other stories to offset the sadness.

William Heyliger’s The Big Leaguer. Heyliger wrote epically earnest fiction for boys in the mid-twentieth century; I like his work both because it is so very earnest (I recognize this is not everyone’s cup of tea) but also because he’s willing to give his characters some pretty major flaws, more so than a lot of authors are. This one I think is a bit repetitive - Marty’s big flaw is that he’s a know-it-all (without actually knowing very much) and nearly ruins his team’s pitcher with his bad advice, which is an interesting flaw but doesn’t need to be hammered home quite so many times.

I also read Marie Brennan’s “Daughter of Necessity,” which is a short story rather than a novel, but I thought I would mention it here because it’s a Penelope story - Penelope from the Odyssey - Penelope weaving and unweaving not only to put her suitors off, but because a drop of divinity runs in her veins and she can weave the future - only she keeps weaving futures she doesn’t want. I quite liked this.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started The Nine Tailors and MY GOD, YOU GUYS, THE BELLS. It at once seems totally random and yet also deeply in character that Lord Peter totally used to ring church bells as a hobby.

I’ve also begun Maria Thompson Daviess The Road to Providence, in which a singer with frazzled vocal cords has been sent to recuperate in a small Kentucky town under the aegis of Doctor Mayberry and his mother, the folk healer, whose warm heart and common sense bid fair to heal more people than all of Doctor Mayberry’s doctoring (although of course Mother Mayberry is fit to burst with pride in her son). I feel that the Pollyanna-ish strain really ought to grate on me, but instead the whole thing is growing on me the more I read.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library is finally - finally! - getting me Ben MacIntyre’s The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War. I loved MacIntyre’s book about Kim Philby (frankly I would have thought that was the greatest espionage story of the Cold War), so hopefully this one is just as good.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I read Mary Boewe’s Beyond the Cabbage Patch: The Literary World of Alice Hegan Rice as research for the blog post I’m writing about Annie Fellows Johnston and her writing group (the Authors Club), and it was perfect, exactly the kind of information that I wanted about the interconnections within the group.

And also - although this is beyond the scope of the post - Rice’s connections with the wider writing world: she corresponded with Ida Tarbell the muckraking journalist and Kate Douglas Wiggin (the two writers were often confused, as Rice’s most famous book was Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch) and even Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas Magazine, a grand doyenne of the American literary world. I love this kind of tracing of social & professional connections - like a literary family tree.

Alice’s husband Cale Young Rice was also a writer, a poet, of the insufferable not-very-talented “my poetry isn’t popular because the masses only want dreck!” kind. He sent a lengthy letter to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine to demand to know why she didn’t publish more of his work or review his books and Harriet Monroe - presumably driven beyond endurance by his endless stream of poems - she responded that she found his work derivative and dull and didn’t publish it because she didn’t want to, and I feel a little bad for him because that would be crushing, but at the same time - I can’t feel too bad when he literally asked for it. WHY, CALE.

I also read Jaclyn Moriarty’s The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone, which I think suffers somewhat from a surfeit of characters - I was having some trouble keeping track of who’s who - but the world-building is as charmingly whimsical as in the A Corner of White trilogy, and I’m looking forward to the sequel. Which probably will not be published in the US for ages.

What I’m Reading Now

Winifred Holtby’s South Riding has arrived at last! It’s still early days (which in a book of this size means I’m over a hundred pages in) but so far I’m impressed by Holtby’s ability to introduce a vast cast of characters so vividly that I haven’t had any trouble keeping track of them. (Of course it helps that a few years ago I saw a miniseries based on the book - so far as I can tell, pretty faithfully.)

I am a little put out that we haven’t gotten to spend more time with my favorites, though. But I’m sure Midge and Sarah Burton will show up again soon.

I’ve begun Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, His Joyful Water-life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers, which is approximately 75% landscape description, and unfortunately landscape description is one of those things where I’ll suddenly realize that I’ve reached the bottom of the page and have no idea what I just read. But I’m persevering: a chapter a night.

What I Plan to Read Next

I wanted to continue with the Lord Peter books, only to discover that the library only has The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club on audiobook, but I listened to Whose Body on audiobook and hated the narrator so much that it almost put me off Sayers for life - he just made Peter sound so insufferable! So I’ll have to find another way to get this book.

In the meantime I’ve got The Nine Tailors on hold; I don’t suppose (outside of the Harriet books) that it matters too much which order I read the books in.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, which scratched the Boxcar Children sized itch in my soul: four children escape an untenable home situation to create for themselves a delightful home in the wilderness.

I also completed Unnatural Death, which has only reaffirmed my belief that the non-Harriet Lord Peter novels are not nearly as good, although I plan to plow ahead regardless.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m nearing the end of The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Lots of good stuff here about illegitimacy rates in Revolutionary War-era New England; lots of women giving birth within a few months (sometimes a few days) of their wedding, and not an insignificant quantity who have an illegitimate child and get married a few years later, maybe to the father and maybe not. Often women from comfortable families, too, including one of Martha’s daughters - this wasn’t just a matter of the poverty-stricken.

It’s interesting how at odd this pattern is not only with modern views of the monolithic past, but even from the popular novels of seduction at the time. Ulrich notes that many of these novels were published in the US, written by American authors, following the English model that assumes the seduction will destroy the seduced girl - and people ate it up even though it was at odds with the lived reality in America, or at least in New England. Was it even the reality in England? Perhaps just among the gentry?

It occurs to me that these novels may in fact have made the plight of the seduced girl worse, by making everyone expect that her plight would be wretched and therefore making that fate harder to escape.

I’ve already begun research for my next essay about female literary friendship (this time: Annie Fellows Johnston, writer of the Little Colonel books, and her Louisville writing group), which means that I’ve dived into George Madden Martin’s children’s book Emmy Lou: Her Book and Heart, first published in 1902. (George Madden Martin was a penname for a woman whose given name may have been Georgia May, but the internet is not quite clear about this.

Naturally what I’d really like is a book with a dedication like “To my writing group! You guys are great!” (only more Edwardian and flowery). This is not that book, but I’m enjoying (in a horrified way) this tale of Emmy Lou’s school days: she’s in a class of seventy and they spend their days droning through the primer in unison, mat, cat, bat, etc.

Oh! And Odysseus just slaughtered the suitors and also the maids who slept with them (which seems kind of hard on the maids, I mean you slept with Calypso for seven years, Odysseus), and it was way more violent than Wishbone led me to expect. And now he’s all “People are going to be mad about how I slaughtered all the suitors” and it’s like… well, if even the people in your own culture don’t approve, why did you do it, Odysseus? Why not just kick them out of the house and demand they send you herds of cattle to replenish your stock and maybe raid them if they don’t comply?

What I Plan to Read Next

Now that I’ve listened to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I’m contemplating whether I should give the Aeneid a go too… although I did lose some enthusiasm for this plan when I realized that Dan Stevens hasn’t read it for audiobook. Still, it might be worth doing? There’s an audiobook read by Simon Callow.

(I realized only as I was looking up Simon Callow that for years I have conflated him and Simon Cowell. Sorry, Simon Callow! You’ve probably never berated a reality TV contestant in your life.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, about which I babbled AT LENGTH in a comment to a previous post, which I won’t copy here because otherwise it will take over my entire Wednesday Reading Meme. But it’s there if you’re interested.

Katherine Applegate’s Crenshaw, which is good as all of Katherine Applegate’s books are. (I think I probably missed out by not reading Animorphs. Not enough to actually read Animorphs now, though.) This one is about an economically insecure family that may be on the verge of homeless - not something that you see very often in children’s books - but in a way that is light enough to be readable without glossing over the difficulties of homelessness.

Crenshaw is the hero’s imaginary friend, a giant cat who likes to stand on his head, a la the giant bunny in Harvey. In fact, Applegate references the movie in the book’s epigraph.

What I’m Reading Now

Keeping on with The Odyssey! Odysseus has arrived back in Ithaca and will at any moment rain down unholy vengeance on the suitors. (I remember this part from the Wishbone version. I’m looking forward to the bit where Odysseus shoots his arrow through twelve axes.) Although right now he’s chatting with his son Telemachus while pretending to be just some random beggar dude, which I’m sure is killing him inside.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. One of the things I find particularly interesting about this book is that Ulrich not only has Martha Ballard’s diary, but also the remarks of commentators from later in the nineteenth century, and it’s so interesting to see what these readers considered worthy of note. They’re surprised, for instance, that Ballard spent so much time gadding about to visit her neighbors.

I wonder if it’s actually that nineteenth-century women actually spent less time gadding - or if it was actually pretty comparable, but the ideal was that women should be the heart of the home and rarely stir from the hearthside, and so people just kind of failed to see how much time women (even respectable married women) spent outside of the home. But the written record of Martha Ballard’s movements made it plain and impossible to ignore.

I’ve also begun Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death. I find the way she talks about spinsters kind of annoying, especially considering that she married late herself - but maybe that just makes increases the temptation toward condescending magnanimity.

Oh! And I’m working on Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island (having run out of Mallory Towers for the moment), which has a very Boxcar Children-type appeal: four kids on their own figuring out how to provide themselves with shelter and food and so forth.

AND FINALLY (deep breath) (I’m reading a lot of books this week) (too many maybe?) I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, about Smarsh’s childhood among poor white farmers in Kansas, which I can only read in small doses because it’s so infuriating reading about how thoroughly the government has undermined the middle and working classes.

Not least by pretending that the working classes don’t exist. Everyone is middle class in America! What do you mean you’re working 60 hours a week not to get by? Everyone is middle class in America. If we say it enough times that will make it true even as we enact policies that dismantle worker protections and favor large companies and factory farms.

It occurred to me - this is not a point Smarsh makes, just something that came to mind - that maybe part of the reason the “fake news” narrative has gained traction is that the media has in fact systematically ignored or misrepresented working class experiences for decades, so there are a lot of people in this country who don’t trust the media because… why would they? What has the media done to deserve it?

What I Plan to Read Next

The library for some reason has loads of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in Spanish. I’ve been thinking I should polish up my Spanish, and the Famous Five is probably about the difficulty level I can take after letting my Spanish go to seed for so long, so maybe I’ll give them a go.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, the second Peter Wimsey book, which is jolly interesting though tragically lacking in Harriet Vane. Should I start swooping through all the rest of the Wimsey novels, or should I ration them out and make them last? A quandary.

I also finished Frances Little’s Camp Jolly, in which three young boys camp in the Grand Canyon and have even grander adventures. The book ends with a hook for a sequel - next they’re going to have adventures in the Great War! - but as far as I can tell the sequel never materialized. Possibly contemporary reaction to this novel was as lukewarm as my own.

I also finished A. A. Milne’s Once on a Time, which I wasn’t sure about at first because it’s so very light that it practically floats - but sometimes you need something very light and in the end its winsome charm did indeed win me. It’s a… I’m not sure what genre to call it exactly. A gentle fairy tale parody?

What I’m Reading Now

Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women, a book set in a girl’s school in the early twentieth century, focusing more on the teachers than on the girls.

evelyn_b, I recommended this to you in a letter, and I feel that I ought to qualify this recommendation now that I am farther into it with the note that this book causes SO MANY EMOTIONS, there are moments when it’s like death by a thousand pinpricks.

And also one of the characters has done something so vile - particularly vile in its absolute pettiness - that I have begun to root for her to be utterly routed and destroyed, because here is a person who ought not to have power over anyone, ever, even the diffuse kind of power that comes from any particularly strong friendship.

Fortunately Alwynne has temporarily escaped her sway and gone to visit relations in the country, which also incidentally turns into a visit to one of those peculiar new coeducational boarding schools with socialist leanings: you can tell because they let the children go on rambles unsupervised rather than marching sedately two by two, with a teacher patrolling to ensure they don’t link arms.

I found the school stuff really interesting, but unfortunately it has been supplanted by A Man. He and Alwynne are clearly going to end up together, which will at least save Alwynne from her seemingly nice but secretly vile Machiavellian friend, but as much as I deprecate vile human beings in real life, their Machiavellian machinations do make for far more interesting reading than “Alwynne just compared this dude to Mr. Darcy. Clearly wedding bells are on the horizon.”

What I Plan to Read Next

We met our Summer Reading sign-up goal at work, so all of us staff members got to pick a summer reading prize, and naturally I got a book: Nancy Farmer’s House of the Scorpion. It looks - potentially scarring honestly; this is why I never read any of Farmer’s books in my youth, when they were a big deal (I remember seeing A Girl Named Disaster everywhere), they all looked potentially scarring. Possibly they are so good that it’s worth it. But still.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished the last Edward Eager book! WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT MORE EDWARD EAGER TO LOOK FORWARD TO? Read E. Nesbit, probably, which is what Edward Eager would have wanted anyway.

But still it’s rather sad, because he died of lung cancer not long after finishing his final book, and from hints dropped in the book itself I think he was planning a crossover between Seven-Day Magic (in which five children borrow a magic book from the library, which among other things sends them on an crossover with Eager’s Half Magic) and Magic or Not?, my very favorite of Eager book, in which it is not clear… whether there is magic occuring or not. But in a way that is totally mysterious and charming, not the annoying way where the reader can definitely tell that it is magic (or isn’t magic) and the protagonists are just confused.

In particular, Laura from Magic or Not? deserves an unambiguously magical adventure and it’s just sad Eager’s death prevented it, and also prevented him from continuing to develop as a writer, because he’s one of those writers where there’s a definite arc of improvement as he continues and… oh well. Don’t smoke, kids! It might cut your writing career short at the worst possible moment!

I also read Adeline Dutton Train Whitney’s We Girls, which was so popular in the nineteenth century that Susan Coolidge mentions it in one of her books as a novel that the heroine is particular pleased to receive… But I must confess that I found it strangely hard to follow. I’m pretty sure it’s the sequel to something and the author expected me to have a prior familiarity with many of the characters, which probably didn’t help.

What I’m Reading Now

I picked up Sheila Turnage’s Three Times Lucky without much interest, solely because it’s on my Newbery Honor list… but actually I’m really enjoying it! It’s nice when it works out like that. It’s a mystery set in the small town of Tupelo Landing in North Carolina, starring a girl named Moses because the river washed her into town during a hurricane when she was a baby, and Mo and her friend Dale want to solve the mystery of her parentage and also a MURDER.

For the same project, I also got Stephanie Tolan’s Surviving the Applewhites, but it’s about a juvenile delinquent and I can’t bear juvenile delinquents (this is why I didn’t read this book during my big Stephanie Tolan kick when I was in junior high) so I’ve stalled a couple of chapters in.

I’m also reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but verrrrry slowly, just a few pages a night. I like to think I’m being meditative about it but really I just can’t read very much nature writing at one go.

What I Plan to Read Next

THE LIBRARY FINALLY BROUGHT ME CLOUDS OF WITNESS. I was saving it with the idea that I should read it as a reward when I finish writing Iced Coffee Dreams - I’m only a chapter and a half from the end! But I have no idea how to fix one of those chapters! - so I may give into temptation and read it right away instead.

I have written another installment of Troy and Vane's Awkward Adventures, which I have now posted over on AO3 because this has clearly become A Thing. Please enjoy Troy's Christmas at Duke's Denver!

Birds of a Feather.

evelyn_b won a fic from me in the

fandomlovespuertorico auction, and one of her prompts was "Vane and Troy's Awkward Adventures."

So I've finally finished that fic! It is not very long, so I will in the long run write another auction fic, but for now - please enjoy the Awkward Adventures.

( Onward to the fic! )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Duncan Wall’s The Ordinary Acrobat: A Journey into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present, which I began with few expectations and ended up really enjoying. The book has that hybrid memoir/history structure that often leads writers astray, but Wall balances it exquisitely. The history sections are meaty and well-researched, and the memoir parts are confined to things that are interesting and circus related, like Wall’s trapeze training. If he dated someone while he was in Paris, he doesn’t even mention it.

(I have a special pet peeve about nonfiction writers who try to cover the deficiencies in their historical research by padding out their books with the dull ups and downs of their romantic relationships. Get a therapist! Or at least an editor!)

And the circus is so interesting! I had no idea it had such a long and complicated history before I read this book. And Wall has such an eclectic and open-minded curiosity about all the circus disciplines. He starts out with a vague dislike of clowns, for instance, but rather than just dismiss them he gets in touch with a critically acclaimed clown and attends an advanced clowning class and reads up on the history of clowning, and by the end is full of respect and admiration for the dedication and craft and vulnerability that it takes to be a good clown.

What I’m Reading Now

Busman’s Honeymoon! I had been saving it, and then yesterday I was at loose ends and couldn’t settle down to anything… until I recollected Busman’s Honeymoon. So far, a corpse has interrupted Peter & Harriet’s honeymoon, and Peter & the chief investigating officer have bonded over their shared love of literary quotations.

I’ve also been reading Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World - And Why Their Differences Matter, which has an unnecessarily bellicose title for a book that is basically a grown-up version of My Friends’ Beliefs, a guide to world religions that I read many times as a child because that was just the kind of child I was.

Prothero is arguing against the thesis that “portrays the great religions as different paths up the same mountain,” although his own book actually offers some evidence in favor of this view - at least insofar as it pertains to mystical traditions, which do seem to converge on the idea of the divine as a far-distant and yet immanent thing that cannot be explained, only understood through experience.

The “different paths up the mountain” view privileges mysticism as the true path of religion - which might be true in a spiritual sense (obviously this is arguable), but isn’t useful in a sociological sense. Most people aren’t mystics, and religions in their non-mystical incarnations are quite different.

Having said all that, I’m finding this book a bit of a slog. It feels a little too abstract: you can’t really get at the lived texture of a religion by describing it.

What I Plan to Read Next

Elyne Mitchell’s The Silver Brumby is next on my shelf. After that and Busman’s Honeymoon, the Unread Book Club will be FINISHED! *spikes football*

Also, I GOT THE NEW ANNE FADIMAN BOOK FROM NETGALLEY. YESSSSSSSSS.

Micky and I swept through Cornell today, first to the art museum, where we spent most of our time on the top floor with the Asian Art - they go all across Asia, which naturally takes up quite a bit of space and time, so we were tired out by the end and didn't stop long in the rest of the museum. Well, except for a beautiful display of Tiffany glass on the landing between the second & third floors.

And then we went to the Cornell Botanical Gardens today, although it was rather hot, and had an absolutely splendid time walking around their herb garden - which was separated into themed plots, "Culinary Herbs," "Herbs for Tea," "Healing Herbs," "Herbs from Literature," and so on and so forth. (Many of the herbs were of course in more than one plot.)

I had a brief but intense interest in healing herbs when I was a kid, so it was nice to be able to see all those herbs that I'd read about in the flesh, if you will.

And also to sniff the leaves of many, many different kinds of mint, and try to pick up the non-mint undertones that are supposed to be there - apple mint, chocolate mint (yes, that's it's own plant!), mint sage... But really they all smelled like mint to me.

***

After that, being rather hot and tired, we repaired to an ice cream shop and thence to Micky's house (where I have been TRYING to do my laundry, but I fear I have become the Bane of Washing Machines - I broke the one in my apartment not too long ago, did I tell you? Well, I don't think I did anything to break it, it just broke while I was using it, but still...

In any case I have been having trouble getting the machine to work. Nothing seems to be working this afternoon: I also attempted to write a bit more of the Adventures of Harriet and Troy and alas have come up against the rocky shoals of Peter Wimsey's inimitable voice. He never sounds like himself when I write him. i suppose I could just cut him out entirely and have Troy meet Harriet all on her own, but then Wimsey can't discomfit Alleyn by calling him by his old Eton nickname (which, I have decided, should be "Allers,"), which would be too bad...

Oh well, dear. This is all lots of fun to brainstorm about, but I really can't do Peter's voice justice, and on the whole it's really more ambitious than I think I want to write. Perhaps it's just better to accept that the brainstorming will be the final product - as tormenting as that may be. Surely it's better than having nothing at all?

***

On the bright side, Micky has introduced me to The Great British Bake-Off. In fact she is at least the third friend to recommend this to me, but the first one to take the necessary step of forcing me to sit down and watch an episode, and it is just as charming and delightful as everyone has always promised.

I have to leave Lily Dale today, and feel rather as though I am being pushed out of paradise. It is so quiet here! So quiet – and so many flowers – and I’ve gotten such a lot of work done – 7,000 words on a new novel!

Which is perhaps too similar to The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball in some ways, by the by, but perhaps that one was not quite ready for prime time yet, poor thing.

But there are no rooms at the inn, so I must be moving on. I’m heading up toward Oneida, I think. We shall see if I actually make it all the way to my stated destination this time…

***

Oh, and also – I hope you’re happy, you monsters:

“Lord Peter Wimsey was one of your schoolfriends?” Troy asked.

“A schoolmate, at least,” Alleyn said, after a slight hesitation. “We investigated a case together at school.”

Under other circumstances, Troy might have laughed, or pressed for details. But now she simply smoothed the letter in her hand and frowned down at it again. “And now he wants me to paint his wife, the suspected murderess.”

“Acquitted,” Alleyn reminded her. “Not all suspects are guilty, you know.”

“Of course,” Troy said. Her own days as a murder suspect rose in her mind. She pushed them ruthlessly back. “But no one seems to have impressed this on the press. A suspected murderess painting a suspected murderess – soon I will be painting nothing but pretty murderesses for their rich foolish fans. So many criminals have the most boring faces.”

As she spoke, a newspaper photograph from the Vane case floated up in her mind. The girl had looked almost ugly, with a sullen mouth and a strong, dark brow.

It was the brow that made Troy pause now. There might be something in that. One could not tell from a newspaper photograph.

“I suppose,” she acquiesced, “it will do no harm to meet her.”

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I galloped through Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, and enjoyed them so thoroughly that I lent them straightaway to Emma and therefore cannot quote from either of them, more’s the pity. Although in the case of Have His Carcase this is not such a problem, because it’s easy to discuss its virtues without reference to direct quotes: it has one of the most perfect twist endings to a mystery that I have ever read. Everything’s a horrible muddle up to the end, and then one little detail comes into focus – absolutely unexpected and yet perfectly foreshadowed – and all is illuminated.

Gaudy Night, though, could bear quoting, and extensive quoting, and I want to read it again and bookmark the relevant quotes about the contemplative life – the life of the mind vs. the life of the heart (insofar as they are set against each other) – the way that this thematic argument intertwines and somewhat obscures the mystery (at least to Harriet’s mind) and yet is integral to it.

…also, I want a story where Harriet Vane and Agatha Troy meet. They have so much in common! They’re both prickly artists, both pursued by detectives who are tragically awkward about love (although Alleyn at least has the dignity not to propose to Troy every five minutes), and both at one point in their lives murder suspects, although Troy only sipped of the cup that poor Harriet drank nearly to the dregs.

Perhaps Peter commissions Troy to paint Harriet’s portrait. (Harriet doubtless hates the idea, but acquiesces on the ground that if she must be painted by anyone, it might as well be Troy.) Murder, inevitably, ensues.

What I’m Reading Now

I spent most of yesterday reading C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life sitting either on a lakeside bench shaded by a weeping willow or in a white wicker rocker by the open window, and it has proven itself more than equal to both settings. I ought to write more about it; perhaps later.

And I’m about halfway through a reread of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and alas it is still no more than moderately pleasant. I had thought that perhaps I read it before I was ready for it, but maybe it simply was never going to be the L’Engle book for me. It just spells everything out, emotionally speaking – Meg meets Calvin and almost instantly there’s absolute trust and he’s pouring his heart out to her – and I guess I want more emotional tension between characters, never mind they’ve got cosmic evil to fight.

What I Plan to Read Next

Busman’s Honeymoon is next in queue!

And then, I think, I shall have a crack at E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. I am a little concerned that one Nesbit will lead to another – and with Nesbit there seem to be absolute piles of others for it to lead to – but after all there are worse things.

A most successful hunt through the bookstores yesterday! Although amusingly I got the most books at a bookstore I had not realized existed: I stopped in the library for a drink of water, and there was the Friends of the Library bookstore, and I found TWO books there, hooray!

I also found a copy of E. Nesbit's The Railway Children, which I have long intended to read, in a Little Free Library, which is the first time I have found something I really wanted in a Little Free Library and marks an epoch in my life.

( The Little Free Library! )

And eventually it grew too hot for traipsing from bookstore to bookstore, so I stopped at a cafe for a lemon bar and finished Strong Poison (v. much approve, have already started Have His Carcase, Peter has proposed to Harriet approximately five times including by telegram:

FOLLOWING RAZOR CLUE TO STAMFORD REFUSE RESEMBLE THRILLER HERO WHO HANGS ROUND HEROINE TO NEGLECT OF DUTY BUT WILL YOU MARRY ME - PETER

I feel that this persistence ought to be annoying but instead I find it weirdly charming.)

The cafe also had this delightful little door in the wall.

( The fairy door )

I have always loved stories about tiny people who live in the walls. In fact when I was in kindergarten I invented a long one to amuse myself at school. The Paintwater Witches lived in the drains in the back of the classroom and used all the dirty paint water we poured down in their potions. Clearly the tiny people living in a cafe can expect far more gourmet fare!

I have begun Strong Poison, and it is fabulous! Peter Wimsey has just proposed to Harriet Vane at their very first meeting (while she is behind bars on a murder charge) and is adorably taken aback when she tells him he's #47. Everyone wants to marry a possible murderess!

A part of me wants to just stay in and read it all day, buuuut I am in Ann Arbor, Land of Bookstores, so I think I must sally forth to contemplate their offerings. After I've had my tea. During which I can surely read a couple more chapters.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

A couple of NetGalley books, one of which I’ve already posted about & one of which I really liked and am therefore finding it difficult to post about. Why is it always so much easier to write about the books you hate?

I guess there is an element of vulnerability in saying that you loved something, or that something touched you or inspired you, in a way that isn’t true of saying that you hated something.

What I’m Reading Now

Ethel Turner’s The Family at Misrule, the sequel to Seven Little Australians, because my heart finally recovered from the ending of that first book. The second book seems less likely to BREAK MY HEART AND CRUSH IT INTO PULP, but then I didn’t expect it of the first book either till the very last chapter, so WHO KNOWS.

I’m also reading The Collected Raffles, which is all four books of Raffles stories collected into one; I’ve finished the first two, and they are just as much ludicrous late-Victorian you-don’t-even-need-slash-goggles-to-see-this fun as they were when I read the first few stories online.

It really is nicer to have them in book form though. I don’t mean to knock ebooks - God knows without them, my quest to read obscure old books would be utterly hamstrung - but I do feel that I retain more & often have more of an emotional response when I read books on paper.

...although being an ebook certainly did not keep me from having an emotional response to Seven Little Australians, so maybe not so much.

What I Plan to Read Next

GUESS WHO JUST FOUND DOROTHY SAYERS’ HAVE HIS CARCASE. THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S ME. I now have all four Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane books!

...I’m actually still not planning to read them for a few more months (I’m saving them for my reading challenge “Three or more books by one author”), but it’s nice to have them all.

For books that I am planning to read next in the literal sense: Isobelle Carmody’s The Red Queen. I’ll be back visiting my parents for the weekend, so I will have lots of lovely empty time to read, which is really the best way to read a Carmody book IMO.

Crossposts: http://osprey-archer.livejournal.com/575868.html

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Arika Oakrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages, which I very much enjoyed. It begins with a brisk summary of nine hundred or so years of the history of invented language, with tidbits like the fact that Hildegard von Bingen invented the first artificial language that we have a record of (yet another reason why Hildegard von Bingen is the bestest), then segues into chapters about individual languages. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Esperanto, Klingon, and Blissymbols, which are a symbol system used in some schools so children who lack the motor skills to speak or use sign language can communicate.

The one frustrating thing, which is really not the book’s fault, is that most of these topics could easily fill books of their own, so I felt like I was getting a taste of something fascinating only to gallop away to a different topic altogether. I want to know more about Esperanto culture, dammit!

I’ve also finished Dorothy Sayers’ Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey book, and feel underwhelmed. (However, I’ve been warned that the Lord Peter books don’t really take off until he meets Harriet Vane, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.) I guessed who the murderer was fairly early on, not because of the evidence, but because there was no other reason for him to be so prominently present in the book, which seems to me a sign of a badly constructed mystery.

And finally, Hilary McKay’s Indigo’s Star, the second Casson family novel, which I enjoyed a great deal. (Clearly I will have to read the rest of the Casson family books. There are three more.) I like the weirdness of the Cassons; I like how they’re all very different and often rather odd, but nonetheless love each other very much and try in their odd ways to support each other. And I like the fact that they take in stray people and gently incorporate them into the family: there’s a sense in these books that they’re adopting the reader in the same way, which is cozy.

What I’m Reading Now

Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo. In fact I’m listening to a version read by Cisneros herself, and really enjoying it so far: her writing has a rhythm to it which is even more accentuated in her speech.

Also, she likes making lists of things - to describe an apartment, for instance, by listing many of the things that are in it. I’m not sure why I find this so appealing, but I do.

I’ve also just started Jane Langton’s The Time Bike, which is part of a series of books about the magical adventures of the various members of the Hall family in Concord, Massachusetts. (It’s a bit like a magical American version of the Casson family series.) I do like series of interlinked books about the same family. Are there any other series like this that I ought to know about?

What I Plan to Read Next

Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, which I have sitting on my shelf.

On a wider note, I want to read both Pamela Dean’s The Dubious Hills and Eva Ibbotson’s A Song for Summer before the end of the summer, because the local library has them and many other libraries don’t. Perhaps I should make a summer reading list like I did last year? That seems sensible.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: dorothy sayers

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Troy and Vane have more Awkward Adventures!

Vane and Troy's Awkward Adventures

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Many bookstores, Strong Poison

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