What I read

Finished Wide is the Gate, and while things are getting grimmer and grimmer as regards The World Situation, I am still very much there for Our Protag Lanny being a mild-mannered art dealer with a secret identity as anti-fascist activist, who gets on with everybody and is quite the antithesis of the Two-Fisted Hollywood Hero. (I was thinking who would I cast in the role and while there's a touch of the Jimmy Stewarts, the social aplomb and little moustache - William Powell?)

Lates Literary Review.

Mary Gordon, The Chase of the Wild Goose: The Story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, Known as the Ladies of Llangollen (1936), which is sort-of a classic version of their story recently republished. But o dear, it does one of my pet hates, which is blurring 'imaginative recreation' with 'biographical research' and skipping between the two modes, and then in the final chapter she encounters the ghosts of of the Ladies, I can't even, really. Plus, Gordon, who was b. 1861, obtained medical education, fought for suffrage, etc, nevertheless disses on Victorian women as 'various kinds of imbecile', unlike those robust and politically-engaged ladies of the Georgian era. WOT. TUT. Also honking class issues about how the Ladies were Ladies and always behaved accordingly.

Began Robert Rodi, What They Did to Princess Paragon (1994), which was just not doing it for me, I can be doing with viewpoint characters being Not Nice, but I was beginning to find both of them (the comic-book writer and the fanboy) tedious.

Also not doing it for me, Barbara Vine, The Child's Child (2012): sorry, the inset novel did not read to me like a real novel of the period at which it was supposed to have been writ as opposed to A Historical Novel of Those Oppressive Times of the early C20th. Also, in frame narrative, I know PhD student who is writing thesis on unwed mothers in literature is doing EngLit but I do think someone might have mentioned (given period at which she is supposed to be doing this) the historiography on The Foundling Hospital.

I then turned to Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which it is a very long time since I read.

Then I was reduced to Agatha Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), and Murder in the Mews (1937).

On the go

I happened to spot my copy of Margery Sharp, Cluny Brown (1944), which I know I was looking for a while ago, and am reading that though it looks as though I re-read it more recently than I thought.

Have also begun on Books For Review.

Up Next

Really dunno.