Oh! You and canadiandevil have just about put the cherry on the awesome sundae that my day has been (I also found out today that I was accepted to my first choice grad school in Milwaukee, which I've been worried about, because I failed several semesters of undergrad thanks to all those reasons many of us aspies have trouble with school).
I think I'm *definitely* going to visit my old university library to borrow some of those books, before my id card expires.
On a related note, lately, I've been into really old series books and the one I've read in the Patty Fairfield series (1903-1918) by Carolyn Wells (who was a satirist before she wrote young people's novels) has a very similar "perfectly polite snark" about Patty's and other characters' faux pas. It's been fun to read about social customs that are a century old in that kind of tone. There was one character, for example, who wore a very nice white dress to a yachting party, and the narrator was absolutely scathing in the description, but without actually saying anything particularly mean or negative. Apparently, and I never would have guessed, the way I always see photos of modern women wearing white on the fancy yachts, it was a bad decision of that character to wear a fancy white frock because the party would be in the sun all day and on a dirty sailing boat, and they couldn't help but get grimy and gross, and by wearing something so inappropriate, the girl was indicating that she didn't plan to help should anything happen (which, of course, it did - they got caught in a storm and everyone had to pitch in to keep the boat going and to keep their picnic things from getting in the way).
I think I'm *definitely* going to visit my old university library to borrow some of those books, before my id card expires.
On a related note, lately, I've been into really old series books and the one I've read in the Patty Fairfield series (1903-1918) by Carolyn Wells (who was a satirist before she wrote young people's novels) has a very similar "perfectly polite snark" about Patty's and other characters' faux pas. It's been fun to read about social customs that are a century old in that kind of tone. There was one character, for example, who wore a very nice white dress to a yachting party, and the narrator was absolutely scathing in the description, but without actually saying anything particularly mean or negative. Apparently, and I never would have guessed, the way I always see photos of modern women wearing white on the fancy yachts, it was a bad decision of that character to wear a fancy white frock because the party would be in the sun all day and on a dirty sailing boat, and they couldn't help but get grimy and gross, and by wearing something so inappropriate, the girl was indicating that she didn't plan to help should anything happen (which, of course, it did - they got caught in a storm and everyone had to pitch in to keep the boat going and to keep their picnic things from getting in the way).
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