recent reading
Some new-to-me books arrived recently from the Topsy-Turvy catalogue...
G B Stern, Dolphin Cottage - an impulse choice, because I've only ever read the two books about Jane Austen with Sheila Kaye-Smith, but know that
oursin rates Stern very highly indeed, and saw this on the list. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and found that the first few chapters rushed on very fast, and that some parts of the plot/character motivation didn't really make sense until later, but then I found I was hooked and really enjoyed it. I like the flexibility of her style, and especially enjoyed the characters emerging through their speech (or lack of it). It's a very late book of hers, so I don't know how characteristic it is. Definitely going to read some more, and since I see that The Matriarch, first of her Rakonitz books, is in print from Daunt Books, I think I shall start there.
Mary Stewart, The Wind Off the Small Isles - a novella, rather than a novel, set on Lanzarote and containing characteristically vivid descriptions of the volcanic landscape - which of course becomes a part of the plot. There is a lively heroine, and a mystery from the past, and some danger, and two of the characters are authors and have some fascinating conversations about their work, which I can't help reading as Stewart also reflecting on what she does.
Re-read: Spellcoats and Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones. Oh, I love Spellcoats so much. It manages that very Jones thing, of taking a real and believable world and people and opening up the mythic dimension without losing the reality. Sometimes the myth seems to emerge into the world of the book, as in Cart and Cwidder, and sometimes the world emerges into the myth, which is what seems to me to happen here, or in Deep Secret. I like all the Dalemark books, which is why I went on to Drowned Ammet (well, that, and the fact that the e-books I though I had of Cart & Cwidder and Crown of Dalemark turned out to be corrupt), but though I like it, and the strangeness of the Holy Islands is always wonderful, it never quite achieves that seamless shift for me.
This entry was originally posted at http://coughingbear.dreamwidth.org/171220.html and has
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G B Stern, Dolphin Cottage - an impulse choice, because I've only ever read the two books about Jane Austen with Sheila Kaye-Smith, but know that
oursin rates Stern very highly indeed, and saw this on the list. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and found that the first few chapters rushed on very fast, and that some parts of the plot/character motivation didn't really make sense until later, but then I found I was hooked and really enjoyed it. I like the flexibility of her style, and especially enjoyed the characters emerging through their speech (or lack of it). It's a very late book of hers, so I don't know how characteristic it is. Definitely going to read some more, and since I see that The Matriarch, first of her Rakonitz books, is in print from Daunt Books, I think I shall start there.
Mary Stewart, The Wind Off the Small Isles - a novella, rather than a novel, set on Lanzarote and containing characteristically vivid descriptions of the volcanic landscape - which of course becomes a part of the plot. There is a lively heroine, and a mystery from the past, and some danger, and two of the characters are authors and have some fascinating conversations about their work, which I can't help reading as Stewart also reflecting on what she does.
Re-read: Spellcoats and Drowned Ammet, Diana Wynne Jones. Oh, I love Spellcoats so much. It manages that very Jones thing, of taking a real and believable world and people and opening up the mythic dimension without losing the reality. Sometimes the myth seems to emerge into the world of the book, as in Cart and Cwidder, and sometimes the world emerges into the myth, which is what seems to me to happen here, or in Deep Secret. I like all the Dalemark books, which is why I went on to Drowned Ammet (well, that, and the fact that the e-books I though I had of Cart & Cwidder and Crown of Dalemark turned out to be corrupt), but though I like it, and the strangeness of the Holy Islands is always wonderful, it never quite achieves that seamless shift for me.
This entry was originally posted at http://coughingbear.dreamwidth.org/171220.html and has
comments. Comment here or there using OpenID.