What I've Finished Reading

Brat Farrar was terrific, maybe the best Tey of all? Of course our old friend the Blue-Eyed Nymphomaniac makes an appearance, and Tey manages to shoehorn in a dig at Scottish Independence for no reason whatsoever (except the only necessary and sufficient reason, which is that it's a Tey book and no one has made a dig at ( Read more... )

What I've Finished

Miss Pym Disposes shed its harem-anime lightness eventually -- well, the harem goes first and then the lightness, though neither one completely -- and becomes something else: a slow-building meditation on justice and responsibility? Shrewd and quiet dismantling of the entire premise of the mystery genre? Fascinating period piece ( Read more... )

What I've Finished Reading

My very mixed feelings about Career of Evil didn't actually prevent me from reading the whole thing in about two days. ( A partial selection of mixed feelings, below the cut )

Finished: The Man in the Queue. The best part was how wrong Grant was about everything, from beginning to end. Oh, yeah, he can totally tell that the killer wasn't English based on the dagger and how sneaky the killing was! NOPE. WRONG. He fails so thoroughly on so many levels and it's beautiful. There is absolutely no way he would have closed this ( Read more... )

Grant, looking them over with a lively interest, found his glance stayed as it came to one face. Now what had brought the owner of that face to a life of seclusion and self-denial? A round sallow face on a round ill-shaped head, the eyes small, the nose fleshy, the lower lip loose, so that it hung away from his teeth as he repeated the words of the ( Read more... )

The Incredulity of Father Brown gave me some trouble. I still liked it intermittently, but Father Brown's homilies are overcrowding his otherwise likeable personality and Flambeau was nowhere to be found. I caught myself skimming a lot.

( All criminals believe in karma )

I guess we're back down to one post a week, since work shows no signs of slowing down and I can't seem to manage my time any better. Oh well.

What I've Just Finished Reading

The Singing Sands was great, and if anything To Love and Be Wise was even better. At least, most of the grouchiness that in other books gets channeled into regional politics ( Read more... )

I've gotten way, way behind on posting, and basically everything else, so here's an update so I can pretend I'm not as far behind as I am.

What have I been reading?

* A ton of essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald, a perennial source of comfort reading for some reason.

* After Many A Summer, US title After Many A Summer Dies the Swan, really ( Read more... )

I'm way behind on the Silmarillion, and everything else, but I do want to talk about The Franchise Affair, which is kind of bizarrely unpleasant.

( Spoilers ahead, I guess. )

What I've Just Finished Reading

P. D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin, which is probably the best-ever title for a murder mystery (if it's not Died in the Wool) and a good book, though it's a sign of how far down the genre rabbit hole I've gone in the past few months that I sometimes felt it was a little too "literary." It's very slow and sad, ( Read more... )