What I'm Reading Wednesday
What I've Finished Reading
Mostly Regencies! I was taken to a different library by a friend and it was full of them, what could I do? They're reading candyfloss and I can't help it, even though I know I'm the wrong person to read them because whatever it is I'm after, they're not quite it. Still mostly fun, though. I just wish the latest one would stop having people say, "Brilliant!" It would feel like we had time-slipped into the 1980s if it had ever felt as if we were anywhere near the 1820s in the first place. (Sorry, deadline-ridden, hard-working Romance authors! I know, I know, I should leave you alone! But... I don't.)
I also re-read Heyer's Charity Girl. It's the last one she wrote (or completed, anyway), but it's also one I find weird in that there's nothing obviously wrong with it that I can ever quite put my finger on, and there are a bunch of engaging side characters but I always wind up doing the same thing in re-reading it, which is: I wait years and years, then start it again, thinking, "Hey, why didn't I like this one last time? It's pretty good!" and then by the end I feel like slapping Hetta and the Viscount for being too smug and heartless and feel that Cherry and Cary Nethercott are well out of that. And yet what is really so different from all the rest? I DON'T KNOW.
I finished the Mrs Jeffries thing. That was... a book. And mostly pretty inoffensive and all.
I also finished two local history books on Barnstaple. I still feel that I don't know quite enough about Barnstaple, though, which is a bit of an unsatisfactory outcome. I wonder if there's any way of me getting hold of the 19th C local histories at some time? (Now I have slightly more of a brain again, our sad expensive charges for ILLs are really getting to be a nuisance. By the time you're spending £8, you might as well just try and buy the book.) I bet they're more in depth and more fun to read. Or, better still, if you know someone handy in North Devon, tell them it's a serious gap in the market.
I also read Belle by Paulina Byrne, which is too slight a biography to comment on really. That isn't a complaint; it's just that hardly anything is known about Dido Elizabeth Belle. It was actually interesting to read from the point of view of how to write NF about someone you know very little about, because if I do write up some family history, that's how most of it will be, regardless of all my best efforts.
What I'm Reading Now
Another regency (the one where they keep saying 'brilliant'). It was being pretty mindlessly enjoyable, but now the plot has twisted and I'm not at all sure why everyone has decided they must all rush off to an inn to see somebody's father. And I don't know why I'm even cavilling at that, given that people keep saying 'brilliant.' Otherwise nothing really.
In NF note-taking, I have moved onto In These Times by Jenny Uglow, a social history of Britain 1793-1815. It looks promisingly interesting and useful, but since I am only on page 7 of 650 or so, it's too early to say much else.
What I'm Reading Next
I don't know, but I probably do need to find something a bit better in the fiction line. I'll get to go to the library when I go to the doctor's on the 17th, so maybe I'm find some more John Dickson Carr or something else that will suit my need for not very taxing but also interesting fiction. Who knows? Possibly The Valley of Fear in the meantime and skim-reading a Skulduggery Pleasant book for wrangling purposes.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth -- Comments there:
Mostly Regencies! I was taken to a different library by a friend and it was full of them, what could I do? They're reading candyfloss and I can't help it, even though I know I'm the wrong person to read them because whatever it is I'm after, they're not quite it. Still mostly fun, though. I just wish the latest one would stop having people say, "Brilliant!" It would feel like we had time-slipped into the 1980s if it had ever felt as if we were anywhere near the 1820s in the first place. (Sorry, deadline-ridden, hard-working Romance authors! I know, I know, I should leave you alone! But... I don't.)
I also re-read Heyer's Charity Girl. It's the last one she wrote (or completed, anyway), but it's also one I find weird in that there's nothing obviously wrong with it that I can ever quite put my finger on, and there are a bunch of engaging side characters but I always wind up doing the same thing in re-reading it, which is: I wait years and years, then start it again, thinking, "Hey, why didn't I like this one last time? It's pretty good!" and then by the end I feel like slapping Hetta and the Viscount for being too smug and heartless and feel that Cherry and Cary Nethercott are well out of that. And yet what is really so different from all the rest? I DON'T KNOW.
I finished the Mrs Jeffries thing. That was... a book. And mostly pretty inoffensive and all.
I also finished two local history books on Barnstaple. I still feel that I don't know quite enough about Barnstaple, though, which is a bit of an unsatisfactory outcome. I wonder if there's any way of me getting hold of the 19th C local histories at some time? (Now I have slightly more of a brain again, our sad expensive charges for ILLs are really getting to be a nuisance. By the time you're spending £8, you might as well just try and buy the book.) I bet they're more in depth and more fun to read. Or, better still, if you know someone handy in North Devon, tell them it's a serious gap in the market.
I also read Belle by Paulina Byrne, which is too slight a biography to comment on really. That isn't a complaint; it's just that hardly anything is known about Dido Elizabeth Belle. It was actually interesting to read from the point of view of how to write NF about someone you know very little about, because if I do write up some family history, that's how most of it will be, regardless of all my best efforts.
What I'm Reading Now
Another regency (the one where they keep saying 'brilliant'). It was being pretty mindlessly enjoyable, but now the plot has twisted and I'm not at all sure why everyone has decided they must all rush off to an inn to see somebody's father. And I don't know why I'm even cavilling at that, given that people keep saying 'brilliant.' Otherwise nothing really.
In NF note-taking, I have moved onto In These Times by Jenny Uglow, a social history of Britain 1793-1815. It looks promisingly interesting and useful, but since I am only on page 7 of 650 or so, it's too early to say much else.
What I'm Reading Next
I don't know, but I probably do need to find something a bit better in the fiction line. I'll get to go to the library when I go to the doctor's on the 17th, so maybe I'm find some more John Dickson Carr or something else that will suit my need for not very taxing but also interesting fiction. Who knows? Possibly The Valley of Fear in the meantime and skim-reading a Skulduggery Pleasant book for wrangling purposes.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth -- Comments there: