What I'm Reading Wednesday

[lost_spook]

What I've Finished ReadingMostly 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

Comments

[evelyn_b]

Is "brilliant!" one of those things that sound too late to use in historical fiction but have actually been in use since 1635? Or is this just Generic Undated Britishness Marker rearing its lazy head again?

The one I'm reading now actually suffers a little from its own best impulses, I think. It doesn't "feel" like the early 19th century because of the dialogue and the writing style, but the author has clearly done a lot of research and wants to bring a hidden side of history to light, so it's full of convincing or jarring details and historically important political arguments, which make the writing style show a little more than if it had been pure ahistorical fluff - like when you clean one tile on the bathroom wall and suddenly the rest of them look 100x worse. But I also appreciate what the author is trying to do, so I don't want to be a jerk about it.

I think it's probably really hard to write a historical setting in this particular very unadorned close-third or first-person contemporary style and make it work - I don't mean that all historical novels have to be pastiche, but style is a tool for conveying setting and if you're limited to a particular style by genre conventions or whatever it is, you're working short-handed.

[lost_spook]

Brilliant as a word has been around for a long while, but it was used previously in its more literal sense as 'like a diamond' so bright, sharp, clear, bright - so you might have a brilliant mind etc., but as a general synonym for 'great', I'm pretty sure it's much more recent. I'll have to check, but I'm fairly sure of that one. I have a feeling it might have come up on that pernickity mistakes in Regency Romances website, too.