Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I began with The Red Cross Girls in Belgium, which opens with a capsule summary of Eugenia’s courtship with Captain Castaigne, and you guys, its all missed opportunities all the time. Eugenia aids French soldiers in escaping from the Germans and ends up in jail and nearly dies of some kind of disease...and all the

Comments

[egelantier]

hooray, you're reading gadfly! it makes me very very happy. and, well, yes. the subtlety is not what we're going for here :D

re: milan: as far as i understand, the brothers sinister series is self-published, so maybe you'll have more luck with e-copies of her books? her website lists where you can get everything: http://www.courtneymilan.com/brotherssinister/.

three men in a boat is my ultimate comfort book; you're right about the effect being mostly cumulative, but god does it build up. and i love the sudden switches to long romantic passages in the narrative; they shouldn't work, but they do.

[osprey_archer]

Aw, man. Well, maybe as money trickles in I'll buy the rest of the Brothers Sinister series.

The long romantic passages are great, because there's such a contrast between the narrator's high falutin flights of fancy and the way he actually acts. He'll be waxing poetic about the river or the sunset or whatever, and then it comes time to figure out how to put the boat tarp up and he's so immature.

[asakiyume]

I have never tried Wodehouse. He's Jeeves and all that, right? When you first tried him, why did you give up?

I'm with you on Evil Dictatorship 101. Lots of book dictators must have failed that class.

[osprey_archer]

It was a while ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy. I think I grabbed one of the Jeeves & Wooster short story books, and short stories rarely appeal to me.

I always find it disturbing how many real dicators seem to have failed Evil Dictatorship 101. Even totally incompetent evil dictators seem to remain in power for ages, sometimes.

[asakiyume]

And given that an evil dictator can only remain in power for a lifetime, I suppose if one can do it without passing Evil Dictatorship 101, why bother exerting oneself?

[osprey_archer]

Right? If evil dictators bothered with things like "prerequisite classes," they might never work up the necessary disregard for rules to really get their dictatorship on.