Wednesday. Reading.
Currently reading
Lorna Gibb, West's World: The extraordinary life of Dame Rebecca West (2013). It's readable but vaguely irksome - I was realising this morning that one of my problems with this (apart from the usual pedantic niggly things) is that it's much more about the ongoing soap-opera draaaaaaamaaaaaa that followed Dame R like the Hound of Heaven and really, not so much about why she is an important figure. It's very light on the actual writing (and has the author actually read Henry James, which is a critical study, not a biography?), though, do admit, quoting large chunks of West's prose might tend to show up other writers.... However, I will say that it's not as vastly annoying as the short essay on West perpetrated by Fay Weldon in the Penguin 'Lives of Modern Women' series, where one wished Rebecca would rise from the grave and annihilate her with a few (or possibly quite a lot, exquisitely strung-together) words.
Otherwise, I think I've read as much as I'm going to at the moment of the two ongoing research books (i.e haven't read them cover to cover), and must try and remember to take sex, gender, and Anglicans as something sensational to read on a forthcoming long train journey.
I'm also dipping into Rosemary Auchmuty's A World of Women, which follows on from A World of Girls by looking at how Brent-Dyer, Oxenham and Fairlie-Bruce dealt with their ongoing series characters once schooldays were over.
What I've Just Read
Finished The Hawkwood War - please insert rave here.
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Mr Quin - monster from Mr Satterthwaite's id, y/n?
Up next
Aliette de Bodard, On a Red Station, Drifting, which arrived today.
The book about the boho Garmon siblings, probably.
And a load of stuff on my ereader which, hello, long train journey in prospect...
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