And it's lovely reading for Wednesday again!

[oursin]

Read
Well, what happened was this, which was that I went into the Oxfam bookshop and they had 2 of the recent paperback reprints of the later novels of Dodie Smith - It Ends With Revelations (1967) and The Town in Bloom (1965) - and really, it is decades since I read either and I had forgotten quite how delightful and charming. One perhaps thought at the time that they were not I Capture The Castle, but really, they stand up better than I supposed. I possibly missed the absolutely spot-on period detail about attitudes towards homosexuality and the impending change in the legal position in It Ends with Revelations first time around. It gives one considerable confidence that the detail about young ladies trying to get started in the theatre and residing in a women's club in the 1920s is similarly spot-on.
Also, once I had got back home, read Greer Gilman's new novella, Exit, Pursued by a Bear, which seems less Jacobean pastiche than Jonson-ventriloquism. Exquisite.
Plus, one of those influxes of periodicals, including the latest Slightly Foxed (no 43), which makes me want to read some Philip Macdonald, although, while I generally appreciated the essay on Arnold Bennett, how can you not rate Anna of the Five Towns among the works in which Enoch Arnold was at the top of his game? Indeed, not even mention it?
Some Sekkrit Projket reading.
On the go
Have not managed to get back to Love Letters of an Englishwoman, which are I suspect beginning to get into Dido's Lament territory, only in Edwardian prose.
Winifred Holtby's Social Vision, however, is great. I really must do a re-read of the non-South Riding novels.
Up Next
Have still not managed to get stuck in to Barbara Hambly, Crimson Angel, because of afore-mentioned influx of periodical literature.
And after that, which is top of the list, Greyladies have just reissued Noel Streatfeild's second novel, Parson's Nine (1932). This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2145622.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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