Wednesday is sitting comfortably, now we'll begin
What I read
Finished Starlight, which is a very good Stella Gibbons, and read Beside the Pearly Water, which did not really play to her strengths - the title novella goes off into wild melodrama territory (while the power of Starlight is that something that could be melodrama is played entirely differently) and I never really think that the short form was her, particularly. Some nice touches, but mostly however good the idea, don't always quite come off. (I liked the idea of the medieval English archer who had been one of the Angels of Mons and found himself and his mates on the Western Front in 1914 - intertextuality for the win! - but it felt a bit literary-exercise.)
Diane Duane's How Lovely Are Thy Branches was sweet, and it was nice to have this get together of the characters without them being brought together to save the universe. However, I was a bit boggled by the 'consensual fireplay involving sentient tree' element.
I seem to have missed at least one in the sequence before Monica Ferris's The Drowning Spool (I don't think the protag was previously shacked up with her admirer?) and this was a reliable spot of cosy mystery in one of those small towns or villages that make hardened cops blanch at being posted there ('He's never been the same since St Mary Mead...')
Elizabeth Taylor, The Wedding Group (1968), which I liked rather more than A Game of Hide and Seek - less indulgent to the characters perhaps? - and made me think that pretty nearly all her books could have the same title as that short story by Dame Rebecca, 'There is No Conversation'.
Last night I was not feeling very well, suffering from a mysterious attack of gastric cramps (but without any of the further untoward effects that might have signalled Something I Ate) and in need of comforting reading and got through most of Maeve Binchy's The Lilac Bus (1984), which is one of her shorter works, or maybe more like linked short stories about a group of people from the same small town who take the eponymous vehicle back to their native turf each weekend.
On the go
Still trekking on with Sekkrit Projekt #ifitoldyouidhavetokillyou reading, which is unfortunately a) being particularly subject to other commitments taking priority b) currently liked slogging across the Sahara with the Foreign Legion, a brutal NCO in charge and the wells poisoned.
Still with The Attic Term for trennels readthrough.
Picked up and started Alison Lurie's Truth and Consequences (2005) (since I couldn't find The Last Resort) - v good.
Still dipping in to In Dreams Begin, but I don't think that the fact that I found it suddenly pick up when the protag was wide awake, in the present, and talking about job-related stuff with a colleague is a good sign.
Up Next
I have the missing episode in the Ferris mysteries on the way and a couple of other things on order, note that I have managed to miss two recent David Wishart Marcus Corvinus mysteries, and we are still waiting for The Just City ebook. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2235300.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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