Wednesday wonders if that was summer, and now it's gone
What I read
Finished An Accident of Stars, which, I can see it's attempting interesting things with the portal fantasy (Narnia under the White Witch is a walk in the park by comparison) and doing unusual things with the characters, but there was a hiatus in the middle while I read other things, and I had a bit of a 'I started-now-I'll-finish' feeling about it.
I then, following somebody (I think
fairestcat) mentioning Cat Sebastian's The Ruin of a Rake (2017) on Twitter, essentially inhaled that and the preceding volumes in the series, The Soldier's Scoundrel (2016) and The Lawrence Browne Affair (2017). These are m/m regencys, and while they are not in the KJ Charles class - OMG the anachronistic word usages and out of place idioms, + character given a title that there is a real-life Earl of - I was consuming them like, no, not popcorn, I'm not that bothered with popcorn, a better analogy would be really good salted roasted nuts or poncey vegetable crisps.
Diane Duane, On Ordeal: Ronan Nolan Jnr (2017: novella set in the Young Wizards universe) - didn't like quite as much as I usually do this series. Plus, no, it was not Fred Astaire swinging around the lamp-post in the pouring rain, that was Gene Kelly.
On the go
Angus McLaren, Playboys and Mayfair Men: Crime, Class, Masculinity, and Fascism in 1930s London (out autumn 2017, this was an advance copy). Continues McLaren's longtime interest in deviant forms of masculinity not subsumable to simple invocation of homosexuality, though it may be in the mix. This takes a high-profile case of an attempted jewel robbery by 4 upper(ish) class men (I think the some of the class analysis could be a bit more nuanced, e.g. the social resonance of specific public schools) which ended up nearly killing a jeweller, and for which two of the perpetrators were flogged (yes, I know one might think they were used to that, with the public school thing, but it was considered shocking that they might endure a criminal penalty associated with the roughest elements).
This is contextualised in wider patterns around crime, class, masculinity etc, and there seem to have been a significant number of entitled young men who, even though they had either run through their inheritance or, because Depression, inheritance not what it was, thought the world owed them a living of nightclubs, posh hotels, fast cars, smart clothes, etc. And if they could not e.g. marry a rich woman, they turned to crime.
At which they were so not Raffles the amateur cracksman but really pretty useless, possibly more like Bunny had he tried to go it alone.
Haven't finished it yet: have just got to the chapter on Fascism.
Also on the go, because that is a bound proof copy that I don't want to tote around me, so on the e-reader, Farah Mendelsohn, Rejected Essays and Buried Thoughts (2017.
Up next
Thinking that Matt Houlbrook's Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (2016) would have interesting resonances with the McLaren, and has already been sitting rather a while on the tbr pile. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2629186.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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