Wednesday has reverted once more to the autumnal
What I read
Barbara Hambly, Murder in July (2017). Well up to the usual standard.
Tanith Lee, Nightshades (1993): these were my on the go thing on the ereader, and really, I'm not sure I'd have wanted to read them in a bunch. Though very good: fairly early Lee, in horror mode.
Simon Green, Tales from the Nightside (2015), which I'd somehow missed. Pretty much as expected, though I'd anticipated that it would be short pieces and mostly about minor characters from the series and there are several that were pretty much novella length, and feature series protag.
Gwen Davis, The War Babies (1966): picked up in Camden Lock when we went for a canalside walk on Bank Holiday Monday. This is one of that genre that I think was prevalent from the 60s through the early 70s: take several young women (usually four, but number may vary), connected in some way (in this instance working as UN tour guides) facing life/affronting their destiny under the new conditions of living away from home and so on pertaining to the period, usually in the big city (and New York was pretty much the default), their adventures and misadventures. Pre/proto-feminist, Of Their Period, but having the sense of despatches from that front line of changing mores. Possibly this mutated into shopping-'n-fucking around 1980? This was okay, there are better there are worse that I have read. One really irking thing was a minor character who appears in one scene described as 'African' and is given a somewhat cliche background. No, I cannot believe that in 1966 and in and around UN there would not be rather more nuance over particular country and maybe even more precise ethnic affiliation.
On the go
Ellen Klages, Wicked Wonders (2017). For someone who doesn't read a lot of short stories, I seem to be hoovering collections of them up a bit lately. So far, this is really, really, good.
Still ploughing through second book for joint review, and I'm not sure whether it is just really, really heavy going or whether there is something about 'disciplinary approach from field which is not the one I work in, on topic I do' with added elements of cultural difference and 'how unlike the home-life...'.
Up next
I think this may be further trove from the Camden Lock excursion: 2 mysteries and a Virago (name of my next indie band).
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And, Dept of Poncey Writing About Books which discloses the writer's ignorance and facile preconceptions, Blood, bookworms, bosoms and bottoms: the secret life of libraries.
Really, bibliographers did not start doing provenance research the day before yesterday.
Some libraries have been making special collections of pulps for some time now, and given the Copyright Act I am in some confidence that the BL and other deposit libraries have been acquiring paperbacks with lurid covers for some considerable time.
But really, has our author ever read any litrachoor? Pulps, in short, are about lust, sex, theft, betrayal and degradation. Pulp men and women are dangerous, duplicitous, damaged.
Describes a whole lot of Y Litry Canon, if you ask me. It's not subject, so much as style, surely? And let us, my dearios, remember those memorable instances of Classix done up as if they were pulps. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2651473.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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