Wednesday is certainly not planning on going to the pub anytime in the foreseeable future
What I read
Finished The Angel of the Crows which, hmmmm, interesting, but the bar is set very high for Monette/Addison and I didn't think this quite came up to my expectations. Without those I might have been more impressed?
Zen Co, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (2020): not sure if this was entirely the best thing to read after the preceding, or whether I was just having a general thing of feeling I was missing genre protocols. I could see it was good but somehow I was not quite fully engaging.
Jane Oliver and Anne Stafford, Business as Usual (1933), which I think it was
sartorias mentioned somewhere, and I found has recently been reprinted by Handheld Press (with copious footnotes mainly explaining things that I, a veteran reader of interwar literature, understood already). Oliver and Stafford were prolific writers from the 30s well into the postwar era and I'm pretty sure, glancing at the list of their publications, in my day I've read various of their works. I was slightly less than whelmed by this epistolary novel of a young woman who goes to work at a lightly-disguised Selfridges as a gesture of independence before she gets married to her sexist surgeon fiance, but that is because I am a veteran reader of interwar literature and this was adequate but the authors are not EM Delafield or Stella Gibbons or Margery Sharp (alas). Of social historical interest (including the copies of Marie Stopes' works being kept on a discreet shelf in the book department...)
Finished Castles Made of Sand which I had put to one side while reading these other things, took some time to get going again and then wow.
Iona Datt Sharma (ed), Consolation Songs: Optimistic Speculative Fiction For A Time of Pandemic came out yesterday. I felt that 'optimistic' implies something rather more pollyannish than these were: they are more about coming to a resolution where there is a 'light that I may tread safely into the unknown'.
On the go
Back to the Bold As Love Sequence: on to Midnight Lamp (2003).
Up next
Well, I have been doing a slight splurge on books, including a deadtree copy of something that there are cheapish paperbacks of, whereas the ebook remains at what I consider a rather peculiarly high price. Also, new Alexis Hall next week!
And, o happy day, if that is quite the term, perhaps not, but Barbara Hambly has a new Benjamin January mystery out next month.
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