Wednesday wonders if that is a one-off or a whole new Calibre problem, sigh
What I read
Finished the Newbolt biography and was a bit underwhelmed - felt that there was a lot of material she'd just plonked down in more or less chronological order and it didn't feel engaged with. It was particularly disappointing, given that Chitty outed Charles Kingsley's very weird erotic life in The Beast and the Monk, given the somewhat bizarre polyamorous constellation of Newbolt's personal life, which one might have anticipated among the Fabian-type set (he did know Wells, didn't everyone, but they were not great chums) but not these rather more mainstream sorts.
Craving a bit of action, re-read John D MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold (1965): I had forgotten quite how high the body-count was in this one.
Candas Jane Dorsey, The Adventures of Isabel: An Epitome Apartments Mystery (2020), which, in spite of all the very up to the minute allusionness, struck me with a certain retro note, as the blurb 'a queer, nameless amateur detective is ambisexual V.I. Warshawski meets Kinky Friedman's Village Irregulars' might suggest. Readable.
Allie Brosh, Solutions and Other Problems (2020), very good, but she has seen some times over the last years, there is some grim stuff there.
Diane Duane, Owl Be Home For Christmas (2020) a rather slight (perhaps rather rushed to get out while still v contemporary?) novelette in the Young Wizards universe.
Caroline Stevermer, The Glass Magician (2020) - took me a little while to get going with this but once I did really good, did not go in directions I thought it might, stands alone but towards end a hint of possibility of sequel???
On the go
Diane Johnson, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives (1972, 2020 edition with Vivian Gornick intro). I fancy I would be enjoying this a whole lot more if Johnson was not setting Mary Ellen up not just as Not Like Other Girls but Not Like Other Girls Who Were Her Victorian Contemporaries. She does not get a pass for having written this in 1972, even if there has been a tsunami of work on Victorian women since then, because who were close contemporaries (born within a decade) of Mary Ellen Peacock, later Meredith? Ada Gordon later Lovelace, the Bronte sisters, Florence Nightingale, a certain Miss Mary Ann Evans, Barbara Leigh Smith later Bodichon, and Josephine Butler. Not to mention Princess Alexandrina Victoria her own self. There had recently been major biographies of George Eliot and the Brontes which placed them in circles of intellectual and literary and social activist women. The struggles of women for education and to enter professions had been documented (the lives in pictures featured in the girls' comics of my youth). Gornick in the intro praises Johnson's interest in fleetingly passing characters but passes over her characterisation of Victorian womanhood in a way that was straight out of the most patriarchal of conduct manuals.
Also on the go, which I admit to so far liking a lot more even though it is background research, Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (2008), which quite by happenstance was being recommended via an academic listserv.
Up next
I'm not sure if Sybil Oldfield's The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi Hitlist (2020) is one to read straight through rather than dip into.
Maybe Marilynne Robinson, Jack (2020).
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