Wednesday has now managed to snag a Waitrose slot for next week, go me
What I read
Finished The Virago Story about which I was distinctly meh - noticed several niggling errors in names and titles of books and stories in areas where I have some expertise and honestly, where does she get off saying the Women's Library is closed? It moved, there was masses about it in the press, and she was talking about that same Women's Library and not one of the other Feminist etc collections, because I looked it up in its present home, and yes, it does hold the papers of that small feminist press that closed that she mentions as being placed there (before the move).
I had another small specialist and niche irk in reading Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House (2019), as somebody who was never required to wear white gloves when consulting archives in the Beineke and never saw anyone else do so. Okay, that was all modern archival collections, and maybe they have different rules for Ye Olde MSS, but archivists and manuscript curators are mostly given to banging their heads over the 'white gloves' motif, something only required when handling certain very specific classes of material. Apart from that, and finding it took me some while to get into this, with some murmuring about what is it with US Institutionz of Highah Learninz and Ye Darke Artz, but once I got going with it thought it v good, will probably go for the sequel. Not sure about Bardugo's other work, which looks to be more YA? Thoughts and comments?
I think Blood Shot: Stories from the Blood 'Verse might have worked better was it not such a very long time since I had read the main novel sequences to which these short stories relate.
Margery Sharp, Fanfare for Tin Trumpets (1932): as with The Stone of Chastity, the central character is a rather drippy and unmotivated young man, and what a blessing it was when Sharp realised that her strength lay in eccentric and subversive women. This was moderately entertaining but predominantly for the surrounding characters and social milieux.
Also not yet having hit her stride: Angela Thirkell, Ankle Deep (1933), which was actually free on Kindle last week (not sure if it still is - 2 other early works of her put out by same press were also available at v low price). Not, alas, Barsetshire, and I could not help thinking that the central rather angst-ridden hopeless love-story would have benefitted from being set amidst the usual swathe of ongoing subplots. A number of recognisable Thirkell types already onstage.
On the go
Judith G Coffin, Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir (2020) - very much based on letters received by her from her readers. Not very far in but some fascinating and rather counter-intuitive stuff on French context - including the concept of pudeur, or public modesty/discretion, which Simone was held to have violated. (Not so much of the oolala, really.) I could not help thinking that those prudish Anglo-Saxon cultures of the Brits and the USA were saying things some thirty years previously (Stopes, Sanger) that appear to have come as An Orrid Shock to the French.
Up next
Another Sharp? Another Thirkell? Dunno, really.
This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/3187824.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.