Wednesday has been trying to get a photo suitable to send to partner's family for An Occasion
What I read
Finished The Fall of Koli, which I felt slightly fell off from the previous volumes - a bit kitchen-sinky with all that was being thrown in.
Sherry Thomas, Claiming the Duchess (Fitzhugh Trilogy #0.5)(2014). This was very slight, especially when it turned out that about half the pages were a trailer for Vol 1 of the actual trilogy. Also, who, reading the blurb, did not see that coming a long way off?
Zoe Chant, Unicorn Vet, just out, charming fluff.
And for a complete contrast, L Timmel Duchamp, The Silences of Ararat, just out, novella riffing on A Winter's Tale - compelling.
Discovered - why was I not informed?? - that a collection of Vivian Gornick essays was just out: Taking A Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time. Devoured these, even if I occasionally looked up and went 'WOT she does not rate Edna St Vincent Millay what is this thing that this thing is, maybe she also does not rate Dorothy Parker'; and 'Boy, that is a very odd take on the transatlantic trajectory of post-war feminism, just sayin''. But we all have our idiosyncrasies.
Sarah Schulman, Maggie Terry (2018), lesbian former cop now in rehab with backstory issues, now has job as private investigator for law firm. Okay, I was pretty sure how the solution to the actual crime was going to turn out (misspent middle age reading a helluva lot of crime fiction), but the journey was very worth taking.
Dorothy Whipple, Every Good Deed and Other Stories (Persephone Press, 2016, the title novella was first published in 1944 and the other stories in various venues from 1935-1961). One, I would say, for the Whipple completist and not the place to start, a bit barrel-scraping.
On the go
Still intermittently dipping in to Thirteen Ways to Look at the Novel, which is a bit of a dipper-inner rather than a read-straight-through.
Lately started, Sarah Lonsdale, Rebel women between the wars: Fearless writers and adventurers (2020), which was lying a bit forgotten in my tbr pile, and in the course of an email exchange with a friend of mine who also works on interwar British women, she asked had I read it, and shock horror it did not mention my work (or hers, actually). So I picked it up, and I was prepared to be a little bit forgiving of the rather cursory overview at the beginning and the rather startling bibliographic omissions (no, not my work, other things at which I boggled), in the hopes that the chapters on the individual women would be what it was there for. Except I keep bumping up against annoying little inaccuracies, and a generalisation about women in the Society of Friends which seemed to be be erasing, o, a century of activism going back to anti-slavery and the sugar boycott? And the writing - for someone who is, it appears a journalist - is not what I would call all that.
Up next
No idea. Maybe some more Margery Sharp?
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