Wednesday is still checking daily for available vaccine slots, sigh
What I read
Finished Rebel Women - possibly (apart from the bloopers) a lot of it was that the author and I were interested in different things? so she was getting very excited about some aspects of these women's lives, and I was 'yeah, yeah, but what about - ?' and really, it was her book and her choice.
Angela Thirkell, Coronation Summer: A Novel of 1838 (1937) - pastiche Victoriana, narrative by a young girl up from rural Norfolk with Papa and friend and visits from Oxonian brother at the time of the Coronation. I suspect a lot of scissors and paste work from memoirs and diaries of the period, and possibly lesser-known literary works, but moderately entertaining.
Margery Sharp, Rhododendron Pie (1930), her first novel recently reissued by Furrowed Middlebrow. It's charming. In her book on the feminine middlebrow Nicola Humble had quite a lot on the eccentric somewhat boho and artistic, consciously unconventional, middle-class family as a common trope, but here (as quite often in Stella Gibbons) a critical and somewhat satirical eye is cast upon it.
Alice Degan, From All False Doctrine (2014), which I have been seeing various people speak well of for a while. An interesting chimera of a book - I fancy there must be people who say that it's not like any other book, but I see some Goodreads reviewers namecheck the influence of Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers, and I think Robertson Davies is somewhere in its DNA (It's set in Toronto. University. Anglican clergymen. Occult goings-on. Dodgy academics. Forgery.) Also, maybe, a touch of Susan Howatch with the chilli factor seriously dialled down?
On the go
I realise that one of my problems with reading Novel on Yellow Paper at the moment is the really horrible formating of the ebook I have - great gaps between paragraphs which essentially plonks them one to a page.
Just started, Sarah Schulman, My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan and Bush Years (1994, reissued 2018) - which I discovered, having recently purchased a copy, I already had on a remote shelf.
Up next
I still have one of the Furrowed Middlebrow Margery Sharps to go, also an early, non-Barsetshire Thirkell.
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