Wednesday is gradually getting the new computer under hand
What I read
Well, Arabella is one of the better Heyers - I mean to say, a heroine who is, by Heyer standards, a positive SJW, no? and the hero is a good deal less noxious alpha than some - a man who takes a delight in winding up aspirants to style by the dandelion thing is something of an improvement, and we even discover that he is capable of conversing with Arabella's Papa on the classics on relatively equal terms. On the other hand, what it is with the useless brothers? these are like the wounds and the sickness for plot mechanism purposes...
Josephine Tey, A Shilling for Candles (1936), which is the one Tey mystery I don't seem to have a copy of, haven't read for ages, and is now available via The Faded Page, bless them. I had forgotten most of this one, including who actually dunnit. (I am already convinced Marta Hallard is a Friend of Radclyffe, and would not be surprised if she had had a fling with the victim in this one - married to an aristo who spends all his time going abroad, can you say, 'beard'?)
Tessa Dare, The Duchess Deal (Girl Meets Duke, #1) (2017), about which I have already perorated. If you can have the actual thing of a woman with a chronometer who goes around setting clocks to the correct time (not unknown, though this is a bit later it was a family occupation) how can you get all this wrong?
Elswyth Thane, Kissing Kin (1948). Many years ago I and my then bestie came across various of Ms Thane's works in the school library and for some reason I remembered them recently, and found that the 'Williamsburg novels' are available as very eligibly priced ebooks. One or two that I remembered I wasn't sure would have worn terribly well, but this one, which covers from the middle of WW1 to early 1930s was by no means bad. It possibly helps that the later novels in a sequence extending from the Revolutionary War to the Second World War were distinctly transatlantic and cosmopolitan, and in this one there were maybe just a couple of moments which were of the time and place. Otherwise, family saga and romance but with some gritty moments among the VADs and in the trenches, and in Germany just after the rise of Hitler, the romances by no means contrived and sometimes thwarted by circumstance, and female bonding and mutual support. Better than I had anticipated and had worn much better than many things I enjoyed at the same period of my life.
On the go
Still rather bogged down in Fuckology - John Money appears to be yet another person who while radical in certain directions was curiously adherent to certain accepted notions in others.
Have started Miranda Seymour's big fat bio of Mary Shelley (2000) - she has just met PBS, and one is already going 'don't do it, Mary!' He sounds terrible.
Up next
I think I may want an occasional let-up from Mary and her woes, but not sure what - maybe another of E Thane's.
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