At the weekend I came across a Twitter thread by someone who had been caught up in what they describe as a 'cult' of a shared online fantasy world, which came to take over their life almost to the exclusion of 'normal reality' -
And I thought, is this not really rather like the 'Brontes' web of childhood'* - one of the significant things being ( Read more... )

What I read
There was a massive re-read of AJ Hall's Queen of Gondal saga - including I think a couple at least of episodes I'd missed, at least, I didn't have them on my Kobo.
Barbara Hambly, Scandal in Babylon (Silver Screen #1) (2021) - very good, not perhaps one of the absolutely top Hamblys, but that is a very high bar. While there is a ( Read more... )

(Dare one wish Emily A Happy Birthday?)
This piece, about Was Charlotte Right to Burn The (quite possibly chimerical) Manuscript of Emily's Second Novel: Emily Brontë’s Lost Second Novel is based on some pretty 'ahem' readings of Wuthering Heights: Emily, being the homebody she was, was also fascinated by ancestral homes, dwellings where several ( Read more... )

What I read
Well, I think I've come to the end of the Antonia Fraser Jemima Shore binge - there are a couple of volumes of short stories, at least one of which I think I have somewhere, but I'm not madly bothered. I finished Your Royal Hostage, read The Cavalier Case (Jemima Shore, #7) (1990) and Political Death (Jemima Shore #8) (1994). Am still ( Read more... )

What I read
Continued with the Antonia Fraser Jemima Shore mysteries, which are quite readable even if Jemima is no great shakes as an investigator (she is no Miss Marple for sure; nor are the books doing the 'I'm playing about with the genre here, for la, 'tis only a mystery story' that Amanda Cross does): A Splash of Red (1981); Cool Repentance ( ( Read more... )

Yet another of those weird book lists compiled upon principles that are impossible to decode - including mostly fiction, a few instances of fairly popular non-fictional writing, a proportion of classics, a certain amount of what I think of as 'book club faves', relatively recent bestsellers, popular YA works, and a sprinkling of genre classics ( ( Read more... )

- there's not really any necessary reason why certain books on a certain theme published in the UK by a fairly niche press from roughly the mid 80s to the mid 90s should be part of the discourse when discussing books of recent years on the same certain theme being published in what one may contend is the very different milieu brought about by the ( Read more... )

As I daresay my dearios are aware, it has long been an on-dit that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were more than good friends. They shared a beach house at Santa Monica for substantial portions of the 1930s, from up-and-coming to major stardom.
However, somebody has just written a book to say, no, no, they really were 'just good friends', and ( Read more... )

Interview with Joanna Russ (from 2011): Russ reflects on her initial responses to slash fandom and considers its political and social meanings in the 1980s and today.
Leaflets falsely claim pupils taught masturbation in relationship classes: Flyers also accuse schools of promoting ‘transgenderism and homosexual lifestyles’ (Dept of, Description is ( Read more... )

When I clicked through to this: Beyond Fan Fiction: Rewriting and Distorting The Shining DW Gibson Speaks with Lonely Christopher About his New Novel, THERE -
I was
Surely this cannot be serious? So I was coming from an intellectual, structural place at the outset. That’s why I was comfortable with throwing out the writing process, as it is ( Read more... )