What I read
Finished Dancing Death, and a) I think that poison gas was in contravention of the Detection Club rules about 'undiscovered poisons' and b) if love for a specific individual is going to motivate a convoluted double murder plot, I really think the individual in question should get more page time and character development rather than ( Read more... )

Thinking further about that question about addicting books, and what that means, it occurred to me that possibly for me it's something that I see not so much on the level of the individual book, as of the oeuvre of an author.
Because I have certainly had experience of that thing where I have binge-read through such works as were available to me of ( Read more... )

I was inspired by reading in Winifred Holtby as I Knew Her that WH, in her book about V Woolf pointed out that several characters from previous books by Woolf were at Mrs Dalloway's party -

Which totally delighted me as a result of thoughts I was having a couple of weeks ago that never became a post.

Which themselves were generated by reading a ( Read more... )

I have a niggling feeling I may have posted to this effect before, but can't actually trace it if I did.

Was thinking, pursuant to recently reading Wigs on the Green, about books one reads because one has encountered them mentioned in other books. It's not just that I first encountered mention of WotG in Decca Mitford's Hons and Rebels, but that I ( Read more... )

Another poetic kerfuffle, this time author of book in which Andrew Motion discovered the lines he turned into a 'found poem' on World War I objects. Motion comes over as a bit of an up-himself prat, but I already codslapped him last week.

Ratty making a comeback to the riverbank, bless.

Revisionism of woman-blaming: Eliza Lynch was depicted by ( Read more... )

Five questions from frankie_ecap:

(1) ( How did you and partner meet and how did you know he was the one? )

Via hafren:

1. Comment on this post and ask for a letter.
2. I will give you one.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose names begin with that letter, and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.
And she gave me O:

Odysseus. Okay, there are a number of problematic areas around his behaviour, but he is a more interesting model ( Read more... )

ankaret has asked me for my memories of 1984.

Probably most significant about this year was that it was the year partner and I finally moved in together. At the end of August, a day or so after the Bank Holiday.

This represented the culmination of the process of finding a new larger flat and selling my old one, a process which included, along the way, ( Read more... )

There are so many stories about girls who leave home to pursue disapproved or unconventional careers or courses of action, that it's really lovely to read a true-life story about a man who left his 'die-hard shipbuilding family' to become a nurse (at a time when male nurses were less common). Though I'm intrigued at the throwaway comment that by ( Read more... )

In response to this post by frumiousb about Proust's The Captive and The Fugitive, I commented as follows:
Narrator becomes strong contender for 'literary character we would most like to see repeatedly slapped about the chops with a wet codfish' (duking it out with Esther Summerson from Bleak House, the queen of nauseous self-deprecating tweeness).
So: wet ( Read more... )