What I read
Finished Pure Juliet, also, but not immediately following, re-read of The Yellow Houses, the other posthumously published Stella Gibbons. And perhaps one does see why they might not have been publishable at the time (simply because there is a feeling of disjuncture between her and the period in and of which she was writing), but they ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Judith, which felt like Streatfeild got bored and decided to skip over a whole load of character development, so there was a sudden change which happened very fast after a break in the narrative leaving one wondering where it came from.
Genevieve Valentine, Icon (Persona #2) (2016). I read Persona way back in 2017 and enjoyed ( Read more... )

Was reading Ursula Le Guin letting her peeves off the leash on the topic of genre in Words Are My Matter, and how literary realist fiction is considered literature and all one wonderful thing.
Whereas, I thought, in fact litfic is a genre and I think it has - or certain types of litfic do - actual generic conventions.
And thinking about what Le ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Yellow Houses. I could live with the 'supernatural agency' element, very much in the mode of the 'Gentle Powers' invoked in Westwood, embedded in a more realist narrative: I'm not sure I could be doing with the central romance which struck me as far more implausible (and with such potential for disaster further down the ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Will Do Magic for Small Change.
Read Sarah Tolmie, The Stone Boatmen (2014): exquisitely written, one could say that narrative was slow and meandering but I think that constitutes a deliberate choice as to where the emphasis falls and what is given importance. Also, subverts certain expectations of the arc of the plot. I ( Read more... )

This evening was our annual excursion to the Flamenco Festival at Sadlers Wells.
Very good, we both enjoyed it (we saw Marco Flores & Olga Pericet - Paso a Dos - stunning.)
But I'm always aware that I don't know much about flamenco, and so I'm probably missing a lot about what is completely trad but doing the conventions really, really well, and ( Read more... )

What I read
The final episode of Tremontaine, series 1.
Heather Rose Jones, The Mazarinette and the Musketeer (novella, 2016); what is not to love about alt-hist (but only slightly) in which Aphra Behn is the spy-forced-out-of-retirement?
Stella Gibbons, Pure Juliet (published 2016, but on internal evidence, written during the 1970s). One of the, I ( Read more... )

What I read
In the A Scots Quair re-read, I finished Sunset Song (1932) - very good but very grim.
As a result (I could only really read a bit at a time), I found myself rereading Stella Gibbons, My American (1939). Although this does some tropes I really could do without, and the American bits of the plot are not only (to the best of my knowledge ( Read more... )

The debate thinggy that regularly features in the Observer New Review this week is Are pedestrian fast lanes a good thing?
Certainly, as someone who tends to move fairly fast and get unwontedly irritated at dawdlers and ditherers - yes, there may be reasons, but if you are going to dither, could you move out of the flow of traffic to do so - I am ( Read more... )

Further to the request for categories listing of five things:

( Read more... )