Oh. And women faint, and are revived by smelling salts. The heart of Victorian novels, eh?
It's now 12:23, and I'm sitting outside Gate A2 of BWI, just over three hours early.
It's nice not to be rushed, isn't it? Almost as nice as it is nice to not be carrying a hundred pounds of baggage. You may think I'm kidding, but the massive blue wheel-bag alone was three pounds over the fifty-pound per bag limit; I had to move some shorts and a couple books into the other book I was checking, which in itself weighted htirty pounds. Now, I've only got my laptop-backpack and a red gym bag.
Talking of baggage: while I was going through security (I've learned to take out every piece of metal out of my pockets more or less instinctively, only to be pulled aside for random sweeps. I'm honestly not sure why the TSA is perusing a vendetta against me, with my long hair, tie-dye shirt, and unkempt beard (not to mention, occasional use of a militant beret). Next flight I'm on, I'm abstaining from any food with iron in it for a week prior, see if that's enough to get me through safely), the woman that I couldn't take the book I was reading through the metal dectector, which was a shame, as I was on the last page, and she enjoyed the author. Elizabeth Peters, creator of Amelia Peabody.
Having just finished her first book, Crocodile on the Sandbank, I'm quite inclined to agree. digopheliadug gave her a strong recommendation, which indirectly prompted me to give her Jaquolin Winspear's Masey Dobbs (possibly misspelled; I don't currently have the internet; the time you see for the update is when I finished writing, not when I posted it), which I hadn't read but had good things about from my grandmother, Grandanne, and other critics, who compared it to The Ladies No. One Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith, which the (terrible) campus bookstore didn't have (although it had the lesser known Masey Dobbs) but which I have read and which reminded me very much in tone to Lori's description of the Amelia Peabody books, and if that isn't the most rambling sentence in this update I'd be shocked.
The characters are Victorian, and while I doubt anyone reading it would mistake it for George Eliot, it does establish Victorian sensibilities most remarkably, as well as having several common Victorian tropes: the Ruined Woman, for example, fits in here as well it does in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, although there is little sign of the sort of comeuppance that one might have expected had Dickens been the author. The banter between Amelia Peabody and Radcliffe Emerson (why don't we see Radcliffe's anymore? If my wife allows it (And if she married me, how bright can she be? Oh, unfelt self-disparaging, where would I be without you?), I'm saddling all my kids with anachrotastic monikers) kept me giggling like some of the better Darcy-Elizabeth moments. Marriages are both affairs of the heart and the purse, although they're denied the focus that . The villain's vices . And Peabody's feminism seems ahead of her times at times, but in a way that fits her personality to a T; she complains about the long dresses because of how they hamper her from running through the deserts of Egypt. Like Ladies No. One Detective Agency, there's really only one word that reflects the book's very essence: Charming.
Plus, Miss Peabody's weapon of choice is a parasol with an iron staff. Laura Croft, the better known female British archaeologist, uses pistols. I think we can agree which one is cooler on that score.
I've got to stop reading new authors, or I'll have to read every book ever written. Why do so many people have to be brilliant?