What I read
Finished Jo Walton, Ha'penny and went on to Half a Crown (2008): the whole sequence as good as I remembered.
Which is not what I could say for the first in a series of thrillers about a woman PI in California in the 80s that I read back in the day and picked off the shelf to see how it had held up, and, readers, it had not, so gave up.
( Read more... )

The longform patriarchs, and their accomplices: Beyond the white male canon: Bernardine Evaristo’s New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture offers a manifesto for the creation of a new, inclusive literary landscape: This essay notes that novels by women and about women are often demeaned by the longform patriarchs and their accomplices, as “domestic ( Read more... )

More weirdness from the Harry Ransom Center - okay, when I was there I was nose-down in the British Sexology Society/George Ives collections and a few other related things, so I never really delved into the bizarre depths: collection of famous people's hair compiled by the Romantic poet and essayist Leigh Hunt: 'Hunt's interest in hair is well ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Defender Hellhound - quite fun.
And then I had a spate of starting things in a 'what-do-Tiggers-like-to-eat?' fashion and putting them down after a very short while, and then defaulted to Agatha Christie, Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), which is coming up for that late period and milieux in which one feels Dame Agatha was not ( Read more... )

- in the interests of an entertaining historical romance read.
E.g. you have given your aristo hero the title of an actual member of the House of Lords who was nothing like that. Really nothing like.
I will concede to overlook playing somewhat fast and loose with the laws of inheritance and the state of the laws matrimonial at the period -
I ( Read more... )

What I read
More Dame Agatha: After the Funeral (1953) and Towards Zero (1944) - do tennis-players (male) have a particularly high probability of being dodgy in Christie? rather like medical men in Sayers?
KJ Charles, Proper English (2019) (I have to stop myself thinking of this as Full English), re-read, and that led me to re-read Think of England ( Read more... )

What I read
I am definitely in a bit of a meh phase via-a-vis reading at the moment, in which I start things and think that perhaps I should not be reading these just now, because I will very likely enjoy them more at some other time.
So what I have been reading - Diane Duane, Young Wizards 30 Day OTP (Days 1-17), picked up as a freebie along with ( Read more... )

Passed across my radar this week the information that there is a recently published biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, first ever Indian MP in the British Parliament and founder of the Indian National Congress. (Harvard UP's site apprears to be a bit weird at the moment and returning error messages quite generally?)
Elected in 1892, for the London ( Read more... )

Apart from the general LJ weirdness at present re cross-posting, I have recently had notifications of anonymous reponses to a comment of mine on someone else's post from 2010, which appear as 'screened' on-screen, but in the emailed version, appear as a string of Biblical references:

Acts 16:31, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 1 Peter 1:17-21, Revelation 22 ( Read more... )

And I've just looked it up and sure enough, the god of travel is Hermes/Mercury.
So, apart from the really crap night's sleep...
Today's mercurial or hermetic sacrifice was arriving at the Tube station to find a lengthy delay before the next train, which proceeded to not change for several minutes, and then a largely inaudible announcement that ( Read more... )