I love books about the Victorians. It’s Oscar Wilde’s fault for being one. And I like books about mental illness, as long as they do not do that stream of consciousness thing, which I absolutely can’t stand. So when I read about this on the other Jenny Claire’s blog, I was pleased as punch to read it; and yes, I did mess up my don’t-check-out-any-more-library-books thing in order to get this book. And, okay, yes, since I was at the library anyway, I may have gotten a few other books as well. An Inconvenient Wife is about an upper-class American…
1 CommentTag: historical fiction
This is more like it. I read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go when I was in England. I don’t remember why – maybe it was that phase in my life where I was getting book recommendations from book prize lists. Book prize books are often not good books for me (see Darkmans). However, I really liked Never Let Me Go, and I really liked this one too. The beginning: The Remains of the Day (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is all about a butler called Stevens who has been in service for many years, and has gone on…
5 CommentsWell, hmph. Well, not really hmph. I sort of take back my hmph. It’s that expectations/reality gap again – I should just stop reading positive reviews of books. If only there were some way of deciding what books to read without forming any expectations at all. Wouldn’t that be nice? But there are just some things that cause my expectations to become high, such as – let me think – okay, such as stories about children who go away to live with relatives/at a boarding school/with a bunch of strangers, and they have adventures. Or stories with Catholic orphans. Or…
5 CommentsI just finished the second book in my “Take Against Matt Smith Unreasonably Before David Tennant Even Goes Anywhere Project”, and I shall watch the film version this evening, taking against Matt Smith with all my might. And if I haven’t taken against him sufficiently, I’ll just, I’ll just look up videos on YouTube and make complaining comments in my head about how his HAIR is stupid and he’s completely COMMON like a little LONDON GUTTER RAT and he keeps on making PRETENTIOUS HANDS. (I just went and watched a video of him on YouTube and okay, yes, his hair’s…
3 CommentsThe Eleventh Doctor isn’t Paterson Joseph. I really, really wanted it to be, but no, it isn’t him. They said so today. It’s some little child twenty-six years old (my generation, for heaven’s sake!) that nobody’s ever heard of. Except that apparently he was in the BBC film version of Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke. With Billie Piper, Billie Piper! Hurrah for Billie Piper! So I decided to read the books and then watch the films when they come in at the library. The Ruby in the Smoke is about a girl called Sally Lockhart whose father has…
Leave a CommentRecommended by: Trish’s blog I’ve been reading this on and off for a while. I don’t like it when this happens with a book – when I put the book down for a while, it looks so reproachful every time I see it, and eventually I often come to resent it and think reasons not to finish it. In the case of The Sixteen Pleasures, I did feel guilty about abandoning it so callously, but last night I picked it up and finished it before I went to sleep. (I stayed up later than I was going to stay up,…
2 CommentsThis is one of about five billion books my father got for my mother for Christmas. My mother loves to get a bunch of books for Christmas, so this year my father made a humongous effort to think of and buy books for her that she would enjoy, so at the end of the day she’d have a great big stack of new books to read. What’s nicer than that, eh? And I swiped it today and read it on the drive to the farm for our family Christmas. (Hm, that paragraph sounds ridiculously wholesome. I made a sneery face…
4 CommentsMy mother mentioned this book as something she might want for Christmas, if it was any good. My mother is impossible to buy for so I made a specific effort to acquire it at the library and read it, to screen it for her. It’s all about how Edgar Allan Poe fakes his own death, and Charles Dickens comes to America, and there’s a conspiracy, and numerous Irish people, making trouble. People from the homeland are apt to behave in this fashion. (My people were Irish. I know British people object strenuously to claims of this sort, but I can’t…
2 CommentsI read about Charles Palliser on this website, but The Unburied, which is the book she actually reviewed, wasn’t at the library. So I got this instead. It is full of London, so I thought that would be a point in its favor. I think of London almost every day, because I miss it so much and I want to go back. And also it is gorgeous and perfect. London’s lovely perfection is not so much in evidence in The Quincunx. The protagonist, John Huffam, spends a lot of time being really unhappy in (Victorian) London, due to the seedier…
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