(no subject)

Happy birthday, shopfront!

Wednesday? Again?

What I read

Following a reference to the first one somewhere online, I've been re-reading Jane Dentinger's Jocelyn O'Roarke mysteries - our protag is an actor/director, gets involved in various workplace mysteries, and has a rather troubled relationship with an NY police detective (plus another guy who pops up in a later episode). I appear to be missing no 3 Death Mask, which I have on order, but have made my way through Murder on Cue (1983), First Hit of the Season (1984), Dead Pan (1992), The Queen is Dead (1994). The series is quite more-ish (as may be deduced), but I remembered very little about any of these. Very much on the cosier side.

Also a long J D Robb short story, Ritual in Death (2008) - is she moving towards bringing in more slightly fantasy elements?

Plus, this kind person has put online 6 uncollected stories by Saki, which I also read during the course of the week.

There was some Sekkrit Projekt reading as well.

On the go

Still only partway through the final Jocelyn O'Roarke mystery, Who Dropped Peter Pan? (1995).

Plus Peter's Room for the trennels readthrough.

Just dipped into Zen Cho's Spirits Abroad (2014), which is now out in ebook.

Up next

Well, more Spirits Abroad I guess. The latest Jane Haddam, ordered well over a week ago, cometh not and I have had an apologetic email from Wordery about the holdup. However, I do have a new Margaret Maron Sigrid Haraldsen mystery,though I think this may just be a new edition rather than a new entry in the series (this was not at all clear from the publishing details), and several other things, including John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (2013) (collection of essays) as Pickering and Chatto were having a knockdown sale on several of their hardbacks (priced even lower than their ebooks for a short time).

That annoying thing -

When you're at the discussion stage of a seminar or conference panel and somebody asks a question which suggests that All They Know About The Subject was gleaned by skim-reading an article in Journal of Things Misheard In A Pub some while ago, or possibly that they are simply free-associating -

- and which is -

a) pretty much completely tangential to what the paper/panel was actually about;

b) something on which one, as a member of the audience rather than the speaker or panel member knows Rather A Lot

- but what they have come out with is such a tangled mess of misapprehensions that one hardly knows where to start unpicking and disentangling, plus it would be completely hijacking discussion of the actual paper/panel.

Speaker did point out, a shade wearily, that it was something on which there was already A Good Deal of Scholarship, which was why they were doing something entirely different.