(no subject)

Happy birthday, kathmandu!

Wednesday was up to 2 am, because emergency plumber

What I read

Finished The People in the Trees - my proviso re noxiousness of main character remains, but I thought there were interesting things going on there, e.g. despoliation of nature/innocence, and that he gets a Nobel prize for work that has resulted in destruction of a way of life and island ecology, but then gets fingered for paedophilia. (And I thought the author should have resisted that coda and left things a bit more grey and indeterminate.)

I thought it was very good, but I would be hesitant to recommend it to people unless I was very sure of their tastes. But given recent hoohah around writing the other, this is someone who is not a Dead White Male writing as the epitome of a certain type of DWM and doing it very well. (And the case I couldn't remember on which it was based was that of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who did work on kuru in New Guinea.)

Read surprising little given the extended railway drama - but did read the very lovely Miss Eleanor Tilney: or, The Reluctant Heroine by Sherwood Smith. Would recommend.

And then got drawn into re-reading Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (2016). It's years since I last read it, and do we think that the narrator is so far in the closet he's looking at a lamppost in Narnia, and in fact doesn't even cop to himself? Doesn't he quite drool over Ashburnham?

On the go

Simon R Green, Dr DOA (2016). Seem to have rather abandoned Trade Secret.

Up next

Really, dunno.