Wednesday still has the ick

What I read

Finished The Age of Scandal - and with additional fat-shaming of Caroline Matilda, Queen of Denmark! No, underwhelmed entirely by this.

Lead Me Not - rather slow, though the setup did rather require that everything moved very tentatively. I wanted more about the twin sister - even if that was a really terrible idea for getting her twin brother to come to terms with his sexual orientation, there was enough there that it seemed like there might be a story.

Latest episode of Tremontaine.

Tanith Lee, Greyglass (2011) - what was really great about this - characteristically late mode Lee - was the way she does the unheimlich in the ordinary and the banal - barely needs any supernatural element, and could be put down to 'all in the mind'?

Anne Charnock, A Calculated Life (2013) - this was, I think, a freebie or a special offer that someone or other recommended. Very good. Small detail work. One or two slightly info-dumpy places, but mostly it's done very subtly. Melodrama eschewed.

On the go

Marjorie Senechal, I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science (2012): I think this was a freebie in the category of Academic Press 'we can't/won't pay you for giving us a report on this ms/book proposal/encyclopedia article, but you can have £/$XXX-worth of our books!' I'm finding it slightly irksome - there's a certain amount of rather consciously fine, or intended to be fine writing (a touch creative-writing class) + a fair amount of 'my research I show u it'. Also, has various instances of getting it wrong ('First Division' in UK prisons c. 1917 didn't mean you were a nob, it meant a certain class of offence not of common criminality, one of the suffragette issues was about trying to get suffragette prisoners into First Division), missing the point, and infelicitous word choices (I don't think 'home-schooling' has the right connotations for 'educated by governesses in the days when girls often weren't sent to schools anyway'). And had that thing where, although author has found out a lot (see 'my research I show u it') I suspect I know enough about quite a lot of the cast of characters to a) wince and b) know more - e.g. 'How could she not mention that Bertrand Russell's elder brother was banged up for bigamy after a trial by his peers, i.e. the House of Lords?' (and I bet he didn't serve that sentence in the First Division) and 'given all the other peripheral matter you mention, surely is worthy of note that Elizabeth von Arnim was Katherine Mansfield's cousin?'.

So I'm rather reading it with my little nitcomb in my hand, in my hand.

Up next

Not sure.