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Happy birthday, flandevainilla and snippy!

Wednesday has been de-earwaxed but requires follow-up

What I read

Finished Out of Bounds, which I thought was rather a slow starter, but picked up the pace as it progressed. Not sure I'm in for delving deeper into McDermid's more recent oeuvre, however. Might see if I can dig out the earlier works I thought I had around.

Most recent Literary Review.

Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men (2011) people talk about Sad Girl Books but this seemed to me of that genre Sad (sometimes Angry, Hai Doris Lessing) Middleaged Women books and maybe it's not typical but I don't think I will be picking up more of her work. Okay, it's the narrator who blathers a bit about Laqueur and the sexual body, but puh-leeez!!! that is the book me and mates in related historiographical fields have been snarking on now for literally decades.

Penelope Lively, Spiderweb (1998). Retired anthropologist moves to a West Country village for rather random reasons. A certain predictability e.g. re the bestie's widowed husband, though, fair dos, did not go quite the full Village Gothic with the horrible dysfunctional nextdoor family (not actually locals but incomers themselves).

RA Sinn, A Second Chance for Yesterday (2023) - I took a punt on this because half of the brother and sister team wrote a very good work of history I read recently, and it was very good but if you are writing sff I would like more closure than just the main character's epiphany to end on? Maybe I am bringing my Old Skool assumptions.

On the go

In between things I am still dipping into They Winter Abroad, because it is absolutely a work where you can read a few pages of somebody wittering on or having deep inward thoughts about the local peasantry or whatever or awkward interactions between the various characters, and then leave it for a while.

Have just started Kathleen Thompson Norris, The Rich Mrs Burgoyne (1912), which was a bit due to a general sortes ereader and partly due to observing that at some point I downloaded several of her works and never got to more than a couple, but the ones I did read I liked.

Up next

The latest KJ Charles is due tomorrow. Also I am a bit intrigued by an Edwardian murder mystery also due to publish then by the author of the biography of Marshall Hall.