Wednesday has reverted once more to the autumnal

[oursin]

What I read

Barbara Hambly, Murder in July (2017). Well up to the usual standard.

Tanith Lee, Nightshades (1993): these were my on the go thing on the ereader, and really, I'm not sure I'd have wanted to read them in a bunch. Though very good: fairly early Lee, in horror mode.

Simon Green, Tales from the Nightside (2015), which I'd somehow missed. Pretty much as expected, though I'd anticipated that it would be short pieces and mostly about minor characters from the series and there are several that were pretty much novella length, and feature series protag.

Gwen Davis, The War Babies (1966): picked up in Camden Lock when we went for a canalside walk on Bank Holiday Monday. This is one of that genre that I think was prevalent from the 60s through the early 70s: take several young women (usually four, but number may vary), connected in some way (in this instance working as UN tour guides) facing life/affronting their destiny under the new conditions of living away from home and so on pertaining to the period, usually in the big city (and New York was pretty much the default), their adventures and misadventures. Pre/proto-feminist, Of Their Period, but having the sense of despatches from that front line of changing mores. Possibly this mutated into shopping-'n-fucking around 1980? This was okay, there are better there are worse that I have read. One really irking thing was a minor character who appears in one scene described as 'African' and is given a somewhat cliche background. No, I cannot believe that in 1966 and in and around UN there would not be rather more nuance over particular country and maybe even more precise ethnic affiliation.

On the go

Ellen Klages, Wicked Wonders (2017). For someone who doesn't read a lot of short stories, I seem to be hoovering collections of them up a bit lately. So far, this is really, really, good.

Still ploughing through second book for joint review, and I'm not sure whether it is just really, really heavy going or whether there is something about 'disciplinary approach from field which is not the one I work in, on topic I do' with added elements of cultural difference and 'how unlike the home-life...'.

Up next

I think this may be further trove from the Camden Lock excursion: 2 mysteries and a Virago (name of my next indie band).

***

And, Dept of Poncey Writing About Books which discloses the writer's ignorance and facile preconceptions, Blood, bookworms, bosoms and bottoms: the secret life of libraries.

Really, bibliographers did not start doing provenance research the day before yesterday.

Some libraries have been making special collections of pulps for some time now, and given the Copyright Act I am in some confidence that the BL and other deposit libraries have been acquiring paperbacks with lurid covers for some considerable time.

But really, has our author ever read any litrachoor?

Pulps, in short, are about lust, sex, theft, betrayal and degradation. Pulp men and women are dangerous, duplicitous, damaged.

Describes a whole lot of Y Litry Canon, if you ask me. It's not subject, so much as style, surely? And let us, my dearios, remember those memorable instances of Classix done up as if they were pulps.

Comments

[tree_and_leaf]

I was baffled by Kells' reference to book burning in Anne of Green Gables - I can only think he means the reference to Anne burning the bundle of leaflets of her story which Diana altered and entered in the baking powder competition, but that surely isn't quite the same thing? It certainly isn't a moment of 'intense emotional power' - the whole thing is at least partly humorous.

Anne was not over-sorry to leave Avonlea when the time came to return to college. The last few days of her vacation had not been pleasant. Her prize story had been published in the Island papers; and Mr. William Blair had, upon the counter of his store, a huge pile of pink, green and yellow pamphlets, containing it, one of which he gave to every customer. He sent a complimentary bundle to Anne, who promptly dropped them all in the kitchen stove. Her humiliation was the consequence of her own ideals only, for Avonlea folks thought it quite splendid that she should have won the prize. Her many friends regarded her with honest admiration; her few foes with scornful envy.

There is emotional intensity about Diana's (well-meaning) appropriation of her work as advertising, but it's focalised around her discovery of what has happened, and all takes place in the previous chapter.

[oursin]

And didn't mention Little Women!

[tree_and_leaf]

Indeed! Now that's got emotional power, and is a good deal more relevant to what he seems to be arguing. (Has he confused the Anne books with LW?)

(The LM Montgomery bit is, of course, actually in Anne of the Island).

[cyphomandra]

I think he means Emily's Quest, when she burns her book after her creepy groomer/stalker disapproves of it - it is a much more powerful scene than the Anne one!

[pameladean]

I don't read short stories either, or so I think; but it really just means I'm very picky (or who knows, just cranky and difficult about short stories in a way I'm not about novels). I always used to read John M. Ford's short stories, and I will always read Marissa Lingen's, and I will in fact always read Ellen Klages's. Also Amal el-Mohtar's.

P.

[ookpik]

I read a fair amount of short stories. Haven't read "Wicked Wonders" yet, but Klages's previous collection ("Portable Childhoods") was outstanding and the new one is on the to-read pile. (There is another, older, collection that I will buy. Hoping for an e-book to appear.)