It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Finished A Power Unbound and felt it all didn't entirely mesh for me, which may be where I'm at in a reading trough for me at the moment.

I.e. I then did some more re-reading of what I hoped would be reviving romantic fluff which didn't quite hit the spot, started something I bought as a Kobo deal recently which I was a bit iffy about and then it looked like it was swerving into weird horror and I decided not to go on.

So then I picked up Jane Haddam, Living Witness (2009) and that seems to be what oursins like at the moment.

On the go

Jane Haddam, True Believers (2001). Query: is there a pattern of defaulting to mystery/crime when in this kind of trough?

Up next

No idea.

Last week I sent back to the Reviews Editor a book that I was realistically never going to review.

I had originally said, oops, this has been hanging on a while, and had an extension, and then I thought I was going to have a rather full dance-card precluding my doing it -

- but ultimately, it was a book I could not see the point of why they were writing that book on that subject, I could only suppose it was because of the historiography of it that was not in the bibliography?

But anyway, I sent it back, and maybe somebody can make more of it than I could (maybe it is because it was coming from a slightly tangential disciplinary perspective, this is not the first time I have been sent a book because they think '[X topic]: let's send it to oursin!!!' even though the author is doing something way theoretically outside my parameters).

But having done that, and returned to The Thing that I had sort-of volunteered myself to do, I am increasingly smitten with the DO.NOT.WANTs. I initially offered a shortish biographical piece and was told that due to changes in their editorial policy for the volume, they are now wanting longer chapters. So I cobbled up an abstract, but now, going away and having done a certain amount of preliminary reading and poking about, I conclude -

a) I'm not inspired - it seems like I'd be pulling together various bits of other people's work and not bringing anything very fresh to the mix.

b) Maybe I could bring something fresh to the mix, but not given the deadline posited.

c) Ever so slightly pissed off with Yet Again, The Victorianz.

I do have Some Other Stuff - the loose endy things from the chapter I got off a couple of months ago - to be about.

I also, maybe, have things I'd really like to be working on? If I can dig them up? Take a look? See where they're going and what needs doing?

What I read

I am definitely in a bit of a meh phase via-a-vis reading at the moment, in which I start things and think that perhaps I should not be reading these just now, because I will very likely enjoy them more at some other time.

So what I have been reading - Diane Duane, Young Wizards 30 Day OTP (Days 1-17), picked up as a freebie along with various offers on her site.

Agatha Christie, Taken at the Flood (1948), At Bertram's Hotel (1965), Lord Edgware Dies (1933).

Zen Cho, The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (2012), which I had been meaning to re-read for some while.

Winifred Peck, Bewildering Cares (1940). Vicar's wife in a Midland town,diary of a month of her life at a time of stress in the parish shortly after the outbreak of war. We are of the opinion that the blurb's invocation of EM Delafield is practically actionable under the Trades Description Act. It had its moments, but in no wise did it recall The Provincial Lady. As opposed to that much wider genre of nice middle class lady, usually defined by husband's occupation, in stressed circs, bravely muddling through, but with more of a religious bent than these usually manifest.

On the go

I was moved to pull out my old paperback copy of Katharine Eliska Kimbriel's Fires of Nuala (1988) by a mention from sartorias that this and the 2 sequels and a new fourth in the series are being issued by Bookview Cafe (as by Cat Kimbriel). I'm not sure it's quite meshing with my meh mood.

Up next

Ardently awaiting the new KJ Charles coming next week, but apart from that...

Though really, if I do that 'first sentence on page 45 of nearest book is about your sex life for the coming year', this oracle is of a murkiness long associated with oracles. There are four books within hand's reach:

The most elliptical is 'See that word on a menu and you know it won't be' (Jay Rayner, My Dining Hell).

'The taboo is so strong that it's safer to be totally ineffective, or as near to it as is humanly possible' (Joanna Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts.

'For the last three years I have known nothing but doubt, and when I felt no doubt I felt misery' (Havelock Ellis's diary entry for 18 May 1878, cited in Grosskurth's biography of him).

'Perhaps a personal anecdote will serve to make clearer what I mean by the relation of female experience to female art and both to male ignorance' (Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing

***

But, anyway, in spite of still feeling a certain blahness and apathy, this week I did:

Engage in what I think was a successful and productive interview with a journalist, and also a telephone conversation which may lead to an interesting project with a film-maker.

The paper I offered to a conference has been accepted with considerable enthusiasm.

I did manage to suggest two Wiscon panels before the deadline.

I also managed to put in some work on A Thing I had been asked to undertake for Former Workplace.

Well, I made a loaf of khorasan (kamut) flour during the week; and there were Saturday breakfast rolls - the adaptable soft roll recipe, 50/50 wholemeal and white spelt flour.

But today was going to see father in respite care home, which rather militated against culinary efforts.

And I don't have any brilliant ideas for alternative post.

What I read

Drinking Gourd, which was very good - perhaps not quite so dark as the previous in the series, but still pretty bleak. But set when and where these are, not going to be the lightest and cheeriest of reads. However, very, very well done.

Another freebie ebook by a forgotten/neglected early C20th crime writer: Basil Thomson, Richardson's First Case (1933). Thomson had actually been head of the CID at the Met: it was after he had resigned after a mysterious incident with Lloyd George that he was convicted of public indecency in Hyde Park (with a woman, not a man). This was a reasonably competent but uninspiring police procedural (claimed as an early example of the genre in the intro).

On the go

I then hit a trough of reading apathy and could not think of anything that I really, really, wanted to read. I started Elizabeth Bonesteel, The Cold Between (2016), which sounded like the sort of thing that I really like in terms of sf, that we have not been seeing enough of, and yet, somehow not feeling it. Perhaps one cannot recapture that first fine careless rapture of one's early encounters with this sort of thing.

I've started Dodie Smith, The New Moon with the Old (1963), which I bought in ebook a while ago (it was cheap) at a time when I thought I might need to stack up on soothing comfort reading. But as that more or less blew over, hadn't actually started it. Now have, and am not entirely sure it would have suited that purpose anyway. I Capture the Castle it is not. I did read it many years ago (possibly more or less after it came out, from the public library) and could remember bits and pieces but not much. I enjoyed the relatively recent re-readings I did of The Town in Bloom and It Ends With Revelations, but I'm not finding the same charm in this. But onwards!

Up next

Have various things on order (research and pleasure). Also the next KJ Charles Society of Gentleman book is supposed to appear next week...

I have two books on order, which I was perhaps optimistically hoping would have arrived by the beginning of this week.

I have finished the books I had on hand that I was reading.

As I am in imminent expectation (perhaps optimistically, q.v.) of a couple of new books that would be at the top of the reading priority list, there is nothing that I immediately want to get stuck into, i.e. there is nothing that obviously shoots to the top of the priority list.

Do I want to start something that I will very likely put aside once the new books arrive?

Indeed, what do I want to read? Nothing quite tempts.

This is not so much Buridan's ass between two books and not knowing which to choose, as Buridan's ass in an extensive library overwhelmed by choice.

Felt sufficiently better this evening to drag myself to a book launch.

Plus: that I realised how little time it took to get to the venue when I had a clear idea of where it was in my head (it was in same venue as a talk I gave about this time last year and where I had fortunately allowed myself enough time to get lost and still arrive in time to sort my PowerPoint and other necessary preliminaries).

Also plus, had nice chat with BBL who was also there.

A further plus was that there was no live music, a situation which had heretofore eventuated at launches for author in question.

Though slightly minus that apart from BBL and The MollyMan, and the author and their spouse, hardly anybody I recognised, which seemed slightly odd, given what the book was about. I would have expected more usual suspects from the floating crap game...

Also rather minus was that the book was a damned great fat heavy thing and I decided to buy it (if I buy it at all...) online with discount code I have somewhere, as I was already laden up with Stuff. Especially as I felt somewhat meh about it, from glancing through it and checking for my name in bibliography and in footnotes to chapter on topic I have published on, and the general tenor of the thing, and rather hope no-one asks me to review it.

This may be me being a bit tired and still not 100% and grumpy, and feeling rather overburdened with reading, things to write, etc and not feeling compelled to buy something that I would feel obligated to read if I did, when there are already so many other things in the tbr pile.