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oursinWhat I read
Well, I did indeed complete the Cat Sebastian binge: It Takes Two To Tumble, A Gentleman Never Keeps Score and Two Rogues Make A Right. And that is it until the next thing Ms Sebastian brings out (? sequel to Hither, Page?)
Read the Ben Aaronvitch Tales from the Folly, new collection of assorted shorts mostly written to specific remits, okay if a bit slight.
Having mentioned Angus Wilson's As If By Magic (1973) last week I dug this up for a re-read, and it is really not anywhere near the top of my list of Sir Angus' works - the whole Hamo strand of the plot was heavy going - one can bear, maybe, with his extremely specific and objectified erotic interests (I suspect this will drastically date the the novel for some readers) but not the constant string of his cringe-making misadventures. The Alexandra strand worked better for me.
The new Barbara Hambly Benjamin January, House of the Patriarch, is very good indeed. It takes January to the 'Burned-Over District' of New York State during the Second Great Awakening of weird religious movements, spiritualism, etc. Also, I approve of the way Hambly works real historical individuals into the narrative - I was complaining recently about the way Laurie R King has been doing it in recent works, scattering them wholesale more or less as set-dressing rather than particularly material to the story - Hambly is far more restrained, and tends to take them at the more obscure periods of their life. This one worked particularly well, I thought, with the wider theme.
Discovered during the resort to unvisited shelves, Olivia by 'Olivia' (Dorothy Bussy nee Strachey). My copy is actually the original 1949 Hogarth Press edition, for which I paid more or less peanuts secondhand. I first read this while minding the bookstall at a church jumble sale when I was about 13 - memory fails to recall what I made of it, except that I was engrossed. Probably about the same time as I first read Frost in May and put it in rather the same box? Anyway, one of those v good short intense novellas (I am not sure where the comparison with Claudine at School comes in, which may be about lesbian passions in a girls' school but has an entirely different feel to it.)
On the go
Re-read, first for many a year, of Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (1957).
Up next
Well, there is the new Robin Stevens forthcoming (?tomorrow?), and an intention to go on to the posthumously edited sequel volumes to The Fountain Overflows
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Date: 2020-08-05 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-05 02:15 pm (UTC)Ahem ahem the Benson family? Also I vaguely recollect that Angus Wilson had at least one gay elder brother. So not entirely improbable... though really, no-one would believe the Bensons in fiction, would they? you could not make it up.
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Date: 2020-08-05 07:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-05 01:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-05 02:26 pm (UTC)NEW BEN JANUARY AWWW YEAH altho OMG the poor guy never gets a break! His life seems to go like this:
WHITE FOOL FRIEND OF BEN'S: //talks to some other white fool wrapped up in crazy drama about Ben's PI abilities
WHITE FOOL FRIEND-OF FOB'S WRAPPED UP IN CRAZY DRAMA: M'sieur January, I have this crazy dramatic white people problem, which for some reason I cannot take to other crazy dramatic white people, and even though you are a accomplished, intelligent doctor AND musician with an extended loving family (except your mother), you are a black man in 1840s America and your creator is an historian, so being perpetually broke is the very least of your problems....
BEN: Will this crazy-ass drama probably get me beaten, land me in jail, possibly throw me on the nonexistent mercy of slave traders, and perpetually remind me and the reader how precarious my very existence in 1840s America is, let alone any attempt of mine to build an individual life and hold on to my considerable dignity? All just so I can pay my mortgage and keep my loved ones as safe as I can, which is to say, not fucking very?
CLIENT: Yes. Also, the economy is tanking, your wife is pissing off the mothers who might otherwise send their daughters to her school because she wants them to actually learn things, AND, can a free black man really consent to an offered bargain in a slave society anyway, knowing that if he pisses off ONE white person it can have disastrous effects on his life?
BEN: Off we go.
(Exaggerating for comic effect and of course I do love the series! But Jesus. "NICE THINGS FOR BEN JANUARY 1840" meme) (of course Hambly's considerable point is, how nearly fucking impossible that is for him and his loved ones....And how it's such a triumph when he does wrestle happiness and independence away from the horrible society he's in anyway)
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Date: 2020-08-05 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-06 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-06 11:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-06 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-06 06:42 pm (UTC)