It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Continued to love The Halt During The Chase and see that two more of Rosemary Tonks' novels that I read back in the 70s are in the process of being reissued yay yay yay.

Mick Herron, The Secret Hours (2023). I'm not sure how this would work if one came to it without having read most of the Slough House sequence first - because I think some of it is going to be entirely opaque, e.g. one character who spends the entire book going under a code-name but if you have read those, is obviously [spoiler]. But with all that taken into consideration, pretty good.

Noel Streatfeild, I Ordered A Table For Six (1942), which I had read yonks ago, one of the Streatfeilds for grownups that I had, but had forgotten much about, set during the Blitz. Oh dear Noel, I did not think that ending worked, or maybe that is just me.

RF Kuang, Yellowface (2023): in the afterword Kuang says that it's 'in large part, a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry' - also seemed to me rather about people desperately wanting to Make It before they were [some age] and being stuck inside that world, and wanting to be A Writer, and I felt someone needed to pat them on the head and tell them to get a job in something unrelated and embrace the playful side of writing and not be desperately grabbing for Stuff to Write About. (Though honestly I thought there was going to be a much deeper plagiarism or identity fakery story around Athena beyond nicking other people's experiences and words and it was going to be intellectual property theft/masquerade all the way down.)

Rachel Swirsky, January Fifteenth (2022). Novella, near-future USA, Universal Basic Income has been instituted, vignettes of 4 women on the day it's awarded for the year at points throughout the day. Rather good I thought.

Barbara Hambly, The Nubian's Curse (Benjamin January #20) (2023) - this arrived yesterday and I devoured it. Perhaps not one of the top ones in the sequence, but pretty good.

On the go

Sue Elliot and Steve Humphries, Not Guilty: Queer Stories from a Century of Discrimination (2017). Over on bsky my old pal oral historian Steve Humphries' name came up, and I looked to see what he'd been up to since A Secret World of Sex back in the day, and there was this, on gay men from before decriminalisation into the era of gay marriage. Solid stuff of a range of personal testimonies - possibly a bit white, but range of class, regions, backgrounds, trajectories.

Up next

Not sure.

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A bit irked this morning to see someone claiming that Ye Illiterate Poorz luvd the works of Dickens so much they would club together to pay a reading person to read them out to them: you know, like they had been doing since the rise of popular literature, pretty much? ('Rejoice! Pamela has got Mr B to the altar! Ring the church bells!') They were probably also ponying up to have Varney the Vampire, or the Feast of Blood, The String of Pearls, Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance, and very likely the latest crim.con. cases read to beguile their meagre leisure hours.