I have read so many duds and books recently that I gave up on because their meh factor was way too high. These are the pearls in a bit of a swamp, the ones I actually finished. Bea Howe, Lady With The Green Fingers. The Life of Jane Loudon I rather unfairly only think of … Continue reading Books I Want To Keep
Category: 20thC
Oriel Malet, My Bird Sings
Oriel Malet's name has been wafting past my attention now for years, probably decades, and I've never paid much attention to her before now, which is a bit shocking. She was an accomplished novelist, Welsh, from a titled family, and her second novel, My Bird Sings, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1946, and … Continue reading Oriel Malet, My Bird Sings
More good books
Books that have shone out during my recent long run of duds as being really splendid reads, giving me faith that good books are out there if you keep at it long enough. Gossamer Years This is the revised translation by Edward Seidensticker from 1960 of a nameless 10th-century Japanese noblewoman’s complaints about her very … Continue reading More good books
I Have Doubts
More sour remarks about books I tried and found wanting. Hugh Walpole, Portrait of a Man with Red Hair This 1925 novel pops up regularly in lists about the supernatural canon as a gem of twentieth-century Gothic horror. It is certainly horrifying, but it’s a novella stretched out painfully beyond the natural length of its … Continue reading I Have Doubts
Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell
This biography of Gertrude Bell begins slowly, rockets up to high speed, but goes a bit flumph at the end. As the Guardian's review back in 2006 noted, Howell seems to regard Bell's thwarted love affair with a married man as the central moment of her subject's life, and is not interested enough in the … Continue reading Daughter of the Desert, by Georgina Howell
Sinabada, by Elinor Mordaunt
This 1938 memoir by the prolific and highly skilled author Elinor Mordaunt (not her birth name) floats airily between the firm land of fact and history and the boundless seas of improbable possibilities. Mordaunt is an extraordinary character. I commissioned the publication of a collection of her supernatural short stories last year, and I was … Continue reading Sinabada, by Elinor Mordaunt
J D Beresford, A World of Women
I reviewed the new MIT press edition of J D Beresford's Goslings (US title: A World of Women) for Strange Horizons. It's good!
Read With Pleasure
I did enjoy reading these, but I haven’t got a whole blogpost’s worth to say about each of them. Please accept these brief paras in the spirit of strong recommendation. Una McCormack, The Greatest Story Ever Told I bought this from NewCon Press, one of a trilogy of themed novels about a populated Mars, with … Continue reading Read With Pleasure
New Year, new duds
It is downright depressing to find so many books from my TBR shelf turning out to be duds. The only upside is that I have contributed several to the charity shop, and I might have learned a bit more about how not to write. F Tennyson Jesse, The Lacquer Lady (1929) I’ve long had Jesse … Continue reading New Year, new duds
The Hot Gates, by William Golding
This is a collection of twenty essays, reviews and magazine columns written by the British novelist and Nobel laureate William Golding, from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. It's a time capsule, packed with riches, and one stand-out comic essay on the body-soul dislocation experienced when flying across the USA. (Bourbon is involved.) Much … Continue reading The Hot Gates, by William Golding
Kate Macdonald 