Bibliography
Aug. 5th, 2011 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyThese are going to have to be very speedy, as there are a lot of them - I have been reading things voraciously lately. I think it is something to do with having spare brain capacity, shockingly enough.
Lady of Quality - Georgette Heyer
Good cheesy period fiction of the sort with rugged heroines and equally rugged heroes. A young unmarried lady living in Regency Bath finds herself drawn into the affairs of a younger woman she meets on the road to the city, who fears she is being pressured into a marriage she does not desire. Of course, the younger woman's guardian ends up being entirely disreputable and also quite interesting at the same time, so we can all see where that's going - but the pleasure in these things is in finding out how long it takes them to get there. Rolicking good fun if you like this sort of thing, and frankly, I needed it.
Left Bank - Kate Muir
I used to read Kate Muir's column in the Sunday Times with avid relish, so this leapt off the library shelves at me astonishingly easily. Set in Paris, in the life of a Parisian intellectual, his transplanted Texan-but-now-pretty-chic-Parisian actress wife, their young daughter and their British au pair. It's Paris, there's sex, there's an affair, there's familial ANGST, there's working out what identity is and how that relates to France, there's some good engagement with modern philosophical thought and the problems it causes. It's a bit deeper than standard chic-lit, but ultimately owes much to that genre - but I quite enjoyed it, especially the fact that the ending was quite open-ended and the characters did not seem destined for the usual rather sappy happy ending. It felt truer to the people we'd come to know, I think.
Alexandria - Lindsey Davis
The next in the Falco books; this one manages to find an ancient angle to play with academic politics. I have to say that I found this one rather more confusing than I tend to find the Falco books, and harder to get a handle on. It was still enjoyable, but something felt less well plotted, less full engaged, than it usually does. I read somewhere that there is no new Falco in the offing for the time being; I hope that when Davis comes back, she does so refreshed, as it's obvious that for this one she was starting to feel a little tired.
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
My mother has discovered the Mitfords, so we'll be working through Nancy's four 'good' novels, which were based upon her own biography (although obviously not literally, despite a liberal amount of straight transposition). This one follows the story of Linda, who goes through life desperately wanting love but never quite finding it. The story is told by Linda's cousin, Fanny, and starts when they are both children; there's some interesting stuff in there about growing up, and about development and maturation, and about expectation. And also about disappointment, disillusionment, fooling oneself about the character of the beloved - which Linda is jolly good at. There's something there about identity and self and knowing who you are before you try to know who somebody else is, I think, but I don't want to make it sound too deep - at least, it isn't on the surface. It's rather comedy of manners with tragic bits in, the writing is good, the characters are excellent, and I enjoyed it very much.
Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
This sort of goes off at a tangent from The Pursuit of Love, following the life of Fanny's friend Polly, who ends up basically being totally uninterested in marriage until she can have The Man Upon Whom She Has Set Her Heart - who just happens to be married to her aunt, alas. When said aunt perishes from an unfortunate complaint, Polly follows her desires, just to discover that actually, what she wanted is not so splendid after all. Sprinkle with a good dose of concern about the family inheritance (going to an unknown soul from Nova Scotia, of all places) and a sprinkle of Oxford donnish household politics. Again, a very good read.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter – Michael Swanwick">
Hmmm. Excellent world-building here, from a fantasy novel; excellent creation of a parallel universe tied into a wide skein of folk stories and myth (some of which are retold a bit too literally, I think). Some very nice ideas, some good development of said ideas, and generally quite compelling to find out what happens. But I have some problems with it. The ideas don't seem to mesh - I found it quite hard to keep the world consistent, seeming as it did to jump from idea to idea, never integrating all the ideas together. (Yes, this could be a metaphor about maturation, I don't care). Some of the narration had me raising an eyebrow, as it's a man writing about sexual experience from a female point of view, and let us say that there were points where I was extremely unconvinced. I also found the reappearance of the Dragon and the final segment of the book extremely contrived and unsatisfying. I'm not quite sure what would have been a satisfying ending, but for me, that was not it. Still worth a read, of course, but mainly for the first three quarters.
Lady of Quality - Georgette Heyer
Good cheesy period fiction of the sort with rugged heroines and equally rugged heroes. A young unmarried lady living in Regency Bath finds herself drawn into the affairs of a younger woman she meets on the road to the city, who fears she is being pressured into a marriage she does not desire. Of course, the younger woman's guardian ends up being entirely disreputable and also quite interesting at the same time, so we can all see where that's going - but the pleasure in these things is in finding out how long it takes them to get there. Rolicking good fun if you like this sort of thing, and frankly, I needed it.
Left Bank - Kate Muir
I used to read Kate Muir's column in the Sunday Times with avid relish, so this leapt off the library shelves at me astonishingly easily. Set in Paris, in the life of a Parisian intellectual, his transplanted Texan-but-now-pretty-chic-Parisian actress wife, their young daughter and their British au pair. It's Paris, there's sex, there's an affair, there's familial ANGST, there's working out what identity is and how that relates to France, there's some good engagement with modern philosophical thought and the problems it causes. It's a bit deeper than standard chic-lit, but ultimately owes much to that genre - but I quite enjoyed it, especially the fact that the ending was quite open-ended and the characters did not seem destined for the usual rather sappy happy ending. It felt truer to the people we'd come to know, I think.
Alexandria - Lindsey Davis
The next in the Falco books; this one manages to find an ancient angle to play with academic politics. I have to say that I found this one rather more confusing than I tend to find the Falco books, and harder to get a handle on. It was still enjoyable, but something felt less well plotted, less full engaged, than it usually does. I read somewhere that there is no new Falco in the offing for the time being; I hope that when Davis comes back, she does so refreshed, as it's obvious that for this one she was starting to feel a little tired.
The Pursuit of Love - Nancy Mitford
My mother has discovered the Mitfords, so we'll be working through Nancy's four 'good' novels, which were based upon her own biography (although obviously not literally, despite a liberal amount of straight transposition). This one follows the story of Linda, who goes through life desperately wanting love but never quite finding it. The story is told by Linda's cousin, Fanny, and starts when they are both children; there's some interesting stuff in there about growing up, and about development and maturation, and about expectation. And also about disappointment, disillusionment, fooling oneself about the character of the beloved - which Linda is jolly good at. There's something there about identity and self and knowing who you are before you try to know who somebody else is, I think, but I don't want to make it sound too deep - at least, it isn't on the surface. It's rather comedy of manners with tragic bits in, the writing is good, the characters are excellent, and I enjoyed it very much.
Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
This sort of goes off at a tangent from The Pursuit of Love, following the life of Fanny's friend Polly, who ends up basically being totally uninterested in marriage until she can have The Man Upon Whom She Has Set Her Heart - who just happens to be married to her aunt, alas. When said aunt perishes from an unfortunate complaint, Polly follows her desires, just to discover that actually, what she wanted is not so splendid after all. Sprinkle with a good dose of concern about the family inheritance (going to an unknown soul from Nova Scotia, of all places) and a sprinkle of Oxford donnish household politics. Again, a very good read.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter – Michael Swanwick">
Hmmm. Excellent world-building here, from a fantasy novel; excellent creation of a parallel universe tied into a wide skein of folk stories and myth (some of which are retold a bit too literally, I think). Some very nice ideas, some good development of said ideas, and generally quite compelling to find out what happens. But I have some problems with it. The ideas don't seem to mesh - I found it quite hard to keep the world consistent, seeming as it did to jump from idea to idea, never integrating all the ideas together. (Yes, this could be a metaphor about maturation, I don't care). Some of the narration had me raising an eyebrow, as it's a man writing about sexual experience from a female point of view, and let us say that there were points where I was extremely unconvinced. I also found the reappearance of the Dragon and the final segment of the book extremely contrived and unsatisfying. I'm not quite sure what would have been a satisfying ending, but for me, that was not it. Still worth a read, of course, but mainly for the first three quarters.
