I had a hip replacement on May 8, and am on medical leave until (at least) the end of July. I'm not allowed to do any real work while on sick leave. (The university grudgingly allows that it cannot keep me from reading and thinking, but asks me to on no account leave a paper trail.) So instead I'll keep track of the totally-unrelated-to-anything-approaching-work novels I read while convalescing. And possibly add a few notes about them.
Since May 8, I have read:
Carter, A. (1992).
The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories, 1st ed. New York: Penguin Group USA.
- Interesting collection of stories; the first one (The Bloody Chamber, based on Bluebeard) is the best, with the mother as the gun-toting horse-riding hero; though Puss in Boots was very entertaining. (Okay, Puss reminded me of my cat.) And that remarkable line that explains, in a nutshell, why we feel such aching sympathy for abusive jerks of all descriptions - narcissists, psychopaths, self-absorbed creeps, liars, louts, two-faced cheating philanderers finally caught with their pants down - and sometimes, so sadly, so much sympathy that we forgive them and take them back: the moment when the heroine of "The Bloody Chamber" looks at the husband that she knows is about to murder her and thinks "The atrocious loneliness of the monster!" The horrible loneliness of one whose own actions have cut them off forever from any kind of human connection; but still we can imagine how we would feel if we were so cut off, and if we forget how the monster got there, we empathize. "The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" and "The Tiger Bride" also good, 2 sides of the same coin. Wasn't sure what to make of "Tiger Alice."
Rankin, I. (2014).
Saints of the Shadow Bible. United States: Little Brown and Company.
- Delighted to see Rebus back in the saddle. Characters good, but plot got a little over-involved and quickly-resolved towards the end. Oh well. I wasn't reading for plot.
Sayers, D. L. (1926).
Clouds of Witness: a Lord Peter Mystery.
T. Fisher Unwin Press.
- Sayers always repays rereading. I suspect I will reread all of her novels while I'm laid up. Always liked this one, though I'm not as enamoured of the nobility as I was when I first read this in my teens; or as Sayers was then, though I think she got over it later. Writing with a shrewd eye to her audience, I think, most of whom wouldn't mind imagining themselves living at Duke's Denver with servants to bring their tea and brush the mud from their shoes at night.
Smith, Alexander McCall (2013).
Trains and lovers. Toronto: Vintage Books Canada.
- In a lot of ways my favourite AM Smith so far, because not so condescending. Though in general I like the ones set in Scotland, possibly for that reason. A great deal better than "Emma", which I got halfway through and stopped, unusual for me; but Smith is not Austen, and not remotely the same kind of writer. "Trains and Lovers", though, was pleasant. Smith is a comic writer, though, and never goes for the hard choice: all the love stories had happy endings, even the one that (one felt) shouldn't (at least, it probably did), and the one about a youth who falls in love with another youth is resolved by his marrying a young woman and becoming a philosophy professor, which was rather anticlimactic. He speaks of how his love for the other boy changed his life, but it's difficult to see how. (Actually, the trilogy about Portuguese Irregular Verbs is still my favourite, come to think of it. Much sharper-edged)
Vickers, S. (2000).
Miss Garnet’s Angel. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
- Really wonderful; the best of the lot. Union of Venice, Rafael, Tintoretto, angels, and a retired atheist schoolteacher whose best friend has incontinently died before they could go travelling. I do wish I could write like this. Must visit Venice.
