Secret Harbour
Dec. 1st, 2013 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyToday I've been to an eightieth birthday party. So that was wild. No, it wasn't. But it was nice.
All guests were issued with name tags, which sounds a bit official but turned out to be quite a good idea. They had our first name and how we were connected to the birthday girl, so mine said:
ALICIA
Grand-niece
So feel free to steal that idea next time you're having a family do, because it was very effective.
November books read
Not a big reading month this time round. Life became a little bit hectic for part of November. I've got one more trip to Melbourne next week, and then I can start winding down for the year.
* A Traveller in Time - Alison Uttley (1939)
* Swan Song - Edmund Crispin (1947)
* The Girl on the Landing - Paul Torday (2009)
It took me three months to get through A Traveller in Time. It's not a long book, and it's not difficult, just a book that never really grabbed me (although I was interested enough to pick it up now and then to work my way through to the end). The book is set in the early 1900s, when a girl from London is sent to live with elderly relatives in the country for her health. Those bits are quite lovely. What didn't really work for me was the time-travelling part, which happens when the girl opens a door in the house and finds herself back in Elizabethan times... where the house is a Catholic one, and the master is part of a plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots. So, yes, that's not going to end well. What I found frustrating was that when the girl went back in time, sometimes she could remember her present-day life and sometimes she couldn't. And sometimes she could remember what happens/happened to Mary, and sometimes she couldn't. And sometimes dogs were scared of her, and sometimes they weren't. And the Olde Tyme people were fine with their new maid disappearing for months at a time and returning wearing weird clothes. And... and quite a lot more, now I think about it.
It was flawed, is what I'm saying, but the country life part was nice.
Swan Song is one of Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen mysteries. I was going to say that I don't really understand why Fen is not as famous a fictional detective as, say, Lord Peter Wimsey, given that the books are just as well written and plotted. But then, Fen as a character and the books themselves are a great deal more flippant than most of the classic 'tecs, so that probably explains it. For example, in this book, when Fen visits the murder scene, which is an opera singer's dressing room, he brings with him: his friend, who really should be considered one of the main suspects but never is; his friend's wife, a journalist who wants to interview Fen as part of a series she is doing with famous detectives like Albert Campion and Mrs Bradley; and another friend who happens to be the Chief Constable. While the poor police inspector is talking to all these people, Fen amuses himself by drawing a droopy moustache on his own face with the victim's stage makeup. You can't imagine Miss Marple doing that.
You can tell this book was written, well, not recently, as it's set in an opera company, and everyone smokes. Barely a page goes by without one of the singers smoking or buying a pack of cigarettes, which was realistic, if slightly odd to read in a contemporary setting.
The story contains detailed instructions for making your own aconitine. It seems quite easy. So if you're considering poisoning someone, this is the book for you.
The Girl on the Landing is... well. I found the premise interesting, and the first half was promising and then... then it went downhill. It's told in alternating chapters by Michael and Elizabeth, a married couple. In the first chapter, which is narrated by Michael, they spend a weekend at a country house, where something MYSTERIOUS happens. Spooky. Sadly, in the next chapter, Elizabeth, who doesn’t know about the MYSTERIOUS thing, makes a casual observation that made me guess what really happened, so the rest of the book wasn’t slowly revealing a plot twist so much as fulfilling my suspicions.
And that was all right for the first half of the book. I was happily ticking off all the things that proved my guess, when the book turned into a very silly thriller that should be read only by people with a high tolerance for unrealistic portrayals of serious mental illness.
(Skip this paragraph if you have this book on your 'to read' pile and don't want to know what happens.)It starts with Michael looking at a painting; he is intrigued by the girl he sees in the distance in it. Later in the chapter, he finds out that there is no girl at all. Spooky! But no, we find out much later that Michael has schizophrenia and has stopped taking his medication. The girl is his hallucination. Elizabeth doesn't know about Michael's illness, but finds out during the novel, eventually learning that Michael murdered his parents when he was a teenager (she is a little slow on the uptake, Elizabeth, because I worked that out as soon as I heard his parents died MYSTERIOUSLY many years ago). Michael's schizophrenia gives him super powers of hunting and stalking, because... that's a well-known side-effect? His psychiatrist tells him this is because schizophrenia is the result of a regular human breeding with otherworldly creatures like aliens (to be fair to the psychiatrist, that's what Michael remembers him saying, not necessarily what he actually did say.) So Michael murders his doctor and his psychiatrist by gralloching them like deer, then attempts to take saliva samples of all the members of his club for reasons that are too silly to go into (and that's a plot that goes nowhere anyway). He then disappears, never to be seen again. The end. So that's a lot of nonsense. I don't think Paul Torday is going to win any awards for his sensitive and nuanced portrayal of schizophrenia there.
I had to look up 'gralloching', so, on the plus side, this book taught me a new word.
All guests were issued with name tags, which sounds a bit official but turned out to be quite a good idea. They had our first name and how we were connected to the birthday girl, so mine said:
ALICIA
Grand-niece
So feel free to steal that idea next time you're having a family do, because it was very effective.
November books read
Not a big reading month this time round. Life became a little bit hectic for part of November. I've got one more trip to Melbourne next week, and then I can start winding down for the year.
* A Traveller in Time - Alison Uttley (1939)
* Swan Song - Edmund Crispin (1947)
* The Girl on the Landing - Paul Torday (2009)
It took me three months to get through A Traveller in Time. It's not a long book, and it's not difficult, just a book that never really grabbed me (although I was interested enough to pick it up now and then to work my way through to the end). The book is set in the early 1900s, when a girl from London is sent to live with elderly relatives in the country for her health. Those bits are quite lovely. What didn't really work for me was the time-travelling part, which happens when the girl opens a door in the house and finds herself back in Elizabethan times... where the house is a Catholic one, and the master is part of a plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots. So, yes, that's not going to end well. What I found frustrating was that when the girl went back in time, sometimes she could remember her present-day life and sometimes she couldn't. And sometimes she could remember what happens/happened to Mary, and sometimes she couldn't. And sometimes dogs were scared of her, and sometimes they weren't. And the Olde Tyme people were fine with their new maid disappearing for months at a time and returning wearing weird clothes. And... and quite a lot more, now I think about it.
It was flawed, is what I'm saying, but the country life part was nice.
Swan Song is one of Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen mysteries. I was going to say that I don't really understand why Fen is not as famous a fictional detective as, say, Lord Peter Wimsey, given that the books are just as well written and plotted. But then, Fen as a character and the books themselves are a great deal more flippant than most of the classic 'tecs, so that probably explains it. For example, in this book, when Fen visits the murder scene, which is an opera singer's dressing room, he brings with him: his friend, who really should be considered one of the main suspects but never is; his friend's wife, a journalist who wants to interview Fen as part of a series she is doing with famous detectives like Albert Campion and Mrs Bradley; and another friend who happens to be the Chief Constable. While the poor police inspector is talking to all these people, Fen amuses himself by drawing a droopy moustache on his own face with the victim's stage makeup. You can't imagine Miss Marple doing that.
You can tell this book was written, well, not recently, as it's set in an opera company, and everyone smokes. Barely a page goes by without one of the singers smoking or buying a pack of cigarettes, which was realistic, if slightly odd to read in a contemporary setting.
The story contains detailed instructions for making your own aconitine. It seems quite easy. So if you're considering poisoning someone, this is the book for you.
The Girl on the Landing is... well. I found the premise interesting, and the first half was promising and then... then it went downhill. It's told in alternating chapters by Michael and Elizabeth, a married couple. In the first chapter, which is narrated by Michael, they spend a weekend at a country house, where something MYSTERIOUS happens. Spooky. Sadly, in the next chapter, Elizabeth, who doesn’t know about the MYSTERIOUS thing, makes a casual observation that made me guess what really happened, so the rest of the book wasn’t slowly revealing a plot twist so much as fulfilling my suspicions.
And that was all right for the first half of the book. I was happily ticking off all the things that proved my guess, when the book turned into a very silly thriller that should be read only by people with a high tolerance for unrealistic portrayals of serious mental illness.
(Skip this paragraph if you have this book on your 'to read' pile and don't want to know what happens.)It starts with Michael looking at a painting; he is intrigued by the girl he sees in the distance in it. Later in the chapter, he finds out that there is no girl at all. Spooky! But no, we find out much later that Michael has schizophrenia and has stopped taking his medication. The girl is his hallucination. Elizabeth doesn't know about Michael's illness, but finds out during the novel, eventually learning that Michael murdered his parents when he was a teenager (she is a little slow on the uptake, Elizabeth, because I worked that out as soon as I heard his parents died MYSTERIOUSLY many years ago). Michael's schizophrenia gives him super powers of hunting and stalking, because... that's a well-known side-effect? His psychiatrist tells him this is because schizophrenia is the result of a regular human breeding with otherworldly creatures like aliens (to be fair to the psychiatrist, that's what Michael remembers him saying, not necessarily what he actually did say.) So Michael murders his doctor and his psychiatrist by gralloching them like deer, then attempts to take saliva samples of all the members of his club for reasons that are too silly to go into (and that's a plot that goes nowhere anyway). He then disappears, never to be seen again. The end. So that's a lot of nonsense. I don't think Paul Torday is going to win any awards for his sensitive and nuanced portrayal of schizophrenia there.
I had to look up 'gralloching', so, on the plus side, this book taught me a new word.