Love, Life and Sex
Nov. 1st, 2017 08:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyI thought it would be a bit of fun to try and post daily in November. I've made a list of emergency topics for the extremely likely event that nothing interesting happens on a particular day. We'll see how we go. Day one is easy:
October books read
* Heirs of the Body - Carola Dunn (2013) ★ ★ ★
Daisy Dalrymple mysteries are always an easy, cosy read. In this one, Daisy is called on to help sort out claimants to her own family's title and estate. And murderous hijinks ensue. Of course.
* The Claimant - Paul Terry (2016) ★ ★ ★
Time for a spot of non-fiction... about one of the most famous fictions in legal history. This is a workmanlike telling of the Tichborne Case that gripped London in the 1870s. The Claimant in question is Tom Castro, a butcher from the Australian town of Wagga Wagga, who claimed he was really Sir Roger Tichborne, missing heir to a baronetcy. It's a rollercoaster of a story that puts Victorian sensation novels to shame. The case (actually two trials, Tichborne v. Lushington and Regina v. Castro) had everything: Scandal! Shipwrecks! Tattoos! Infidelity! People being sent to the workhouse! Popular songs! Retractable penises! Witnesses from Australia and Chile! Mark Twain! An incidental character called Truth Butts!
So was Tom Castro really Sir Roger? Left is the last known photo of Sir Roger; at right is the Claimant, thirteen years later:
So, no, is what I say. Different ears.
* Britt-Marie Was Here - Fredrik Backman (trans. Henning Koch) (2016) ★ ★ ★
I did not enjoy this as much as I thought or hoped I would.
Britt-Marie is 63 and has just left her husband. She gets a job in a tiny village, where she finds herself doing all sorts of things she never thought she would. It's your basic curmudgeon-whose-heart-grows story.
My problem was that I found Britt-Marie just too obtuse. Britt-Marie doesn't care for football, for example. Fair enough; I also don't care for football, but I'm at least aware that countries have national teams. I find it hard to believe that Britt-Marie has never even heard of such a thing.
All in all, not a bad concept, but I didn't find it believable.
* Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon - Elizabeth Wilson (2014) ★ ★ ★
Did you know that the early developers of lawn tennis wanted to differentiate their game from the older one of real or royal tennis, so they called their invention "sphairistike"? That's just one of the things I learnt from reading this, a whistle-stop tour of tennis, placing it in different contexts: era, class, sex and race. I enjoyed the first half, covering the early years, more than the second half, which seemed rushed. It also needed a bit of tidying-up: a couple of striking phrases are re-used in different chapters, and one memorable sentence suggests that Ivan Lendl played on the women's tour.
* Closed Casket - Sophie Hannah (2016) ★ ★
I didn't know the estate of Agatha Christie had authorised new Poirot novels! This is the second, apparently. It's... not quite right. It's 1929; Poirot and Inspector Catchpool of Scotland Yard are invited to stay in County Cork with an Anglo-Irish family of awful and/or stupid people. Their hostess, Lady Athelinda Playford, announces at dinner that she's changed her will to disinherit her two children, leaving everything to her private secretary, who is dying. That night, the secretary is found bludgeoned to death.
This seems longer than a Christie novel, and it's lesser for it. Poirot disappears for long periods, leaving us with whiny Catchpool, and when he is there he's only a shadow of his former self. The reason for Poirot and Catchpool being there makes no sense; their deciding that there would be a murder, long before it happened, makes no sense; the reason for the will change makes no sense; the murderer's plot makes no sense; the family's reaction to it makes no sense. Christie was nothing if not efficient. She would never waste my time like this.
Now, I should say SPOILER. This is what happens. If you don't want to know, look away, but if you're not planning to read the book, here is a (highly condensed) summary:
The murderer believed, correctly, that the secretary (a) was faking his fatal kidney disease and (b) had murdered the murderer's ex-fiancée because she was threatening to reveal his fake fatal kidney disease, so the murderer cut short his Shakespeare studies and studied medicine in order to gain work as a forensic pathologist, so when he killed the secretary (with a vial of strychnine he kept in his pocket for an appropriate occasion) he could do the autopsy to prove that the secretary's kidneys were fine.
I mean, what?
* Warned by a Ghost - Barbara Cartland (1991)
Previously commented on here.
* The Visitors - Simon Sylvester (2014) ★ ★ ★
This is set on a remote Scottish island where strange things start happening: a couple of locals have disappeared, and a mysterious father and daughter have moved in. It's about belonging and change and growing up, blended with tales of selkies. It's a bit clunky in parts (there are so many symbolic storms, and the father and daughter might as well have a neon sign flashing WE HAVE A SECRET above their house), the ending was a bit silly, and, having lived in a tiny, remote town myself, I didn't find the townsfolk's reactions to the things happening to them terribly realistic. That said, I liked Flo, the protagonist, and it kept me reading, so all up, I'd call it a success.
* Essex Poison - Ian Sansom (2017) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is the fourth of Sansom's County Guides mysteries, in which autodidact journalist Swanton Morley, his glamorous daughter Miriam, and factotum Stephen Sefton travel the length and breadth of Britain in the 1930s, writing travel guides and solving murders. Quality writing that is a cut above the usual cosy murder mystery fare: narrator Sefton is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and his troubled soul casts just the right amount of shadow over Morley's oblivious blowhardiness.
PS for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
emma2403: The Booker winner was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.
October books read
* Heirs of the Body - Carola Dunn (2013) ★ ★ ★
Daisy Dalrymple mysteries are always an easy, cosy read. In this one, Daisy is called on to help sort out claimants to her own family's title and estate. And murderous hijinks ensue. Of course.
* The Claimant - Paul Terry (2016) ★ ★ ★
Time for a spot of non-fiction... about one of the most famous fictions in legal history. This is a workmanlike telling of the Tichborne Case that gripped London in the 1870s. The Claimant in question is Tom Castro, a butcher from the Australian town of Wagga Wagga, who claimed he was really Sir Roger Tichborne, missing heir to a baronetcy. It's a rollercoaster of a story that puts Victorian sensation novels to shame. The case (actually two trials, Tichborne v. Lushington and Regina v. Castro) had everything: Scandal! Shipwrecks! Tattoos! Infidelity! People being sent to the workhouse! Popular songs! Retractable penises! Witnesses from Australia and Chile! Mark Twain! An incidental character called Truth Butts!
So was Tom Castro really Sir Roger? Left is the last known photo of Sir Roger; at right is the Claimant, thirteen years later:
So, no, is what I say. Different ears.
* Britt-Marie Was Here - Fredrik Backman (trans. Henning Koch) (2016) ★ ★ ★
I did not enjoy this as much as I thought or hoped I would.
Britt-Marie is 63 and has just left her husband. She gets a job in a tiny village, where she finds herself doing all sorts of things she never thought she would. It's your basic curmudgeon-whose-heart-grows story.
My problem was that I found Britt-Marie just too obtuse. Britt-Marie doesn't care for football, for example. Fair enough; I also don't care for football, but I'm at least aware that countries have national teams. I find it hard to believe that Britt-Marie has never even heard of such a thing.
All in all, not a bad concept, but I didn't find it believable.
* Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon - Elizabeth Wilson (2014) ★ ★ ★
Did you know that the early developers of lawn tennis wanted to differentiate their game from the older one of real or royal tennis, so they called their invention "sphairistike"? That's just one of the things I learnt from reading this, a whistle-stop tour of tennis, placing it in different contexts: era, class, sex and race. I enjoyed the first half, covering the early years, more than the second half, which seemed rushed. It also needed a bit of tidying-up: a couple of striking phrases are re-used in different chapters, and one memorable sentence suggests that Ivan Lendl played on the women's tour.
* Closed Casket - Sophie Hannah (2016) ★ ★
I didn't know the estate of Agatha Christie had authorised new Poirot novels! This is the second, apparently. It's... not quite right. It's 1929; Poirot and Inspector Catchpool of Scotland Yard are invited to stay in County Cork with an Anglo-Irish family of awful and/or stupid people. Their hostess, Lady Athelinda Playford, announces at dinner that she's changed her will to disinherit her two children, leaving everything to her private secretary, who is dying. That night, the secretary is found bludgeoned to death.
This seems longer than a Christie novel, and it's lesser for it. Poirot disappears for long periods, leaving us with whiny Catchpool, and when he is there he's only a shadow of his former self. The reason for Poirot and Catchpool being there makes no sense; their deciding that there would be a murder, long before it happened, makes no sense; the reason for the will change makes no sense; the murderer's plot makes no sense; the family's reaction to it makes no sense. Christie was nothing if not efficient. She would never waste my time like this.
Now, I should say SPOILER. This is what happens. If you don't want to know, look away, but if you're not planning to read the book, here is a (highly condensed) summary:
The murderer believed, correctly, that the secretary (a) was faking his fatal kidney disease and (b) had murdered the murderer's ex-fiancée because she was threatening to reveal his fake fatal kidney disease, so the murderer cut short his Shakespeare studies and studied medicine in order to gain work as a forensic pathologist, so when he killed the secretary (with a vial of strychnine he kept in his pocket for an appropriate occasion) he could do the autopsy to prove that the secretary's kidneys were fine.
I mean, what?
* Warned by a Ghost - Barbara Cartland (1991)
Previously commented on here.
* The Visitors - Simon Sylvester (2014) ★ ★ ★
This is set on a remote Scottish island where strange things start happening: a couple of locals have disappeared, and a mysterious father and daughter have moved in. It's about belonging and change and growing up, blended with tales of selkies. It's a bit clunky in parts (there are so many symbolic storms, and the father and daughter might as well have a neon sign flashing WE HAVE A SECRET above their house), the ending was a bit silly, and, having lived in a tiny, remote town myself, I didn't find the townsfolk's reactions to the things happening to them terribly realistic. That said, I liked Flo, the protagonist, and it kept me reading, so all up, I'd call it a success.
* Essex Poison - Ian Sansom (2017) ★ ★ ★ ★
This is the fourth of Sansom's County Guides mysteries, in which autodidact journalist Swanton Morley, his glamorous daughter Miriam, and factotum Stephen Sefton travel the length and breadth of Britain in the 1930s, writing travel guides and solving murders. Quality writing that is a cut above the usual cosy murder mystery fare: narrator Sefton is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and his troubled soul casts just the right amount of shadow over Morley's oblivious blowhardiness.
PS for
emma2403: The Booker winner was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.