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I have been reading widely, as usual, still working my way through Agatha Christe's Miss Marple mysteries -- I have finally gotten to some which I have not read before, and I am fascinated by how Christie admits that things are changing. Miss Marple's little village is now a bigger town with a housing development and a supermarket, and Miss Marple herself is elderly enough she cannot live alone, but human nature remains the same and murders keep happening. I have four left before I have read them all, but my pace has slowed down a little because of a spate of library books that needed to be engaged with before they were due back. One of these was Mariana, Monica Dickens' first novel, which I did not like as much upon rereading; I think the first time around it was newer and so more interesting, but also I have not really liked anything else by her that I've read, so perhaps it is not too surprising that her first book does not hold up for me. There was also a short manga series by Yoshinaga Fumi (Antique Bakery, which combines her interests in delicious food and beautiful men angsting together), and lastly Jane Duncan's Letter From Reachfar, which I ended up ordering my own copy of because I am enjoying it so much. Duncan's narrative voice is definitely not that of her protagonist Janet, which is a good reminder of how much actual craft went into her fiction (for all that it reads like extended autobiography), but at the same time I can feel that this is the mind behind the books, as it were.
Once those are done I will focus properly on Patricia McKillip's Alphabet of Thorn and decide whether or not I am going to continue with All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams, which has been on my list for decades because it is supposed to be an obscure classic but the anti-Semitism sets my teeth on edge and I am constantly irritated at all the literary people who have recommended it over the years (not personally, in columns and books and such) and never once mentioned this aspect. I am not yet willing to give up on it altogether because the rest of it is fascinating in an early c20th occulist way, but I am getting close.
Also I am reading a few pieces of very long non-fiction, a book on late medieval Catholicism and the Reformation (The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy) and a book of essays on art and neurobiology with an excellent title -- A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women by Siri Hustvedt.
This leaves out about 10 or 15 books, of course, but thus it goes.
Once those are done I will focus properly on Patricia McKillip's Alphabet of Thorn and decide whether or not I am going to continue with All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams, which has been on my list for decades because it is supposed to be an obscure classic but the anti-Semitism sets my teeth on edge and I am constantly irritated at all the literary people who have recommended it over the years (not personally, in columns and books and such) and never once mentioned this aspect. I am not yet willing to give up on it altogether because the rest of it is fascinating in an early c20th occulist way, but I am getting close.
Also I am reading a few pieces of very long non-fiction, a book on late medieval Catholicism and the Reformation (The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy) and a book of essays on art and neurobiology with an excellent title -- A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women by Siri Hustvedt.
This leaves out about 10 or 15 books, of course, but thus it goes.
