Obviously I am not the most reliable blogger

Here are the things I have been reading instead of stuff I could be writing about here:

After I came back from my trip — actually, there are a couple of books I read while I was away that I have yet to post about–I reread Kate Ross’ Julian Kestrel books. If you like historical mysteries, anything set during the Regency era, upper class amateur detectives, or historical novels written in the ’90s (this is absolutely its own category), you will probably like these. If you aren’t particularly interested in any of those things, you might like them anyway. They’re really good.

i am terrible at this updating-on-a-schedule thing: 10/17/11

Sunday evenings I never seem to want to do much, but it’s not like it would have taken me more than five minutes to update last night. This past week I:

a) realized that, while Jane Talbot may share a few themes with the Gothic, it is by no means a Gothic novel,

b) decided to read Sophia Lee’s The Recess instead, only to find that I couldn’t get a text of it onto my kindle, and

c) switched to The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, because I know I’m capable of getting through something by Ann Radcliffe in pretty good time.

Oh, and I read some more of The Contested Castle.

I do plan on going back to Jane Talbot soon, because it’s both enjoyable and fascinating.

(belated again) week in books: 10/9/11

I feel like my reading has been kind of scattered and unfocused lately. So, this week I finished the Georgette Heyer book I started last weekend. Then I read half of Charles Brockden Brown’s Jane Talbot, which I’m reviewing for the Classics Circuit’s Gothic Lit tour later this month. Then I read a chunk of one of Carolyn Wells’ lesser children’s books, The Story of Betty, which I ready in bite-sized chunks because it’s falling apart and I can’t take it anywhere. Then I reread the first couple of chapters of The Contested Castle, which is a really enjoyable analysis of Gothic literature in relation to the ideal of the home. It’s already been helpful in relation to Jane Talbot — I wasn’t really seeing how it was Gothic, but now I’m having an easier time picking out the relevant themes.

ETA: I’m not sure what it says that I read Harold Bell Wright’s The Eyes of the World yesterday and completely forgot about it.

week in books: 10/2/11

One nice thing about doing these weekly posts is that it helps me actually keep track of what I’m reading. But then there are weeks like this, where all I have to offer is the fact that I reread half of Georgette Heyer’s The Convenient Marriage this morning, and it’s just kind of embarassing. What can I say? There have been numerous distractions this week.

But here, have some dark and blurry photographs of things I bought at a library book sale yesterday:

I don’t spend all my time at book sales, I promise. It’s just that one of the libraries in my area has been running a ook sale out of a side room on alternate weekends or something, while another had a big booksale fundraiser thing this weekend.

The pictures are terrible, but yes, that is a stack of twelve Georgette Heyer paperbacks on the left. I’ve read all of them, I think, but I didn’t own any of them. And I left at least as many behind.

On the other side we have…hmmm. There’s a book by Katherine Cecil Thurston, an early 20th century bestseller whose books I’ve never read. There’s a copy of Rupert of Hentzau, because I didn’t have a nice one. There’s one of the Lillian Elizabeth Roy Polly and Eleanor books, which are pretty great and which I should write about at some point. That skinny white thing is by Annie Hamilton Donnell, and the second thing from the top is something randomly entertaining-looking by Mabel Dana Lyon (anyone familiar with her?). And the last one is someting by Grace Livingston Hill, who should have appeared on this blog before but hasn’t.

 

 

(slightly belated) week in books: 9/25/11

Let’s see. I started the week with Samuel Hopkins Adams’ The Clarion, of which I have have a review written out in the kind of messy handwriting that results from trying to write on a moving train. Then I continued with Adams and read The Unspeakable Perk, which was pretty awesome.

That brings me to Friday. On my train into the city I reread Josephine Tey’s To Love and Be Wise, which I hadn’t read in enought years that I’d forgotten most of what happened in it–except, unfortunately, the soluion of the mystery. So that was enjoyable. Saturday I reread Roast Beef, Medium. It’s funny to think how recently I read it for the first time, because I’ve already lost count of how many times I’ve gone back to it. The same goes for the Torchy books. After that, I read a Nero Wolfe mystery, The Final Deduction, and followed it up with In the Best Families, which I had read once before but had not allowed myself to read again until now. It’s sort of one of the most emotionally engaging mystery novels I know, although I also think I’m being kind of crazy when I say that.

week in books: 9/18/11

Another slow reading weeks. I read The Lamp in the Desert, and reviewed it, and then for some reason I went straight on to another Ethel M. Dell book — The Bars of Iron. I didn’t get very far before I switched to Rafael Sabatini’s The Suitors of Yvonne, of which my review is forthcoming. I may go back to The Bars of Iron, once I’ve got past the fact that the hero and heroine are named, respectively, Piers Evesham and Avery Denys.

Now I’ve started Samuel Hopkins Adams’ The Clarion, and so far, so good, but it’s very different from the other two books of his that I’ve read.

Also: have you sent in your entry to the Sylvia contest yet? I’d really appreciate it if you did — it doesn’t even need to take more than five minutes. I can’t come up with credible results without data.

week in books: 9/11/11

It hasn’t been a big reading week for me–I finished My Side of the Mountain, which was fun, dragged to a halt on the Dresden Files thing, reread A.E.W. Mason’s The Prisoner in the Opal, of which a review will be forthcoming once I figure out how to write it, and reread The Way of an Eagle, which may actually have been more fun the second time around.

I’ve also been watching silent movies–The Sheik, a couple of Biograph shorts, and now, in installments, The Birth of a Nation. I thought I’d seen the latter before, but I’ve realized that I only saw a part of it–probably less than an hour. Anyway, I’m wondering whether I ought to be reviewing these movies, since they’re in the public domain and available for free online. I’m not sure if I know how to review movies.

Next up: probably something by Rafael Sabatini.

week in books: 9/4/11

I’m trying out a new thing: weekly reading updates, to be posted on Sundays and to include all of the books I’ve been reading, regardless of whether they’re old, out of copyright, etc.

For most of the past week, I’ve been making my way through Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books, a series about a wizard/private detective living in a Chicago overrun with fairies and demons and things. The books are, to be honest, not that great, and there are a lot more of them than I initially thought, but I’m determined to make my way through them. I’m on book five now.