We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

So for reasons that may be evident from my last post this summer was not a great time for reading or for anything else. Except crafts. Last week I did so much crochet I bruised my fingertip. (Tumblr quilt posts here and here)

Recent:
A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard started good but got more irritating over time, and I ended up skimming the last few chapters.

Very much liked Patchwork: A World Tour; I still really want a general history (specifically one starting before 1700), but this was very diverse and very pretty.

I read the first of Jewelle Gomez's Gilda Stories, which was very well done, but the author's note was more evidence that debates over moral storytelling are not limited to modern tumblr.

In August I finished another Biggles book, and now the next time I feel like Boy's Own Adventures I can get on to the resolution of Von Stalhein's arc and widen my fanfiction options.

And then I deliberately picked up Circle of Magic: Sandry's Book for comfort reading, which it provided. Also more craft books and more RWRB fanfic.

Current:
Just finished Agatha Christie's The Moving Finger in audiobook for more comfort reading. I remember liking but also being annoyed by a paranormal romance about how great small towns are, and it probably says something very clear about me that Horrible Things Happening in Nice Small Towns are, conversely, very comfortable.

Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times, because I wanted to reread a Discworld book and I knew I'd only read this one once ... but unfortunately there was a reason for that. Which of course is going to be true of anyone who wrote that many books over that much time.

Sarah Caudwell's The Shortest Way to Hades, which is great. One of the nice things about this series is that I can think things like, "Ah, what an interesting choice to refer to Euripides' Helen in this particular narrative. What might that imply for the main mystery plot?" (I'm less than halfway in and don't know if I'm guessing right yet.)

My current purse book is The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman, which will probably go slowly but which I am enjoying very much when I remember it's there.

And a facsimile copy of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Future:
The library for some reason hasn't got any of K. J. Charles' recent releases.

I have another Christie audiobook lined up. In print the Caudwell will probably take me a while yet. But it's occurred to me that autumn is coming up, and this year I want to actually read The Haunting of Hill House.

This is just for the second post (still open until the end of the month). Recs for fics in the first post (now closed to prompts but still open to fills and comments) are over here.

Still not anything like exhaustive, especially since I am going to be too busy in the next couple of days to wait until then to post. Also, for some of these it may help if you click show thread from start for context.

( Still lots of really good fics! )

Finished

A MCU fic with a decent but not very deep plot, low on rationale for character motivations. Pretty good period AU, though.

Unsettled by AxeMeAboutAxinomancy: As podfic, comfort listening during physical health issues this weekend.

(My cutoff for fics to count as "books" for record keeping purposes is somewhere under 25,000 words.)

Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey: Comfort reading. I think this is the low point for her copyediting and it's improved since here. (Having one section of my brain complaining about typos and punctuation and consistency errors actually makes it better for comfort reading in some ways, because there's more there to occupy me.) I don't like any of the villain pov here; come to think of it, she cut that out of some of the later books in this series entirely, which is probably a good idea.

Victorian Families in Fact and Fiction by Penny Kane: On the Victorian demographic transition as expressed in the literary evidence. Excellent, clearly differentiates between factual and literary sources and what can be determined from them. And as I said a couple weeks ago, the Victorian era was fucking terrible, people. (Primarily: child labour, (lack of) education, and patriarchy.) (The thing is, we know about the patriarchy (in fandom), and there was a lot of other Really Terrible stuff happening too that gets ignored.)

Lots of things that get left out of standard pop-historical imaginings. Some of them less terrible: for example, Victorians had very late marriages (mid to late twenties, later in the middle classes and for men) and numerous remarriages after deaths of spouses. ("Two out of every five men across Europe in the nineteenth century who survived to age 50 had married and produced families more than once.")

...Huh. Come to think of it, that makes Watson's hypothetical multiple marriages a bit less implausible.

The Comfortable Courtesan by Clorinda Cathcart: Man, I'm so glad this exists. And it's officially ended, and comforting and lovely and impressive and just go read it. It hasn't been on my weekly posts before because it's just been kind of background to my life: of course I'm reading Madame C-'s updates. And it's finished, and I am sad, but it's there to be reread whenever.

In Progress

The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie: I glanced at the introduction to this (never read the introduction) and apparently Christie's thrillers are deprecated; I like them, and while this is clearly early and implausible it's fun.

I also have a book about Miss Marple as a character that I am going to start on.