April Books etc
Apr. 29th, 2016 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
debodacious63Again not much reading for pleasure this month but this should improve now I have finished my academic modules until September.
Shirley Jackson - Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons Somehow Shirley Jackson had passed me by although I had heard of The Haunting of Hill House, until last year the VG told me to read We Have Always Lived In The Castle because I would like it, and she was right. I was very pleased to learn she had written a couple of autobiographical accounts of her life as a faculty wife and mom in 1950s small town Vermont. She writes touchingly about her endearingly eccentric family and the books are laugh out loud funny in places although the knowledge that she was addicted to drugs and alcohol and died of a heart attack at the age of 49 casts a bit of a pall. And the bits about the young women who apparently adore her husband (despite him wearing nylon shirts eww) are also sad when one reads of his posthumous reputation as a shagger of his students. She is a bit like Betty Macdonald with a hint of the supernatural: there is a young daughter with a gift for magic and a few things that go bump in the night, and a number of oddly named cats.
Josephine Tey - The Man In The Queue Her first Alan Grant novel (in fact I think her first actual novel) and not a patch on her later classics such as Brat Farrar or Miss Pym Disposes, but still an enjoyable enough golden age crime read.
Teresa Waugh - The Gossips A Kindle impulse buy about the residents of Hillgate Village who enjoy nothing more than malicious and self righteous conjecture about their friends and neighbours. It has a lot of the usual chicklit characteristics - the heroine has a troublesome teenage daughter and a ghastly ex-husband with a new wife and baby, but it is entertainingly written and kept me amused.
No exhibitions, although we did visit (most of) and enjoy the Titanic in Belfast.
On TV I am still liking Thicker Than Water and cringed my way through the hilarious Camping - a bit like a bleaker, dirtier, naughtier Nuts In May for the 21st century.
And I have completed 21 blocks of The Splendid Sampler, which I am still finding curiously addictive.
Shirley Jackson - Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons Somehow Shirley Jackson had passed me by although I had heard of The Haunting of Hill House, until last year the VG told me to read We Have Always Lived In The Castle because I would like it, and she was right. I was very pleased to learn she had written a couple of autobiographical accounts of her life as a faculty wife and mom in 1950s small town Vermont. She writes touchingly about her endearingly eccentric family and the books are laugh out loud funny in places although the knowledge that she was addicted to drugs and alcohol and died of a heart attack at the age of 49 casts a bit of a pall. And the bits about the young women who apparently adore her husband (despite him wearing nylon shirts eww) are also sad when one reads of his posthumous reputation as a shagger of his students. She is a bit like Betty Macdonald with a hint of the supernatural: there is a young daughter with a gift for magic and a few things that go bump in the night, and a number of oddly named cats.
Josephine Tey - The Man In The Queue Her first Alan Grant novel (in fact I think her first actual novel) and not a patch on her later classics such as Brat Farrar or Miss Pym Disposes, but still an enjoyable enough golden age crime read.
Teresa Waugh - The Gossips A Kindle impulse buy about the residents of Hillgate Village who enjoy nothing more than malicious and self righteous conjecture about their friends and neighbours. It has a lot of the usual chicklit characteristics - the heroine has a troublesome teenage daughter and a ghastly ex-husband with a new wife and baby, but it is entertainingly written and kept me amused.
No exhibitions, although we did visit (most of) and enjoy the Titanic in Belfast.
On TV I am still liking Thicker Than Water and cringed my way through the hilarious Camping - a bit like a bleaker, dirtier, naughtier Nuts In May for the 21st century.
And I have completed 21 blocks of The Splendid Sampler, which I am still finding curiously addictive.
