Igenlode Wordsmith

I was surprised to hear that D.K. Broster's novels had been originally regarded as rip-offs of Baroness Orczy (with the exception of the historical French setting, they really have very little in common), but in "Sir Isumbras at the Ford" we actually do get a Scarlet-Pimpernel-style rescue mission taking place, even if the victim is a small boy who has been kidnapped into post-Revolutionary France rather than an innocent in danger of the guillotine!

It has been a long time since I read this book, mainly because the account of the Quiberon disaster (something that, one feels, would never have featured in Orczy's optimistic adventures) haunted me for years as a child. On this occasion I consciously picked it up again as a result of having read The Marquis of Carabas, which features an equally (probably more so, because Sabatini goes into the damning disagreement and back-biting among the commanders, while Broster gives us only the exhaustion and dwindling hope of those under their command) devastating version of Quiberon. That experience reminded me of the existence of "Sir Isumbras".( Much discussion and spoilers for many Broster novels )

I discovered the existence of this title while researching the activities of Hyde de Neuville after wondering what might have become of a version of the Comte de Brencourt who stayed behind in Paris, and looked for it on Project Gutenberg because Georges Cadoudal, who appears at the start of "The Yellow Poppy", was mentioned as featuring as a character in it (which he does), and because I was intrigued by the existence of a Rafael Sabatini novel of which I'd never heard. To my pleasant surprise, I enjoyed it more than I was expecting. The final twist satisfactorily explains away elements that had been unexplained since the start of the novel and carries emotional weight, while managing to provide some depth to its villains, and for once the book avoids Sabatini's besetting trope of the despicable weak intellectual betraying and then being defeated by the designated Manly Man.

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This was the first Vorkosigan book I ever read; the first Bujold book I ever read. It swept me away, and it still does.

I didn't get to read "Shards of Honour", which I had to order from America via the local bookshop in those pre-internet days, until long after -- this one I just came across at random in the library, and picked out on the basis of its clichéd cover to use as an example of mechanical science fiction as versus my love of high fantasy. Needless to say, I had to pick another book for that particular essay (I eventually went for Isaac Asimov); it rapidly transpired that Miles Vorkosigan's world had as much loyalty, drama, nobility (in all senses) and thwarted romance as any Tolkienesque epic, and it was brilliantly and humanely written.( Read more... )

I went to a lot of trouble to get hold of this book, and was very lucky to get it: the copy I found on the branch library shelves was battered with a cracked spine, and had been marked by the librarian "Please withdraw on return" -- fortunately for me, it had presumably been hastily reshelved by an unpaid and untrained volunteer (almost all the librarians having now lost their jobs in order to save the Council money) who had failed to notice this instruction, and I was thus able to find out what happened in the final volume. And it's quite a lot. The death of the King and both his adult heirs, for a start, which throws the normal plotting on the ruling Council into paranoid overdrive, plus the trifling matter of a major invasion during all the in-fighting, while the enemies of the First of the Mages start to catch up with him, and neither they nor he turn out to care much about the collateral damage.... ( Read more... )

I assumed this book was about Kings and Queens, but in fact it turns out to be a collection of 18th-century family letters found at Wilton House, seat of the Earls of Pembroke, in the 1930s, "Henry" being the 10th Earl, "Elizabeth" his wife, and "George" their son, Lord Herbert. The letters and diaries in this volume mainly cover the years 1775-1780, the period during which young Lord Herbert, then in his teens, made his Grand Tour of Europe, and consist, in addition to assorted other letters, of the lengthy correspondence between the young man and his parents at home, between the latter and his tutors, the Rev. W. Coxe and Captain Floyd, and Lord Herbert's detailed diary for the final part of the trip in 1779-80.

This collection is surprisingly interesting, especially in the second half, where we can see young Lord Herbert growing up in the course of his diary entries. ( Read more... )

The First Law is that it is forbidden to speak with devils. The Second Law is that it is forbidden to eat the flesh of men. There are definitely people in Joe Abercrombie's universe who do the latter (and seem to gain uncanny powers thereby), so we can assume that there are probably people who break the First Law as well, and that devils exist to be spoken with...

The review extract on the front of the book calls it "delightfully twisted and evil"; Goodreads calls it "grimdark". I'm not sure what either of these are based upon, unless it is by comparison with the Young Adult diversity-positive fantasy faeverse. What you've got here is a world that feels real rather than just generic ( Read more... )

https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/html/colette_gigi.html

My immediate reaction to this was that, as a short story, it felt like about half of a book with a chunk missing :( If the author had written the whole thing out with the same level of detail that she devotes to the initial set-up, then it would have been twice as long and probably a novel in its own right. But she spends a lot of time depicting her characters and their situation at the start, and then the dènouement feels suddenly stuck in out of nowhere, in a handful of scenes that feel disjointed with no clear progression between them. There didn't seem to be any stage of development or change from the initial relationship.

Perhaps this was because I was reading in French at about three am and thus not sensitive to all Colette's subtleties; there was certainly a large chunk of vocabulary at the start that was simply unfamiliar. (Mme Alvarez toisa sa petite-fille, du canotier en feutre orné d’une plume-couteau, jusqu’aux souliers molière de confection -- I'm assuming from context that this is describing Gigi's clothing, but without looking up all the period vocabulary I have no idea what it means, and have only learned that toiser means to look at somebody because I *did* have to look that up at a later point where it was plot-significant!) But Gaston seems to switch from viewing Gigi as a refreshingly unaffected child to viewing her as a potential mistress to acting the despairing lover without any obvious trigger or transition at all: there isn't any "But without your glasses you're beautiful, Miss Jones!" moment, or even any point where we see it visibly dawn on him for the first time that she has become an adult.( Read more... )

Necromancer raises zombies and solves murders while dating vampires -- the pitch for this did sound rather like Anita Blake. On the other hand, I *liked* Anita Blake before she went over the top, so I was inclined to give it a go. (N.B. the 'and croquet' in the strapline is false advertising; there is one brief non-plot-relevant croquet scene near the beginning of the book :-p)

It turns out that the heroine is unusually short -- "five foot in my stockinged feet" -- and has curly hair, as well. (But 'copper curls and emerald eyes' rather than Anita's dark colouring, which isn't really a score in my book; if the author wanted to make her red-haired, she could simply have been ginger like the rest of us :-p)

The selling point for this book proves to be that the zombies are the good guys, for a change. (And generally on the losing side against vampires, since the latter have the advantage of speed and intelligence -- which makes the ability to command the undead less over-powered, even if you can raise recent victims out of a sense of burning outrage.) Indeed, we meet one of the most attractive characters in the book in the first chapter, when Toni (whose real name is 'Lavington', although nobody ever questions this!) raises him from his grave as part of an exercise in raising every single corpse in the cemetery.

In her case, being a necromancer is not an official profession, but what she terms a Compulsion, and she has been working her way in secret through the local supply of graves in order to keep her abilities in check. It turns out our heroine is actually an estate agent, although she doesn't manage to turn up for work very often in the course of this book and one does wonder how long she will hang onto the job at this rate! It can be surprisingly useful to have access to lists of the local desirable properties when you are trying to track down where vampires might be hiding out, however, and Toni meets her Designated Vampire Love Interest when he employs her to find him a house -- with suitable cellars.( Read more... )

I thought I'd read all Shute's books (and indeed it turns out I actually own a copy of this one!), but I had no recollection of ever having encountered "What Happened to the Corbetts" before -- and given the subject matter, I think I probably would have remembered it. I can see *why* it's not familiar among his 'canon'; it is an unexpected experiment that could best be described as speculative fiction, I suppose. This is the story of Britain undergoing heavy bombing at the start of a World War II that had at the time of writing, not (quite) actually happened, and ultimately did not take place quite as described -- in this reality, the characters find refuge across the Channel in a sympathetic France which is harbouring the Royal Navy but still at peace, for example. ( Read more... )

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/04/23/love-undetectable-andrew-sullivan-friendship/

A truly fascinating article reviewing a book which I haven't read ("Love Undetectable", by Andrew Sullivan), but which sounds well worth the reading; the review is basically summarising the subject via outstanding quotes from the original, which makes it seem redundant then to quote selectively again, although there is a great temptation...

Unlike a variety of other relationships, friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist. One can admire someone who is completely unaware of our admiration, and the integrity of that admiration is not lost; one may even employ someone without knowing who it is specifically one employs; one may be related to a great-aunt whom one has never met (and may fail ever to meet). And one may, of course, fall in love with someone without the beloved being aware of it or reciprocating the love at all. And in all these cases, the relationships are still what they are, whatever the attitude of the other person in them: they are relationships of admiration, business, family, or love.

But friendship is different. Friendship uniquely requires mutual self-knowledge and will. It takes two competent, willing people to be friends. You cannot impose a friendship on someone, although you can impose a crush, a lawsuit, or an obsession. If friendship is not reciprocated, it simply ceases to exist or, rather, it never existed in the first place.