[ebooktalk] Re: My Monthly Reads
- From: "Shell" <shell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ebooktalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2013 10:24:39 +0100
Hi Clare,
I have been very disappointed in Peter James, because I found the first few
books brilliant and eagerly awaited the next in the series, then he suddenly
nose dived for me a few books in and after a couple of stinkers, I stopped
reading. Such a shame as I thought the series had a lot to offer, but maybe he
just ran out of good plots.
Shell.
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From: "Clare Gailans" <cgailans@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 9:01 AM
To: <ebooktalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [ebooktalk] My Monthly Reads
> Bit late with this.
> Peter James: Looking Good Dead. Very exciting, I must progress a bit faster
> with this series. Can't remember much about the book a month on, though.
> Margaret Atwood: Cat's Eye. This was a re-read for a course we are going on
> soon. I enjoyed it more this time because it seemed less hard work with an
> audio reader who was in sympathy than in braille first time round. Elaine is
> rather hard-faced, and on this reading I found this harder to understand,
> because though the experiences with Cordelia were definitely dreadful and
> the sort of thing you would expect to mark her for life, she had a very
> loving though rather unobservant family who you would think would have
> compensated, even without knowing what was going on. Well, I suppose I think
> they would have noticed that something was and asked her.
> Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea, for the same course. I loved this, mainly for
> the writing about the landscape and some of the characters, though my
> longtime hero Mr Rochester doesn't come out of it well.
> L. T. Meade: a World of Girls. This is a Victorian school story and rather
> melodramatic, with some of the most nauseating baby talk I have ever seen
> written out, and an awful lot of it. Three-year-old Nan kept saying "me like
> 'oo" among many other things. I enjoyed most of the writing though, and will
> return to her, if only because I am now thoroughly gripped by the school
> story genre (again!) Perhaps I have entered my second childhood.
> E. M. Delafield: Turn Back the Leaves. This was a very dark book about an
> old Catholic family who lived in grim isolation under the rule of their
> dreadful father, though it did have snatches of humour to remind me that she
> could also write about the Provincial Lady. My favourite was one of the
> daughters being chastised for putting on a little make-up, which she was
> told to remove before Papa saw it. "You may be sure that our Blessed Lady
> never used a powder-puff!"
> Charlotte M. Yonge: the Clever Woman of the Family. Another piece of
> Victoriana, recommended by my school story devoteees but actually about
> several families and Rachel's struggle to branch out of the drawing-room
> into the world. Things go horribly wrong and she ends up marrying the man
> she loves and settling for family life and helping in the parish. Not a
> feminist writer, not that this bothers me as I have more or less settled for
> family life myself, all these years on. She has some very good disabled
> characters in this book, including a blindy, which isn't always the case in
> books of this period!
> Dorothy Whipple: Greenbanks. This is another family story written in the
> 1930s. Persephone have republished quite a few of her books. This was very
> good but my favourite is still High Wages, about Jane who makes her way up
> from a shop girl to running her own shop, with all sorts of lovely period
> detail about the job.
> Clare
>
>
>
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