Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
OK, I bit. I also started An Ordinary Youth by Walter Kempowski, a bildungsroman about growing up under Hitler. I'm liking it. And, The Reef Girl by Zane Grey as an audiobook which was recommended to me by a neighbor. It's awful. I've only ever read Riders of the Purple Sage by him and I did like that. But this is horribly written to the extent that when I read a review suggesting that Grey's wife finished it/wrote it (it was posthumously published and about 40 years later) I thought that was plausible. But I'll keep listening for now, as it kills the time when I've got insomnia.
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What I bit on was
A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer. I'm enjoying it; I wish Heyer wasn't always so aggressive about showing off just how very much research she's done. I can read Austen and nothing in the vocabulary jumps out at me but with Heyer, I'd be looking up cant phrases every page if I bothered.
I abandoned
The Reef Girl, which was way too much passionate love with sultry native.
I've started one last book published in 2024, Robert Harris's
Precipice, about H.H. Asquith's romance with Venetia Stanley. The whole business strikes me as pretty plodding, way too much about washing hands and locking doors and looking in mirrors. And, one of my pet peeves, he gets titles wrong! How could he do so much research and still refer to Winston Churchill's mother as Lady Jenny, instead of Lady Randolph? But, it's holding my attention for a book to listen to while in bed, where the bar isn't all that high.
The good news is that I'm hopeful of clearing the decks by year's end, which would be fantastic.