The Braineater Gazette & Clarion

I had to read 19 books to judge a translation prize and I'm not allowed to talk about those yet but I am finally released to read other things so these are them:

A Well Full of Leaves by Elizabeth Myers (Persephone). ( Read more )The author's letters to Eleanor Farjeon at the end are great. I'd have read a whole book of those.

Gulity by Definition by Susie Dent. She definitely likes words and the workplace aspect of how people work at a dictionary was really interesting in a way like Murder must Advertise though they don't seem to do very much apart from solve cryptic clues to a 10 year-old disappearance. ( Read more... )

Diplomatic Baggage by Brigid Keenan (charity shop). I thought she was one of the diplomatic wives interviewed in Daughters of Britannia so picked it up because one of my complaints about that is that I want to read longer chunks by each of the diplomatic wives through history, not what each of them thought across time about food or whatever. I also assumed from the cover (heels and miniskirt) that it was written in the 1970s but no it was 2007. I suppose that is still quite a while ago now (ouch) and it's a look back from Kazakhstan at how she ended up being a diplomatic wife and running through all the postings from the 1970s. It is funny but you can have too many funny stories about dinner parties and being a ditzy fashion journalist and not being able to communicate with local staff*. Daughters of Britannia turns out to be a better approach to the topic.

Crooked Cross by Sally Carson (Persephone). Written in 1934 about a happy German family living in Bavaria with a daughter engaged to a lovely doctor chap who happens to have a Jewish surname. Yeah. Compelling, all the more so as the author died in 1941. Like The Chalet School in Exile, a fictionalised account of what was happening on the ground written at the time. Except this one is for grown-ups.

I would like to read something more cheerful next.

Accidental cinema. Frankenstein

Youngest was going to a theatre thing which turned out to be inaccessible by public transport so I had to be transport and decided that instead of sitting in a pub or walking the rainy streets, I would see what was on at the cinema. I didn't want to watch Bruce Springsteen so Frankenstein it was. Normally I would not go near anything that could be supernatural or horror but I have read the book (a very long time ago) and had seen a review complaining it wasn't horrific enough, which made me feel I might be able to cope. Also I went to the Everyman so if it got too gory, I could concentrate on eating chips.

( Frankenstein  )

I should go to the cinema more often. The problem is that our nearest one, which I want to support, only has one screen so tends to only show the big films that will bring in lots of people (although everytime we go there's only been about 6 people in it) and otherwise it's a long drive to the Odeon in a retail park by the motorway.

*I did see a review saying "why didn't she just learn Russian before she went?" which is fair comment but I'm not sure of the date when she arrived in Kazakhstan and I remember my mother trying to learn Russian from a BBC course in the 1970s but then Russia invaded Afghanistan and the course got moved later and later in the evenings and then she gave up. It's not like there was Duolingo, or even possibly the internet.