Well, the last time I was here I promised more thoughts on
A Conspiracy of Kings, so here I come with a couple of links:
a review (safe to read for anyone who's read the earlier books) and
some more spoilery thoughts.
As always, reviews of other reads, both recent and not-so-recent, can be found
here.
Since finishing
ACoK (and, thus, since I've last posted), I've read three books:
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen,
The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, and
The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald. I'd had my eye on
Briar Rose for a long time, and had even started it before, but I'm afraid to say that it was a huge disappointment. It has a great concept (Sleeping Beauty + WWII = win) and one very strong character in the grandmother, but the rest is mushy and distasteful. The Ferguson I won from the LT Early Reviewers program. It's from the same era as and somewhat in the style of
Cold Comfort Farm, but despite some hilarious and charming passages ("I’m through with Holmes now, but I often think that he and I could have hit off wonderfully well in Baker Street, as I am not at all demanding, and rather love old clothes and arm-chairs, and silence, and smoking, and dispassionate flights of pure reason"), it left me cold.
The Princess and the Goblin was not a total hit either, although as it was a childhood favorite of mine I still enjoyed it quite a bit.
I'm now reading the sequel,
The Princess and Curdie, and I've found a few quotes from it that I absolutely love:
A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them - and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not always feel quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors.
There is this difference between the growth of some humans beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes at length to know whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in, so afraid that he takes himself in altogether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it between his teeth.
This fall I'm going for a bunch of dark, Gothic-toned volumes, including
Dracula,
The Woman in White,
My Cousin Rachel, etc. It just seemed like the right thing to do for the season, and moreover all the books I've queued up are ones I've wanted to read for a long time. But I'm not starting quite yet ... after I finish
The Princess and the Goblin, I really need to read
Wildwood Dancing since I promised to loan it to a friend once I'm done, and AustenProse's Heyer month (thanks for the link,
ww!) is making me want to read
Friday's Child. Who knows? I may slip
The Maltese Falcon and
Death in the Family in there too.
I may play catch-up later, but that's all for now.