My TV-show inspired reread of Outlander confirmed few things I thought I remembered about this book. Namely, that I liked it, but also found it almost silly at times. An enjoyable read, but not a great one. The good: inventive take on time-travel. Great female character in Claire. Historical milieus well realized and intriguing. Jamie. The cheerful abandon with which Gabaldon treats genre conventions. Is it science fiction? Is is romance? Is it supernatural romance? Historical fiction? Who knows? Who cares? It’s all that and […]
Okay, and?
I’ve read comic books as long as I’ve been able to read, but I’d never be allowed to call myself a “comic book geek”, because the Anglo-American super hero thing remains terra incognita for me, at least for large parts. Whenever I think of changing this, the few decades worth of “canon” seems daunting. Where to even start getting to know these characters and their stories? But last week in the library I decided to just do it: pick a Batman book and read it, […]
“It was a horrible time to be alive”
In her Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, author Fay Weldon calls the Regency era “by our standards, a horrible time to be alive.” She also writes that the class society was “fair enough if you were Jane Austen, but supposing you were the maid?” That is what Jo Baker’s Longbourn does: supposes you were the maid. And it does the supposing brilliantly. For me, this was one of those books where the reading experience is so emotionally magnificent, it seems like a […]
The Uninterested Reader
Every once in a great while you encounter a book that has all the right ingredients to appeal to your taste, but that nevertheless leaves you somewhat unsatisfied. The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones was like that for me. It has so many things I like: An English manor house, a disastrous dinner, early 20th century English vernacular, an eccentric child, unresolved sexual tension, and a mystery. And yet I did not love it. It’s an easy book that most readers will probably breeze trough […]