Short Reviews

Welcome back! For those in the US, I hope you enjoyed the holiday, however you do or don’t celebrate it. Personally, we don’t celebrate the meaning so much as the opportunity to be together.

The household typically gets some additional days off, and we used to host a huge party the weekend after. The pandemic changed a lot of things for us, including our views on family/friendship and my partner’s introversion (he’s a 5-6 guest max person now). The party hasn’t happened in years. He also found his love of cooking during this time. We spend all day cooking with each other and occasionally the housemate and/or teen, invite a friend or two over, and then bemoan the huge amount of food we now have to eat over the next few days. This year was a traditional turkey, but in the past we’ve managed all sorts of experiments and first times. Thankfully, they’ve all turned out okay.I skipped last week because of Turkey Day, and mulled over how I wanted to handle these shorter reviews in the future. Gods know my punctuation is doing all the heavy lifting to keep most of these to two sentences. They will still be short, but some may go longer or shorter depending on how I felt about the book, editing, or what I remember of it. I really should get to writing these while the memory is fresh, but it would cut into my reading time and that will not do.

Currently Reading: Blackwater by Michael McDowell Wearing: Fox in the Flowerbed by Imaginary Authors. This is a hothouse floral perfume: overwhelming and heady when you first put it on, like walking into an estate greenhouse as everything is blooming. The jasmine sticks around, but eventually becomes powdery and more acceptable for something like a late night ball and ::gasp:: ankle showing. It’s one of the most traditional perfumes in their collection, which is appropriate for the Regency Era and some rich, catty, New York bitches.

Persuasion by Jane Austen*: 4. Anne Elliot was convinced as a young woman to break off her engagement to Captain Wentworth, and now it’s a decade later and he’s back— romance, shenanigans, misunderstandings! I actually liked this better than Pride and Prejudice, but it could be because the other story has been beaten to death in my mind.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: 4.  Fanny is poor with a million brothers and sisters, so her aunt’s family is magnanimous to take her in since they need someone to look down on. As she grows up, she experiences angst over her cousin’s lack of interest in her, despite a rich lothario being so into her he’s willing to redeem his wicked ways. God, I even created a map for this one and I don’t remember much of it. Austen is meant to be read in between other books, so maybe I can remember shit.

Answered Prayers by Truman Capote: 3.5: The narrator, a queer escort who services high society women, reveals information about the social circles he runs in and the women he meets. It’s more than a little based on Capote’s real life relationships with wealthy socialites, and the novel was abandoned after the third chapter made its way to the press, because, man, Capote skewered the women he was benefiting from. Then again, with that kind of money, maybe they could have been pulled back and made 100% bitchy asshole less of their personalities.

*I’m on a bit of a Jane Austen kick and doing some mapping work on the books. I want to map out the locations mentioned, find historical images of different types of dwellings, houses, fashions, etc, and put together a visual guide for each of the books at some point. I brought in things that were adjacent, like Gaskell’s book and other historical romances. You know the plot: plucky heroine, class politics, and steamy hand brushing. Surprisingly enough, this kind of stuff is useful for writing horror.