Someone To Manage Your Affairs? Someone To Handle Your Business? Someone To Take The Dog For A Run? Someone To Assasinate Your Aunt? PSMITH WILL DO IT

Greetings!

Been doing a lot of reading lately and very little writing... lemme see...

Read:


The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer - this was a bit more romance-y than the other Heyer books I've devoured (any book with the sentence 'He kissed her ruthlessly.' will set my teeth on edge a little; fortunately kissing is as far as it goes!), but still amusing. More than a teensy bit implausible - the 'masqueraders' of the title are a brother and sister who swap clothes for almost the entire novel, and only one man figures it out! Very fun, silly sort of book. Think The Scarlet Pimpernel, just a little less brilliant.


Bridget Jones - The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding. If reading Jane Austen is like eating a delicious five course dinner then reading Bridget Jones is like eating a packet of chips. A guilty pleasure that doesn't do you any good, (My inner monologue always takes on the style of whatever I'm reading until I finish it... can get 'v.' annoying with some books) but you can't put it down. The storyline is much more closely based on Jane Austen's Persuasion than the previous book was based on Pride and Prejudice.

In my impatience for the next series of Sherlock I've started re-reading Arthur Conan Doyle's original classics. Awesome stuff. Definitely recommend it. Finished A Study in Scarlet - I'm moving on to The Sign of the Four now.







Leave it to Psmith and Ukridge by P. G. Wodehouse... how can I express the affection I feel for Wodehouse's characters and stories? I can't. Not a bit. I adored Ukridge with his dodgy money-making schemes and mustard yellow macintosh almost as much as I loved Psmith with his suavity, wit and monocle. I can only say, go! Get your mitts on a Wodehouse! Revel in the golden goodness of his magical prose and delicious, delightful plotting!

Bought:






















Yesterday I purchased these two books, neither of which I have read. The Iron Man I acquired because I recently saw The Iron Giant, which is based on the above novelette. (The Iron Giant is a gorgeous little movie, by the way - very much recommended!) I have never heard of or read any of the four books that make up The Diary of a Provincial Lady (which, according to the cover and introduction, is about the ups and downs of being a housewife in the 1930s): it seems like my kind of book and I bought it on a hunch. Hope it's good!

- NO-ONE GETS PARDONED FOR LIVING.

Just finished reading Terry Pratchett's Mort. This won't be a very long post, coz I haven't eaten today and my hungry stomach is beginning to make its presence known. I rather liked this book - but, to be sure and certain, Pratchett has come a long way since then as regards characters and the development of them.

Oh, and I recently listened to P. G. Wodehouse's book The Luck of the Bodkins on CD - does that count as having read a book? Probably. And yes, I do reccomend it. And no, I haven't got anything to say about it right now.

"You like it?" he said to Mort, in pretty much the same tone of voice people used when they said to St George, "You killed a what?"

Old men, intellectual ladies, and a dearth of reading material...

Haven't been reading much new stuff lately - mostly been dabbling and dipping into old favourites. Read Pere Goriot for uni - won't talk about it here because I know I'll be writing reams about it elsewhere ere long; lazily dipping into George Eliot's Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, which began most entertainingly but lost me a little when she started to talk about the salons of the influential French les précieuses and their literary movement: basically a bunch of pretty women who held parties for clever men and made them write fairy tales and love poems and stuff. Sounds like it must have been fun at the time - but deadly dull to read about.
Need some books to read! I'd really like to get my hands on Leave it to Psmith and Summer Lightning - I read the first Blandings novel ages ago and loved it. Why is Wodehouse not sold with all the other comfort foods? I could really go for some chocolate and chuckles.