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Woke up very achy this morning, emailed work that I was taking a sick day, and at present am feeling better enough that as usually happens, I'm feeling a bit guilty about not having gone in.
Meanwhile, I've been searching Project Gutenburg for things to read: Monday evening and Tuesday during breaks I read one of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries, <I>The Key</I>; it's definitely a cosy, but Miss Silver is saved from being a mere knockoff of Miss Marple by the detail of being a full-time professional private detective. She makes her living at it. Previously she was a governess, and it's implied she can win over middle- and upper-class witnesses by reminding them of their childhood nannies, and working-class ones by coming off as the sort of not-quite-gentry, not-quite-commoner who has the inside track on gossip while "not being the sort you have to mind your Ps and Qs with." I suspect she also plays a bit older than she actually is.
This afternoon, by contrast I read Charles Williams' <I>The Place of the Lion.</I> Felt rather stupid for not guessing Williams was one of the Inklings until I looked him up afterwards. True, he wrote it before he met Lewis or joined his circle, but when a book's genre is described as "theological thriller" and the premise involves a breach in reality unleashing Platonic forms on a small prewar English village, where they run around absorbing/possessing people and things, it's a bit of a giveaway. Need to think about this one for a bit, but there's a half-dozen or so by the same author waiting to be read.
Meanwhile, I've been searching Project Gutenburg for things to read: Monday evening and Tuesday during breaks I read one of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries, <I>The Key</I>; it's definitely a cosy, but Miss Silver is saved from being a mere knockoff of Miss Marple by the detail of being a full-time professional private detective. She makes her living at it. Previously she was a governess, and it's implied she can win over middle- and upper-class witnesses by reminding them of their childhood nannies, and working-class ones by coming off as the sort of not-quite-gentry, not-quite-commoner who has the inside track on gossip while "not being the sort you have to mind your Ps and Qs with." I suspect she also plays a bit older than she actually is.
This afternoon, by contrast I read Charles Williams' <I>The Place of the Lion.</I> Felt rather stupid for not guessing Williams was one of the Inklings until I looked him up afterwards. True, he wrote it before he met Lewis or joined his circle, but when a book's genre is described as "theological thriller" and the premise involves a breach in reality unleashing Platonic forms on a small prewar English village, where they run around absorbing/possessing people and things, it's a bit of a giveaway. Need to think about this one for a bit, but there's a half-dozen or so by the same author waiting to be read.
