The recent weekend road trip means that I haven’t had much time read. Still happily working away at A Suitable Boy. To recap my recent reads, I will start with the one I wanted to hurl across the room because it was so bad…

Constance Harding’s (Rather) Startling Year (US)
A Surrey State of Affairs (UK) by Ceri Radford
Let me try and make a few comparisons to help explain this piece of derivative dreck: The cluelessness of Hyacinth Bucket was only marginally funny when the show was new 23 years ago. Radford seems to think that putting Hyacinth (Constance) on the Internet is a sure fire way to make this book hilarious. It isn’t.  Bridget Jones all grown up at 53 but without any of Helen Fielding’s wit. But Constance is so much cooler than Bridget because she has a blog rather than a diary. What innovation. It’s as if Radford took every one-dimensional starchy British character she had ever seen in American film and TV and decided that was going to be her heroine. This is 30-year old Radford (she was only ten when Hyacinth was cutting edge) trying to get into the brain of a 53-year old and failing miserably. There are ways to portray out of touch housewives that are much funnier and less insulting to the intelligence of readers (and housewives).

Little Altars Everywhere by Rebecca Wells
I read this one to cover 1992 on my A Century of Books list. And it certainly had all of the hallmarks of books of that period: drunken, abusive parents (oh, look that pregnant woman is smoking), satirical look at the Catholic church, sassy southern women just begging to be adapted to the Hollywood screen. This prequel to the Ya-Ya sisterhood is a poor man’s Steel Magnolias.

Surprising Myself by Christopher Bram
The 1987 debut novel of Gods and Monsters (Father of Frankenstein) author Christopher Bram. I read this one right after high school and loved it. Twenty-six years later the landscape for young gays is so, so different, so this reads a bit like historical fiction, but it still managed to charm me a second time.

Quartet by Jean Rhys
The only “serious” book I have read lately. Enjoyable in that tragic French life kind of way. Woman’s husband ends up in prison, she becomes a mistress to survive…angst, jealousy, more angst. I actually quite liked it. Makes me wish I had gotten my hands on the two Jean Rhys Penguins before Frances found them.

   
This past weekend we headed up to Ithaca, New York so that I could go to the gigantic Tompkins County Friends of the Library book sale.  They have the sale twice a year in October and May. The sale goes for three successive weekends with the prices getting cheaper each day. On the first day of the sale hardcover books are all $4.50. By the 4th day (the day we were there) hardcover prices are down to $2.50 a title. And by the final day of the sale you can get all you can fit in a bag for just $1.

We probably wouldn’t have driven six hours one way for just a sale, but since we have friends in Ithaca we hadn’t seen in a while, we decided to make a weekend of it. JoAnn at Lakeside Musings was at the sale about six hours after I was. It looks like she had good luck with trade paperbacks which I skipped entirely. Too many people in my way. Plus I was looking for older things that couldn’t possibly interest anyone but me.

Now, the books.

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
I have heard this one is a bit of a depressing snooze. But it is seminal work of early LGBT fiction, so I thought I would give it a go.

An Unsuitable Attachment and A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym
I am trying to get all of Pym’s books in these hardcover Dutton editions. I have five of them now. But this Green Leaves turns out to be a dupe of something I already have. I am going to send it to JoAnn to thank her for sending me an Angela Thirkell novel.

The Glory of the Conquered by Susan Glaspell
I keep collecting the works of this author, I think she has been reissued by Persephone, but I haven’t read any of them yet. I hope I like her work or I will have a lot of duds on my shelf.

The Railway Police and The Last Trolley Ride by Hortense Calisher
I know nothing about this book, but I like the fact that both novellas are train related. And the author’s name is Hortense. It must be fantastic.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
There were several copies of this on the shelf each with a different pattern on the cover. Seemed like it was worth a go.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Lady Anna by Anthony Trollope
I collect these little Oxford World Classic hardcovers so I don’t always need to like the actual work. I am ambivalent about Dickens but love Trollope. Only it turns out I already had both of these at home.

Although I only recognized Penelope Lively’s name, I thought this look interesting and whould go well with my Anglo-iana collection. But now looking at the cover, I realize I also know Helen Cresswell. She wrote a series of juvenile books that were favorites of mine gorwing up even though I only understood about half of the English (vs American) vocabulary.

Too many people thing I am an a-hole for not liking du Maurier. So I am going to give this one a go. Many tell me this is their favorite. Hopefully third time will be the charm for me with this author.

Another little Trollope in an Oxford World Classic edition. A lovely edition of Margery Sharp’s The Foolish Gentlewoman which I was so happy to find. Turns out I also have that one at home. Sheesh. And then a gigantic bio of ICB.

While in Ithaca, we also stopped by the fantastic farmer’s market. One of the best I have ever been to. It has its own purpose built pavilion right near the foot of Cayuga Lake.

  
Not resting on my laurels
My friend Roz and I are in a competition to see which of us can read a 100 books first. Earlier in the year she had expressed a desire to read at least a hundred books in 2013. Knowing what a competitive person she is, I thought a little rivalry was all she needed to achieve her goal. Last time we checked-in with each other she was at 36 books and I was at 41. I think both of these totals are pretty impressive with only four months of the year gone. But all Roz could see was that she wasn’t in the lead. I think she is a little hard on herself. She will clearly meet her goal for the year and she is a much, much busier person than I am. If she isn’t running half marathons she is running all over DC doing more things in a year than I have done in a decade.

So the other day when I was at the fantastic Politics and Prose not far from my house I spotted the enormous Vikram Seth novel A Suitable Boy. I have always been curious about this book. I even think Roz mentioned that she was thinking of reading. And it was just one of those moments when one knows the time is right. Plus I thought with 41 (now 42) books completed for the year already I certainly had the breathing room and it might give Roz the chance to keeping running half marathons and to take the lead in our reading competition.

Like I did with War and Peace, I have decided to keep a counter of my progress. Unlike War and Peace, A Suitable Boy is several degrees more enjoyable to read and I find the Indian names easier to follow than Russian ones.

Spring has sprung like crazy
After some weird, freakishly warm weather in early April, temperatures here in DC have settled into a very nice, coolish, largely, sunny spring. The early warmth seems to have really encouraged everything to grow and bloom at once. This is in crazy contrast to the snow that continues to dog the midwest.

And speaking of weather
The film adaptation of Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding arrived from Netflix on Friday. I found it thoroughly enjoyable. I think the fact that I had read the book a few years ago helped put me in the right frame of mind for watching it. I wonder what I would have thought if I hadn’t known what to expect. Although it had been a while since I read the book, I was pretty sure that liberties had been taken. Nothing jarring, just different. So when I finished the film I pulled the book off the shelf and read it in one sitting. Both book and film benefited from the reread.

The book takes place in March, the film takes place at Christmas. My guess is so that they could dress the set to make it clear that it was a cold time of the year even if the landscape didn’t indicate so. For those of you interested in architecture, note the way they did the (what appears to be lead?) flashing above the door. Usually, at least in DC, it would be done with a simple, but less elegant stepped pattern.

Flashback to sunnier times.

You can’t tell in this photo, but there were a couple of scenes in the film when actress Zoe Tapper looked a bit…plump. I thought she might have been pregnant during filming. Turns out she had a child in 2011, the film came out in 2012, so I may be correct.

The wonderful Barbara Flynn played Aunt Bella. She also played Mrs. Jamieson in Cranford.

I am annoyed that this picture loaded fine as a thumbnail on Google, but the original image refuses to load. But Kitty was my favorite character in the film, so I decided to include it anyway.

That’s Gareth from The Office on the left and the wonderful Fenella Woolgar on the right.

Barbara Pym week is less than a month a way
Barbara Pym week begins on June 1st. Have you decided how you are going to celebrate Pym’s centenary? Amanda and I will have a week’s worth of Pym related posts and links. And lots of prizes. Books, bags, teabag holders…

Have you ever had to create an index?
The history of St. Elizabeths Hospital that I have spent a year writing for my job is so close to done I can taste it. I decided that it couldn’t be worth its weight in digital 0s and 1s if it didn’t have an index. Not only does it behoove a work of non-fiction to have one, but I like the thought of putting some obscure names that I plucked out of millions of pages of archival material out into the cybersphere. Who knows who might find that useful. Maybe someone searching for their ancestors will stumble upon the fact that they were once fired from St. Es, or led a staff rebellion there, or ran the prosthetic limb shop. You just don’t know. At any rate, creating an index is kind of fun and plenty tedious.  Still, it almost done and should be online around mid-month.

Lucy’s version of TV
There is a hole in the fence between our yard and the neighbor’s yard. Sometimes Lucy gets transfixed with whatever she sees on the other side and will sit for an hour just staring.