50 books for 2005 | #4 & 5
Here's the thing I've discovered about moving: very very hard to stick with a serious read at the same time. In all the craziness, it was hard to pick up a book, much less spend a nice afternoon with one. (How utterly sad is that?) I must have started five different books and put them all down for one reason or another. The only two books I managed to *finish* in their entirety were fluff of the extremely ooey-gooey variety.
Book #4 was The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, and despite its high ridiculousness and anachronisms, was quite fun. I suppose I consider a guilty pleasure of the highest kind considering my high school lust object was Sir Percy Blakeney aka the Scarlet Pimpernel. The premise of the novel is actually very clever and refreshing: it surmises that Blakeney was not a character of fiction but of history, and that involved in similar exploits of fighting the French were two other Englishman: the Purple Gentian, aka Lord Richard Selwick, Percy's neighbor and one of the novel's heroes, and the mysterious Pink Carnation, whose real identity is the subject of a dissertation of an American lass living in London. The book goes back and forth between manuscripts detailing the Purple Gentian's exploits and the modern-day researcher, who has the beginnings of a very Darcy-Elizabeth romance with the ancestor of Selwick (a very underdeveloped sub-plot, sadly). I know I will be hunting down the sequel when it comes out, that's for sure.
Book #5 is the kind of insidious fluff that one even hates to admit that they've read, but there it is: The Water Nymph, which by the way, features neither nymphs nor water prominently enough to make any sense as the title. I picked it up because I vaguely remember liking The Stargazer in high school... and reading this was a reminder of exactly how naive and romantically silly I was in high school. You find these things in the mystery section of the library, or shelved amongst the general or historical fiction, and they utterly don't belong there. Anyway, "Nymph" is practically a re-hash of "Stargazer" with a change of setting. Man meets Girl With Dead Body. Man and Girl both have Very Important Reasons for finding out why Dead Person is Dead. Man and Girl Detest and Cannot Trust one another, but must Work Together to Solve Mystery. While so doing, they Fall in Love and Have Sex Many Times (or vice versa). Her writing style is genuinely funny-- she manages to get quite a few quips in as the supporting players in her books tend to be hysterical-- which wouldn't be so bad if everything else wasn't so laughably preposterous.
Ah well, it was a cleansing of the palette, so to speak. Armed with my new library card, I have a short stack next to all those half-started tomes and hopefully will be able to get to them soon.
Book #4 was The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, and despite its high ridiculousness and anachronisms, was quite fun. I suppose I consider a guilty pleasure of the highest kind considering my high school lust object was Sir Percy Blakeney aka the Scarlet Pimpernel. The premise of the novel is actually very clever and refreshing: it surmises that Blakeney was not a character of fiction but of history, and that involved in similar exploits of fighting the French were two other Englishman: the Purple Gentian, aka Lord Richard Selwick, Percy's neighbor and one of the novel's heroes, and the mysterious Pink Carnation, whose real identity is the subject of a dissertation of an American lass living in London. The book goes back and forth between manuscripts detailing the Purple Gentian's exploits and the modern-day researcher, who has the beginnings of a very Darcy-Elizabeth romance with the ancestor of Selwick (a very underdeveloped sub-plot, sadly). I know I will be hunting down the sequel when it comes out, that's for sure.
Book #5 is the kind of insidious fluff that one even hates to admit that they've read, but there it is: The Water Nymph, which by the way, features neither nymphs nor water prominently enough to make any sense as the title. I picked it up because I vaguely remember liking The Stargazer in high school... and reading this was a reminder of exactly how naive and romantically silly I was in high school. You find these things in the mystery section of the library, or shelved amongst the general or historical fiction, and they utterly don't belong there. Anyway, "Nymph" is practically a re-hash of "Stargazer" with a change of setting. Man meets Girl With Dead Body. Man and Girl both have Very Important Reasons for finding out why Dead Person is Dead. Man and Girl Detest and Cannot Trust one another, but must Work Together to Solve Mystery. While so doing, they Fall in Love and Have Sex Many Times (or vice versa). Her writing style is genuinely funny-- she manages to get quite a few quips in as the supporting players in her books tend to be hysterical-- which wouldn't be so bad if everything else wasn't so laughably preposterous.
Ah well, it was a cleansing of the palette, so to speak. Armed with my new library card, I have a short stack next to all those half-started tomes and hopefully will be able to get to them soon.
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