Fading Memories

The final installment of the four volume series of The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers is a relatively slim, but very attractive book. It contains both My Edwardian Childhood and Cat O'Mary. The first was an abortive attempt at memoirs; the second an abortive attempt at a 'straight' literary novel. This book contains a very worthwile preface by Christopher Dean, the Chairman of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, and an insightful introduction by Barbara Reynolds, who has worked with DLS on the translation of Dante and who has edited the other volumes of letters.

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It's Lent, and I thought I'd give this book another try. And again I foundered.

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Piccadilly Jim is one of the early Wodehouses; and also a very fine title. That the book failed to grab me this re-reading has everything to do with being tired out with flue, rather overwrought with family matters and shaken by being within two weeks of losing my job, and not with the excellent work of Plum.

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Down with flu, I tend to grab something easy, something accessible. Nobody will argue that 1632 is a masterwork. Its prose is ordinary, but racy. The premises are questionable. The mathematics suck. But it's a rousing, fast-paced read for all that.

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Joy in the Morning is one of the perfect pearls Wodehouse has given the world. I was given my copy by Adrian Morgan's mother, when they made a stop with us when they toured Europe.

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The United States might — arrogantly — assume hegemony over the world, thinking it is the richest state, the last superpower, a nation with a manifest destiny, forget that the rest of the world pays it five hundred billion dollars a year, making them the best paid mercenaries in history, they still do not know what war is, what occupation is.

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A fresh an fun read about a ferocious battle.

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To Say Nothing of the Dog has been described to me as Connie Willis' homage to my favourite authors: P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy L. Sayers, and also, of course, to Jerome K. Jerome, of whom I haven't read anything yet. See reading list, though..

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Striding Folly is the last collection of Lord Peter Wimsey short stories. As a collection, it wasn't published during Dorothy L. Sayers lifetime; it is copyright by Anthony Fleming, her son, and its meager pagecount is eked out by a horrible introduction by Janet Hitchman whose main criticism of DLS is that neither she nor Harriet Vane conformed to her (Janet's) ideas on what is good clothes sense. I feel that Janet Hitchmen is more like the Helen, Duchess of Denver than she knows herself...

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I there's one book I reread and reread, it's Busman's honeymoon. Ostensibly a murder mystery, but in fact a love story with detective interruptions, I first encountered it when I was courting Irina. This is significant, because I feel that I've learnt a lot about the metier d'époux from the Wimsey-Vane marriage tribulations. And whenever I feel a certain book is not soothing enough, I do not fall back to the Looking Glass, but to Busman's Honeymoon.

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David Liss's second novel was so spanking new that the bookshop where I bought it (Atheneum in Amsterdam) couldn't find it in their computers. I bought it because I was intrigued by the first few pages I read, and by the what the blurb uncovered about the plot. Was it a good buy?

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