What’s on your bedside table?

 

The Fussy Librarian is a subscription website with book news and reviews for readers and authors. I really like the name because I’m beginning to feel like the fussy reader. In the last couple months, I’ve started and abandoned more books than I’ve finished, and that’s totally not like me. I longed for a book that would grab my imagination and not let go, something that I rushed back to and that kept me up too late at night.

Of two books that are currently on my Kindle, half finished, one is a novel based on the life of a famous twentieth-century food journalist. I’ve read some of her writing and come away with the sense of a life boldly lived, full of almost hedonistic pleasure that was not limited to food alone. The first pages of the book swept me in, promising the same kind of fictional adventure. But, then, after one bold move, the protagonist becomes this unsure, introspective person, always questioning, always wondering what’s going to happen. Seems like her joy in life was suspended. I confess that I put it down before I was halfway through.

The other is a fictional account of the family who owned and ran a longtime restaurant in Chicago. I have just enough restaurant experience in a small family café that I thought it would ring a lot of bells for me. Instead, I was once again mired in the various characters’ introspective meanderings. One chapter rang the familiar bell of all that can go wrong and all that people complain about in restaurants. Otherwise it was all family stuff—the gay son who longs to be part of a couple, the granddaughter back from New York to pick up her share of family responsibility, the matriarch that no one can please.

I had enough of other peoples’ angst. I longed for a book that would carry me away. Usually I read contemporary fiction, mostly traditional mysteries. I’m just not interested in the Roman period or monks in old English monasteries in the fourteenth century. And I’m definitely not interested in the Regency period (early nineteenth century England), with its cultured and refined upper crust and extreme poverty in everyone else. Think Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Keats, William Blake. And also think extreme rules of social behavior.

So what am I reading? Who could resist a book titled, The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (by Alison Goodman)? It’s not really a mystery though there are plenty of tense moments and illegal acts, and it’s not really a romance, though there’s an unusual touch of that too. I’d call it a Regency romp. And I am really caught up by the ladies who dance the quadrille and sip champagne while gossiping far into the night.

Lady Julia Colebrook, petite and ladylike, is only half successful in reining in her fraternal twin, Lady Augusta (Gus). The twins are forty-two years old and unmarried, which makes them an anomaly in Regency society with its strict rules of etiquette. Searching for a way to lessen Julia’s grief for her fiancé, killed in a horseback accident, Gus decides they will rescue women in difficult situations in a society where men have all the power and rights. With relative ease, they repossess love letters written by their friend Lady Charlotte to an unscrupulous lover. But things get complicated when they determine to rescue a woman being slowly killed with laudanum by her husband and, along the way, are beset by a highwayman who turns out to be a disgraced nobleman—and, in Gus’ eye, devilishly attractive. Julia is aghast. One problem follows another, including the disapproval of their younger brother now in charge of them since he inherited the family title and property.

Moments of real, nail-biting tension and the threat of violence are relieved by some hilarious scenes, and the whole things is a fiercely feminist statement about a society where woman have no rights.

Who knows? I may add mor Regency titles to my TBR (to be read) stick. If I can find another heroine like Gus ….What’s on your bedside table?

The Fussy Librarian is a subscription website with book news and reviews for readers and authors. I really like the name because I’m beginning to feel like the fussy reader. In the last couple months, I’ve started and abandoned more books than I’ve finished, and that’s totally not like me. I longed for a book that would grab my imagination and not let go, something that I rushed back to and that kept me up too late at night.

Of two books that are currently on my Kindle, half finished, one is a novel based on the life of a famous twentieth-century food journalist. I’ve read some of her writing and come away with the sense of a life boldly lived, full of almost hedonistic pleasure that was not limited to food alone. The first pages of the book swept me in, promising the same kind of fictional adventure. But, then, after one bold move, the protagonist becomes this unsure, introspective person, always questioning, always wondering what’s going to happen. Seems like her joy in life was suspended. I confess that I put it down before I was halfway through.

The other is a fictional account of the family who owned and ran a longtime restaurant in Chicago. I have just enough restaurant experience in a small family café that I thought it would ring a lot of bells for me. Instead, I was once again mired in the various characters’ introspective meanderings. One chapter rang the familiar bell of all that can go wrong and all that people complain about in restaurants. Otherwise it was all family stuff—the gay son who longs to be part of a couple, the granddaughter back from New York to pick up her share of family responsibility, the matriarch that no one can please.

I had enough of other peoples’ angst. I longed for a book that would carry me away. Usually I read contemporary fiction, mostly traditional mysteries. I’m just not interested in the Roman period or monks in old English monasteries in the fourteenth century. And I’m definitely not interested in the Regency period (early nineteenth century England), with its cultured and refined upper crust and extreme poverty in everyone else. Think Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, Keats, William Blake. And also think extreme rules of social behavior.

So what am I reading? Who could resist a book titled, The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (by Alison Goodman)? It’s not really a mystery though there are plenty of tense moments and illegal acts, and it’s not really a romance, though there’s an unusual touch of that too. I’d call it a Regency romp. And I am really caught up by the ladies who dance the quadrille and sip champagne while gossiping far into the night.

Lady Julia Colebrook, petite and ladylike, is only half successful in reining in her fraternal twin, Lady Augusta (Gus). The twins are forty-two years old and unmarried, which makes them an anomaly in Regency society with its strict rules of etiquette. Searching for a way to lessen Julia’s grief for her fiancé, killed in a horseback accident, Gus decides they will rescue women in difficult situations in a society where men have all the power and rights. With relative ease, they repossess love letters written by their friend Lady Charlotte to an unscrupulous lover. But things get complicated when they determine to rescue a woman being slowly killed with laudanum by her husband and, along the way, are beset by a highwayman who turns out to be a disgraced nobleman—and, in Gus’ eye, devilishly attractive. Julia is aghast. One problem follows another, including the disapproval of their younger brother now in charge of them since he inherited the family title and property.

Moments of real, nail-biting tension and the threat of violence are relieved by some hilarious scenes, and the whole things is a fiercely feminist statement about a society where woman have no rights.

Who knows? I may add mor Regency titles to my TBR (to be read) stick. If I can find another heroine like Gus ….