March 2009 book log

A somewhat tardy posting of my book log for March.

Print books:

An ARC received through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme of The Agency by Ally O'Brien. Full review here; short version, I liked it a lot and I think a lot of my friends will too, but it's not going to be to everyone's taste.

Ebooks:

Finished Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte. As gloriously gothic as ever.

Mansfield Park, by Jane Austin, which I hadn't read before. (*) Fanny is a drip, but I still couldn't stop turning the pages. Also, "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there". Loved this. Am told that a recent BBC adaption omitted the Portsmouth section as a cost-saving exercise, and am boggled. It's integral to the structure of the book, and if you drop it, large chunks of the story arc simply don't make emotional sense.
(* Or to be more accurate, I don't remember reading before. I bought an Austen omnibus back in the days when my memory was doing an impersonation of a sieve, and while I know I read most or all of the ones I hadn't already read, I remember nothing whatsoever about them from then. I know I started MP, but I don't know if I finished it.)

book log: Andre Norton: Plague ship and Voodoo Planet

Discovered a while back that there are several of Norton's books on Project Gutenberg, and promptly downloaded them via the Feedbooks site into my Cybook. Over the last couple of weeks I've read Plague Ship and Voodoo Planet, the second and third titles from the Solar Queen series.

The first two Solar Queen books were major comfort reads for me when I was a kid, so I was a little bit worried about whether Plague Ship would stand up to scrutiny [mumble] years on. But it's still enormous fun. Voodoo Planet is novella length, and one I'd only read once or twice before. Good read, although I think wouldn't have hooked me the way the first two did if I hadn't already known the characters.

I want to talk about Plague Ship in more depth, but that needs to wait until I'm a bit less tired. Maybe this weekend, but it'll be competing for time with doing some writing of my own.

Started Ralestone Luck, her first written and second published novel, once I'd finished Voodoo Planet yesterday. Completely unfamiliar to me, and the prose is not up to the standard of her later books, but it's definitely Norton's style and I'm enjoying it.