A somewhat random set of recent reads:
31. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Life and Legacy of Great Britain's Most Favoured Poet Laureate, by Charles Rivers eds
I feel like I've read a fair amount about the Romantics over the last few years (Byron and Shelley seem to crop up a lot) so felt I needed to balance it out with a Victorian. This was a very brief introduction and not very satisfying. The biggest surprise was Tennyson and his friend Hallam supporting a revolutionary movement to overthrow the King of Spain. Not part of my mental image of him.
32. Weird Medieval Guys, Olivia Swarthout
Takes real medieval pictures and weaves jokes around them. Not sure I needed all the jokes- I'd have liked a more straightforward narrative. Mildly diverting.
33. Mona of the Manor, Armistead Maupin
When I think of Tales of the City, I think of San Francisco in the 1970s and the 1980s. The early books felt as if they were riding the zeitgeist - the joy of gay liberation, and the horrors of losing beloved young men to AIDS. This instalment takes place in England and was published this year, although the setting is still the 1980s. Some of the original power is lost by the fact that it's now so far away in time, although there are some comments about transphobia that feel addressed to current debates. The plotting is oddly paced, with a couple of dramatic events dispatched in a paragraph or two. Not a literary triumph, but I have some lingering affection for the characters, and there's still that endearing warm-heartedness.
34. With Bold Knife and Fork, M K Fisher
This has been sitting at 67% on my kindle for a few years, so I finally finished it off. It's an American cookbook from the 1960s, a mixture of recipes and anecdotes from the author's life. She writes with great zest and is good company, although it's probably more a book to dip into than to read through.
35. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way, Nancy Spain
Another 1960s book, although this is by an English journalist and broadcaster, who was also an out lesbian (she lived both with her female partner and a female rally driver, as well as the partner's two sons). This was advertised as a forerunner of "Toujours Provence" genre, as she buys some land in Greece and tries to build a house. That's only about half the book - we also get some childhood memoir, reflections on her career, and random bits, for example about her friends in Paris. She died in her forties in a plane crash just after submitting the manuscript, which presumably curtailed the editing process. It's a bit of a mishmash, but she's an interesting woman and I have another memoir by her and a detective novel by her lined up. (She also wrote stories set in a girls' boarding school called, of course, Radcliffe Hall.....) Oh, and it appears that she was the Nancy Spain named in the song.
36. To Venice with Love, Philip Gwynne Jones
Straightforward account of the author and his wife leaving their jobs in a bank in Edinburgh to set up as English teachers in Venice. Focused on the practicalities (details of packing, trips to the recycling centre, how they moved their boxes) rather than misty-eyed accounts of the beauty of La Serenissima. I've got springtime itchy feet (a bit ahead of Chaucer's folk who longen to goon on pilgrimages in April. Global warming, possibly).