Currently Reading #3
Still in the Golden Age
Hi, friends,
I had a strangely productive morning—I went to the grocery store and did laundry, brought out the compost and brought wood in, and now I’m waiting on some bread to rise and for a huge batch of minestrone to finish up. So I’m suddenly satisfyingly exhausted, curled up by the woodstove—with Lemon at my feet—and reading yet another John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson novel: The third book in the Sir Henry Merrivale series, The White Priory Murders.
What prompted me to check in with you is this: I keep getting so much more emotionally engaged in these than I expect to? And even odder than that, I keep getting so much more emotionally engaged than I even realize until I LITERALLY GASP at a particular reveal, which is what just happened to me at the halfway mark in this one. I love that.
This one, like the others I’ve read, features a light romance:
He leaned forward suddenly and took her by the shoulders. He said:
‘I’m very fond of ghost stories and the morbid kind. That’s because I’ve never run up against anything really morbid in my own life. But you’re not to get frightened by a lot of damned shadows and nonsense, do you hear? You’ve had too much of it.’
‘I say, what on earth—’
‘What you need is to walk out of this forsaken house with its cold hot-water pitchers and its cockeyed mirrors and its moth-eaten ghosts. You need to make straight for London or Paris, preferably Paris, and fly off on a bender that would knock the unholy watchsprings out of anything you’d ever imagined. You need to wallow in dressmakers’ shops and red-plush hotels; you need to hear bands and have a dizzy love-affair and get sozzled in every bar round the Place de Clichy; you need to see the Chinese lanterns on the lake in the Bois, and dance at the Chateau de Madrid in a postage-stamp of a dress, and see the chafing dishes steam and the colour of Burgundy while you’re jammed up in a crazy little room that’s served the best in the world for two hundred years. You need to see the chestnut-trees coming out in spring on the Champs Élysées, and taste onion soup down in the markets by the river when it’s just getting daylight; you need—’
He had pitched diplomacy clear out of the window. He had got up and was waving one arm during the fervour of the moment. Now the balloon collapsed as he realized he must be making a fool of himself. He saw again the bleak room, the windows looking out on snow. But he was surprised at the vividness and intensity of Katharine Bohun’s face. She looked up at him.
Phew. If this romance doesn’t work out, John Dickson Carr and I will be in a Serious Fight.
More soon,
Leila
PS. While I was writing this, I got distracted halfway through when I spotted a somewhat agitated crow over in a tree near our compost pile. I snuck over to a different window, and realized that there was a hawk—I think it was a sharp-shinned, but don’t quote me on that because I am utter garbage at identifying raptors—just hanging out on our garden fence, keeping an eye on our bird feeders. Yikes. I feel like we might have a local murder mystery on our hands very soon: Watch out, little goldfinches!
I LOVE a book that makes me react OUT LOUD. That's sheer joy, that is - and rare! I'm so glad you're finding that.
Now I feel like I really ought to finish um, something, what with it being A Day Of Productivity and all. But... we'll see. California is so cold right now it's giving me ALL THE EXCUSES to make special friends with the couch and blankets and books. Meanwhile, I'm terrible at raptors too; we either have a sharp-shinned or an American kestrel - either way it's wee but fierce looking and makes a lot of alarming shrilling noises while staring fixedly at the bird feeder...