Ooh, good to know! Also have that in my TBR but only as a sample so switching to audiobook might work out well for me

I just finished A Desolation Called Peace and dear lord I remember NOTHING from A Memory Called Empire but the good news is that Desolation seems to work fine as a standalone novel. One of these days I will have to go back and read them both one after the other and no doubt experience that universe very differently.

That's good to know, -t. I am on the waitlist at the library. I think I remember things moderately well, but I've read a lot of books recently that seem to have similar elements.

I finished The Doctors Blackwell yesterday (background reading for a project that will come together...eventually...but overall a worthwhile biography).

I finished The Hollow Places today.

I...did less work today than I probably should have. I didn't read any last night, as I think Kingfisher horror books are daytime reading for me. Not sure they're exactly horror, but for sure creepy in a way that I expect will stick, and might keep me up if I read them at night. I hope she keeps up this loose series of sequel/rewrites of hundred-year-old stories.

Those are daytime only books for me, too.

Lois McMaster Bujold has a new Penric (and Desdemona) story out.

It's a novel! I was pleasantly surprised to have a little longer with this one

It seemed to be longer, but it's hard for me to tell on an e-reader. Whatever - more Penric! more Desdemona!

It says so on the cover, so I am more confident in my assertion than I probably would be otherwise

I have read The Woman in White and The Moonstone and they are both pretty good! I'm not sure why expected them not to be except I have a general suspicion of Victorian literature (and I think I was confusing Wilkie Collins with H Rider Haggard, although my opinion of Haggard is likewise baseless as I haven't read his stuff either). Watched the recent adaptations as well and they were both fine, I guess? They made choices I disagree with but not terribly egregious ones (well, adding a whole extra character to The Woman in White irritated me a lot). The costuming in the 2018 The Moonstone is quite enjoyable.

I do wish the romantic triangle in The Moonstone wasn't made up entirely of cousins. I didn't like 'shipping cousins in Mansfield Park and I don't like it here. But the mystery is quite good, full of shocking reversals and startling reveals that make sense of what's going on rather than just being surprising. And I enjoy the framing device used in each, where the story is told in narratives from various characters that have been gathered up by one of the characters. I like a good framing device - the business in The Handmaid's Tale where the story has been transcribed from unlabelled cassette tapes and had to be arranged chronologically based on internal clues made a big impression on me. That said, I feel that both adaptations were led astray by attempts to preserve some semblance of the frame in translating the story to film.

Definitely good additions to my Gentleman Detective project, especially The Moonstone which has both a professional police detective and an amateur gentleman with less expertise but more desperation. I have to wonder what it means that in what is widely regarded as the first detective novel in the English language the Sergeant says "It's only in books that the officers of the detective force are superior to the weakness of making a mistake". I expect I'll be thinking about that for a while.

I think I have to go back and read Bleak House and maybe The Mystery of Edwin Drood. And some story by E T A Hoffman I came across, but I was already going to do that. At least that postpones deciding what I'm going to do about Agatha Christie...

I read The Moonstone (many, many years ago) and watched a PBS dramatization not too long ago. I've seen a couple of dramatizations of The Woman in White, although I don't think I ever read the book. I did - in my misspent teenage years - read some H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines and She). Even back then, I think I could realize that it was racist. And sexist, probably. It was a long time ago.

I read a lot of my father's books - the Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and E.E. Smith, among others. Also SF magazines (I remember reading Dune when it came out as a serial). I think I also got through most if not all of Agatha Christie, as well as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and, well, a lot of stuff.