The other sign for the end of summer: Back to School. My MA restarts today, although I have spent the last couple of weeks making a start on all the Heyer-related essays, biographies and commentaries, as well as more general, hopefully related, reading, I can find.
And reading the actual novels my current train of thought is pursuing: An Infamous Army and The Spanish Bride, with a possible detour into A Civil Contract. Maybe with Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Waterloo thrown in for good measure. Probably depends on the exact research question I come up with for the whole thing. I keep thinking of new ways of connecting various of Heyer's novels, which doesn't help.
Most of the peripheral stuff I've been reading has not concerned the more military novels. Mostly it's been about the romances, and a fair amount of it has caused furious mutterings, not always under my breath. And lots of furious scribbling in the margins. So cathartic!
But the best thing about choosing Heyer to write about this year is that it gives me a reason, if such a thing is necessary (permission is probably closer to the mark), to reread all my beloved Heyers. And read the handful which I have inexplicably missed over the years. So upsetting! But it's all in the name of education. Or something. I've already worked my way through a collection of her contemporary short-stories I'd not read before.
It'll keep me busy for the next year or so: there's enough for one a week, plus a couple of extra weeks, covering the medieval period right up to the 1950s. Because the other thing I've found over the summer is that, while I might not really like writing about crafting, I quite enjoyed writing about the books I read, even the ones I didn't really like.
I've attempted to write about books in the past, but I think where I've fallen down has been in trying to write about books I didn't really have any feelings for. I didn't hate them; I didn't particularly love them; they were all right to pass the time. They were just nice. And there's nothing wrong with that, except that, like with the simple cards I make, it gets a bit boring to write about the "3-star" sorts of books. There's nothing much to say.
Of course, I might begin to have this problem with Heyer, as I work my way through them all, except I don't really use a star-system for books. Perhaps, because I'll be rereading so many of them, it will be easier to look at the details, and not simply the boy-meets-girl storyline (which, if you ask me, is a very simplistic way of looking at Heyer's romances). But then, Heyer wrote in several genres and historical periods, not just the Regency romances, so hopefully that will help avoid any same-ness that might arise from reading them back-to-back.
I shall aim to read one a week, although I will probably give myself a week off each month, to write about something else. The complete list can be found here, with links added to their specific posts as I read and write about them, and (affiliate) links to a bookshop if you wish to read along with me (other bookshops/formats available).
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