rosanicus

It's a chunky one this week! I missed Wednesday last and decided I'd do a rollover, lottery style, rather than a late post and then a sparse offering. 

What I've Just Finished Reading

All Systems Red & Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

Swordheart by T Kingfisher

• Paladin's Grace
  • Stephen and Grace OTP forever!!! I love slightly esoteric careers for romance novel protagonists - my all-time fave being Rowley the taxidermist from An Unseen Attraction by KJ Charles - so Grace the perfumier and Stephen the paladin of a dead god were extreme catnip to me. The ongoing intrigue surrounding Marguerite and the attempted assassination of the prince were really fun, and I loved getting more insight into the Temple of the White Rat, especially Bishop Beartongue, who is an icon. I enjoyed the glimpses of the wider group of paladins, which is of course a staple of the romance genre - introducing potential leads for future books in the series.  All around a very fun read - OH MY GOD, forgot to mention the KNITTING!!!! Stephen the recreational knitter is such a perfect character beat and I love it.
• Paladin's Strength
  • Another fun one. I enjoyed Grace more, I think because the plot was more inherently interesting to me, but Strength had the advantage of a group of nuns who turn into bears so it all came out in the wash. Clara is a delightful woman and I think Istvhan just about deserves her, she's so wonderfully herself in every way. I loved how tortured Istvhan was about his reactions to her, and the ongoing misunderstanding about it was actually interesting rather than infuriating. The entire sequence in the colosseum is just excellent, and I adored the way that Istvhan was willing to reorient his goals to support Clara in finding the other sisters of St Ursa. 
• Paladin's Hope
  • MY FAVOURITE! To be the predictable lesbian, I do prefer same sex romance novels to het ones, so while I enjoyed the previous two and the overall attitude of acceptance and background radiation levels of queerness, it just didn't hit as hard as Piper and Galen fucking in an ancient underground clockwork death maze. I loved Piper's character, and his wonderworking reminded me so strongly of Thara Celehar from The Cemeteries of Amalo series that I fell immediately in fondness with him as soon as it was mentioned. He's such a good foil for Galen, traumatised and raw still from the death of the Saint, and I loved how they respected each other straight away and were able to balance one another's flaws as the book progressed. I think one of the other reasons this was my favourite was the prominence of Earstripe the gnole, another all timer! Gnoles are everything to me. I think it's the dormant Reepicheep obsession lying within my soul.
• Paladin's Faith
  • This one is going to be less effusive. I like Marguerite a lot, so I was excited to read a book from her POV, but my GOD did this one drag on. On my Kobo this was over 800 pages and it really felt it - I took a short break between finishing Hope and beginning this, so I don't think it was romance fatigue, I just found it so hard to care about Shane. I think it's because his name is Shane, which I found completely incongruous every time it appeared, which - given he's the love interest - was frequently. It wasn't a bad book, and if you enjoy the idea of a romance novel which ends with a drawn out siege on a demon cult then feel free to try it. But I missed Galen and Piper, bundled off on a noble quest off page and never appearing again, and without a fifth book the cliffhanger ending was more annoying than intriguing.
• FINAL POINT: I was really annoyed that Hope is only 300 pages (I checked Goodreads!) while the others are, respectively, 366, 445 and 464(!) pages. While I was reading it I noticed that the sex seemed less detailed so I reckon that's probably most of it (because oh my god, the M/F couples have a lot of very detailed sex) but I do feel a bit cheated since it was my favourite and it's so much shorter :(

Enemies to Lovers by Aster Glenn Gray

Briarley by Aster Glenn Gray

Deck the Halls with Secret Agents by Aster Glenn Gray


Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver (again!)

What I'm Reading Now

Rogue Protocol is next up in Murderbot, so I'm technically on page one of that. Beyond that I've got so many books on my technically-currently-reading pile that I simply could not list them all. One day I'll cut them down - my honeymoon is in two weeks, so hopefully that'll help.

What I'm Going To Read Next

I need to stop putting books in this section because it is almost 100% of the time a guarantee that I won't be reading it any time soon! Nevertheless, I will say that I've still got Honeytrap and The Sleeping Soldier to read, so that's a fairly safe bet in the near future.

Thought I wasn't going to get much in for this and then I had an insanely good evening yesterday.

What I've Just Finished Reading

• Buried: An alternative history of the first millenium in Britain by Professor Alice Roberts
  
  • I bought this after Goodreads pushed my brother's partner's review of it onto my timeline despite the review being several years old. It's an excellent read and I have NO regrets - such a thoughtful and kind examination of historical burial practices, the limitations of archaeology, and the ongoing quest to discover exactly what happened on this little island after the fall of Rome. The second chapter is quite heavy going - it's about infant burials - but the author is upfront about it and even invites you to skip it, which I thought was nice. I did read it though because I wanted to learn more about it and ended up with lots of info about surgical abortions in the Roman era, which was COOL. Honestly, a lot of the info here was just cool to me, I love archaeology and grew up watching Time Team obsessively.
• Donut Squad: TAKE OVER THE WORLD by Neill Cameron
  • The boys in my class won't stop going on about this so when I saw it half-price at Waterstone's I picked it up (along with an enamel pin of Anxiety Donut, I'm not made of stone) and it is, irritatingly, really funny. It has the vibe of Beano or the Bash Street Kids, which makes sense since it's a compilation of strips from the kids' magazine The Phoenix. The strips are all four panels centering on a particular character or plotline (either world domination by the Donut Squad or the evil machinations of their enemies the Bagel Battalion) and they are genuinely very good. My favourite doughnuts are Sprunky the unpredictable (who does things like write communist propaganda on the walls of Buckingham Palace) and Chalky (the ghost of a murdered Victorian doughnut). It's very silly and it only took about forty minutes to read. 
• Pride by Eric Huang
  • This one was another impulse buy at Waterstone's. It's a picture book about going to Pride as a child with your gay parents, and I loved it. So sweet and gentle in a way which will definitely not appeal to the boys in my class but that's fine, I'll lend it to the Reception teacher who was on our Sherlock Homos quiz team last term. I love children's books which deal with queer identity in this matter of fact way, it gives one a bit of hope.
• Biggles Takes It Rough by W.E. Johns
  • Reviewed here!
• What it was like to be an Ancient Maya by David Long
  • Research for next term's History topic and also the only book I could find at Waterstone's about the Maya. The book was simple and easy to follow, being a Barrington Stoke title, and I would describe it as largely inoffensive. It's an underrepresented period in children's books on this side of the Atlantic, abandoned in favour of the more dramatic and bloodthirsty representations of the Aztecs and Inca (I am not immune to the Pachacuti song from Horrible Histories). I learned just enough to discover that the scheme the school buys into has, once again, been massively reductive and occasionally outright incorrect. Great!

What I'm Reading Now

STILL Blood on Satan's Claw, I promise I'm reading it on and off it's just heavy going while we wait for the teens to get on with the rituals.

What I'm Going To Read Next

I plucked Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane off my bookshelf this morning and am very excited to get into it! I fucking love Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places is one of my favourite books ever.

The parents at school very kindly gifted my WIFE and I a Foyles gift card as a wedding gift (we're married) (it's great), and with it I bought several books. One such book is the Penguin Weird Fiction anthology, which I miraculously read after a horrible reading dry spell.

My taste in short stories is definitely suited to this book. There's a good mix of authors in here, stories I've heard of and a few I hadn't. In the tradition of my old Goodreads reviews I will therefore present a power ranking, least favourite to most, because I enjoy putting my opinion on the Internet.

DNQ: A Wicked Voice by Vernon Lee
The only story I completely bounced off. Something about the narrative voice really annoyed me and I couldn't get past it :( Maybe one day!

8. The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft
This is my first Lovecraft story and honestly I'm disappointed by how sane the narrator remains for the whole thing. The racism was more intertwined with the narrative than I expected which gave the whole thing an unpleasant aftertaste, unsurprisingly. I enjoyed the epistolary elements though, and it's nice to have a reference point for all the Lovecraftian media made in response.

7. Where Their Fire is Not Quenched by May Sinclair
I think this one is about the perils of retreating into piety after treating other people badly and/or being sinful, which is less effective as someone living in 2025 who thinks Oscar Wade sounds like a bit of a cunt. The protagonist's growing terror and disorientation was effective though, and I loved the gut punch of an ending.

6. Kerfol by Edith Wharton
Would've enjoyed this more if it went full Martin's Close with the historical part of the narrative. The ideas behind this were more interesting than the execution, I think, but I did like the ideas!

5. The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe
It's dramatic, it's hard to parse, it's got horribly long sentences and obvious social commentary. It's got literal death gatecrashing a party to say Fuck The Rich. It's a great time and I'm glad I read it - probably my favourite Poe I've read yet, although Amontillado is obviously close at heel.

4. The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs
I mean obviously this one is a banger. I've read it several times and every time I'm struck by how genuine the bond of love is between the parents and son before it's all destroyed by an understandable greed. Endlessly parodies and imitated but ultimately that last image of the open door - damn. Really good.

3. The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle
Realistically this isn't better than The Monkey's Paw but it's a speculative piece of horror sci-fi from ACD about a pilot that finds a sky jungle at 40,000 feet and then gets killed by massive sky jellyfish. So it's a yes from me, gang. I didn't realise until the pilot mentioned unscrewing his "air bag" that the aeronautics was mostly theoretical as well, so kudos to ACD for some very plausible technobabble.

2. Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster
HAUNTED FUR BOA. This is an oversimplification but it's true, so. I am yet to read Flight of the Heron despite a combination of desire and motivation so thus is my first Broster foray and I had a FANTASTIC time. It's such a potent mix of deserved retribution and undeserved manipulation, a real Jamesian wallop at the end with the return of A Creature and a wonderful amount of implication and subtext as to what exactly Augustine Marchant has been up to in Prague...

1. Oh, Whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad' by M.R. James (my beloved)
We all knew this was coming. I adore MRJ and this really is one of his best. It's funny in a dry and understated way, it contains many references to MRJ's hatred of golf, and it also happens to be genuinely frightening, both in its descriptions and in the way it builds that sense of unease in the environment and the things that Parkins shrugs off and the audience Just Knows is going to go badly for the poor professor. I like Parkins! I hope he and the Colonel had a lovely assignation on the links and he returned to Cambridge a better and less cynical man.

A real game of two halves this weekend! And a lot of catching up from the past month...

Starting with the bad, I finally finished reading Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. I didn't like it! Annoyingly, I was initially really excited to read it (three years ago, when I started reading...) because I'd listened to and enjoyed a few episodes of the podcast, but as a book it felt poorly structured and I really disliked the way it subconsciously draws equivalence between varying levels of 'badness', as if being a Nazi and being mildly kinky are equally worthy of inclusion in this book's bloated, YFIP list-esque chapters. Not a fan.

In the Biggles world, I read Sergeant Bigglesworth, C.I.D., Biggles' Second Case, Biggles of the Interpol and Biggles in the Baltic. I really enjoyed them all, with Interpol being probably the least favourite due to inconsistency between stories, and my favourite being Baltic. I'd been putting it off due to the Evil vS, but it's a really cracking adventure and features such breathtaking insane thrills that I just can't resist. The bit at the end where Raymond admits that everyone thought they'd be dead in a day was truly fantastic, Biggles was SO CROSS. I hope they got at least a few days to unwind after this, but knowing Biggles he probably got involved in bringing down a spy ring while trying to walk in the park.

CID and Second Case were fun adventures as well. I love Bertie becoming an integrated member of &Co, I really do love him, and the drama and whump potential was really good stuff for my id. I do wish the polar bears had been given a bit more play, but to be fair I always feel this way about giant animals in Biggles books. I admit it's been long enough now since I read them that I only have faint memory of the actual plot, but the huge pit of Chekov's land mines was probably the highlight, especially when they vaporised a Nazi.

Finally, I read Hungerstone by Kat Dunn, which was excellent. It pushed me past two of my misgivings, which are that I usually bounce off first person POV (with the notable exception of Rivers of London, and now this!) and also that I haven't always enjoyed ambiguity in fiction. But here it is: an ambiguous gothic novel in the first person which had me up past midnight to finish it. Lenore is a fantastic protagonist, closed off and traumatised and working so very very hard to win a game rigged against her. The point where she snaps is built up to with such fantastic tension that the pay-off had me actually clapping in delight. The structure where nearly every chapter ends with a hook for the next also worked extremely well, to the point I was turning to my partner basically every chapter to say 'You won't BELIEVE what happened NOW'. Extremely readable, slightly haunting, highly recommended.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Picture the scene. I am on Faded Page, trying to find a reference in a Gimlet book so I can write absolute filth with moderate canon accuracy. While looking for said Gimlet, I am distracted by the cover of a book on the front page of the site which has an aeroplane on it.



Eight days later, I have read seven books.

The Ted Scott Flying Stories are a collection of 20 books published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate between 1927 and 1943. They are perhaps the most formulaic books I've ever read while also being patently insane by turns, and I am becoming convinced that the homoerotic subtext was actually intentional on the part of at least one of the ghost-writers, because I can't believe it could be by accident.

Ted Scott begins the series as a young man with a thirst for aviation but no money to learn. By the end of the first book (Over the Ocean to Paris) he is the most famous pilot in the world, and a national hero, all because he met a young millionaire (Walter Hapworth) who - within about six hours of meeting him - decided he NEEDED to pay for his flight training, and then later for all the expenses related to attempting the first ever transatlantic flight, which amounted to about thirty thousand dollars. By the fourth book he has learnt to fly so that he can go with Ted on long distance flights, alone, and by the fifth book Ted is calling him by his first name. The WEJ Discord has been witness to my ongoing breakdown over this, which started as kind of a joke and is now firmly embedded as canon in my heart.



Every book opens with a summary of the events of the entire series, which is useful because so far one of them has been so racist I actually gasped and I wouldn't wish that on anyone (Rescued in the Clouds, which is a shame because it also features Ted rescuing two pilots in midair from a burning plane). Ted is a charming enough protagonist on his own, modest to a fault and generally baffled by how much attention he gets for being The Best Pilot On Earth. I think this is probably due to the authors trying to set him up as a role model for the young male audience while also getting in some American Exceptionalism (there are a few wincingly earnest speeches about how America is The Best Nation and should therefore Win At Aviation) but it makes it much easier to root for him than heroes in other contemporary series from the syndicate, which I've looked through and immediately had to turn away from due to Bad.

I have thus far read the first seven books and can comfortably class these books as Easy Reads. They are somewhere sub-Biggles in complexity and have a sort of breathless plotting style which is admittedly starting to grate at my nerves, especially with regard to Sudden Fog and Dangerous Storms, and since the author was never a pilot there is also a paucity of interesting details about flying which weren't directly plagiarised from contemporary magazines. The real draw is, of course, the slash potential.
( A selection of quotes which are fun both in and out of context ) 

What I've Just Finished Reading

Gimlet Mops Up, The Ravensdale Mystery and All's Fair, all by W.E. Johns (as is to be expected at this point. Mops Up was a very enjoyable tale, and once again delivered Gimlet whump in spades - I think WEJ just enjoys hitting him over the head from time to time and honestly I can't blame him (sorry Gimlet, ILU really!!). The plot moved along at a fair clip and there was a decent amount of action as well as a bit of espionage with Cub's trip to the church. Speaking of, the chapter title 'Cub Goes To Church' really tickled me. We also got some fun Copper and Trapper bits, although Trapper continues to be the most weakly characterised of all the cast due to his main trait being 'has a French accent, is happy to murder', as opposed to characters like Cub ('is young, happy to murder, in love with Gimlet'). Speaking of I am starting to shamefully ship Cub/Gimlet in a one-sided and hopeless way which Gimlet would be horrified to find out about. Cub goes out for a drink with Ginger and ends up trying to commiserate about age-gap crushes. Unfortunately Ginger has levelled up the relationship and has to try and conceal that fact for as long as possible.

The Werewolves were described in a suitably creepy fashion and their use of knockout gas was an effective way to incapacitate the characters in a believable way. The scene at the Lorrington Cottage Garden Show was great, and also the fact that the Lorrington Cottage Garden Show is a thing in this book I can mention brings me great joy. WEJ seems very attached to Gimlet as landed gentry trying to Do It Right, which is probably some sort of Imperialist impulse but I can't get over the idea of Gimlet, freshly scrubbed clean of Nazi blood, turning up to award a rosette for Best Lamb In Show to a rosy-cheeked child.

The Ravensdale Mystery was a delightful surprise! A girl's school story which I can happily rec to my mum, we follow Joan Scott - a previously sickly child who grew up in a colonial state (wherever did he get that idea...) - who has finally started school after years of reading books on her own. Her father is in Intelligence and her mother isn't mentioned, but one hopes that she's alive even against all the odds. Joan is a lovely lead character, so very clearly a teenager with a lack of experience in the world but still very intelligent and adventurous in a way which surprises even herself. She self-consciously thinks she doesn't have friends - especially Diana, who is described as a quintessential British schoolgirl, being attractive and very good at sports but not much for her lessons. Diana is also said to rib younger students a lot in a good natured way, which Joan objects to. Despite all this I do believe that she has a pash on Joan and her actions in the last part of this novella definitely bear it out. Joan/Diana 4ever.

Joan's adventure begins when she is hiding in a gorse bush to avoid Diana and her friend Tick, and ends up witnessing her French mistress - the only teacher she doesn't get on with, of course - emerge from Ravensdale, an area the headmistress has declared off limits for students. This kicks off a very fast-paced mystery involving German spys, secret messages and hidden passages. It's great fun, and I have no doubt it's part of a genre of WW2 story which I just haven't come across in my reading before. I would happily read a dozen more of these and honestly it did remind me a bit of Murder Most Unladylike, which is all to the good!

All's Fair was a bit rubbish.

What I'm Reading Now

Technically Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, but after a strong start for me where I read about eighty pages in a day I've completely fallen off it. I really enjoy Emily's narrative voice so I'm hoping I'll manage to re-engage with it without too much trouble. Also a Biggles Buries A Hatchet re-read, as a treat, which I believe was spurred by the point last week that a child in my class threw a shoe at me.

What I Plan To Read Next

Since Christmas is coming up, I might go back to Connie Willis's Miracle anthology of short stories, which I got off my parents but haven't read since I was about fourteen and couldn't appreciate all the nuances. Possibly also going to dive back into some of my British Library Tales of the Weird, since I have about six I haven't finished yet after a strong period with Botanical Weird and Weird Trees.

This is the first time I've had enough reading built up for this specific post format and I'm EXCITED.

What I've Just Finished Reading

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, On Zionist Literature by Ghassan Kanafani and Murder by Air by W.E. Johns.

I picked up Piranesi at the charity shop near work on Monday and then read all of it yesterday, including about sixty pages during silent reading time (which I extended much longer than usual out of a selfish desire to keep reading Piranesi... forgive me). It's such a gorgeous book, surprising nobody, and I absolutely loved the narrator and the way he engaged with the House on a religious and personal level. He's so empathetic and careful and deeply traumatised, many things I enjoy in a character, and the fact the entire book is epistolary caused me extreme joy. I knew I was going to like this one, but I'm very pleased by how much I loved it - a five star reading experience for sure.

On Zionist Literature was a very interesting text on the history of Zionist thought as viewed through the form of the novel in the Western world and beyond, from the early 1800s up to the date of publication in 1967. It came up as a PDF on Tumblr a few days ago and I thought, ooh, that looks interesting, and ended up reading it over the course of two evenings! I do think that reading it in translation made some of the author's points a little unclear, especially with how some academic terms were translated, but overall I was really engaged with it in a way that academic texts rarely draw me in. I thought the section about the early 19th century was particularly effective, although I wasn't always convinced by the author's arguments on specific texts. I'll definitely seek out more work by Kanafani, but might look up reviews to check whether the translation is more accessible.

Finally, the obligatory Johnsiverse book. Murder by Air is the third Steeley book and objectively the best plot so far. There were so many twists and turns which were always well thought out, engaging and thrilling. I really liked the Count as an antagonist and especially Helene (both of her!), another example of W.E. Johns' blase attitude towards crossdressing in the pre-war period. He engages with it as if it's the same level of disguise as, like, a false moustache, and I enjoy it!  Obviously in my heart Constantino got his egg cracked by this experience and then miraculously escaped the plane crash at the end so that she could turn over a new, transgender leaf. Fingers crossed!

What I'm Reading Now

This is always a complete crapshoot but AT PRESENT, I am working on Blood On Satan's Claw, which is the very late novelisation of one of my favourite horror films of all time. The pastor has gone on a short walk and stumbled upon the future site of some rather nasty satanic rituals, but it's clearly already a Place Where Terrible Things Happen... all mysterious and etc., I'm enjoying it but because the original film is quite atmospheric the book is relying heavily on narration and setting description, which could become quite a slog if the pace continues as it has so far.

What I Plan To Read Next

Possibly yet another crack at Biggles Follows On. I also bought a slim volume by Ernest Shackleton which I believe to be a long extract from South!, which I will dive into when I feel like reliving polar agonies but don't feel depressed enough to rewatch The Terror.

I did have to look up the punctuation for this title.

Anyway: I got a copy of this in an Oxfam Bookshop in Henley-on-Thames and delighted the cashier by doing so, which was nice. It's one of the few early books I don't own, and I got it in the blue-and-yellow Oxford University Press edition which fits in nicely with my hardbacks of Hits the Trail, Defies the Swastika AND Charter Pilot. It's also an edition which contains Keir Starmer Algy, which I will mention every time I possibly can due to my moral obligation to horrify black_bentley.



The Ruritanian romance is such a good vehicle for Bigglesian hijinks, I'm sad WEJ seemed to fall out of love with it as a subgenre during the SAP era. I know the literary world moved past it somewhat but god I just love it. If I am mistaken PLEASE tell me which Biggleses to elevate to the top of my teetering TBR! Lucrania is a feasible enough micronation and I really liked the detail of it being ringed by mountains. It's also more specifically linked to current events at the presumed time of writing (I know it was published in 1940 but it feels like it was written pre-WW2) and has some firm Stance-Holding from WEJ on anti-semitism (he is against it). For all that the representation of Simon Kretzner is not exactly stellar, I appreciate that our main man William Earl went for it. Weirdly, I read this a few days after my mum expounded on the virtues of The Chalet School in Exile, which also features characters being staunchly against anti-semitism to the extent that they have to flee the country (if I ever read Chalet School I may start here).

Obviously I cannot review this book without mentioning that it is an early von Stalhein book and therefore chock-full of cheerful homoeroticism and Spy Nonsense. I really enjoyed EvS's attitude in this book - he's flirtatious when he's confident and flirtatious when he's bluffing and even insouciant when being held at gunpoint outside his own car. I probably shouldn't just quote the entire scene in the hotel bar but - look. It's just unbelievable how much fun Biggles and EvS have in this period of canon. I will however include one quote which I feel hasn't had much play and made me CACKLE.


I still can't tell how sarcastic this is supposed to be but it is so funny to me. Erich, you like three English people and two of them are sat opposite you at this bar table. The interwar Biggles/EvS dynamic is simply delicious and I can't believe I've RUN OUT. Devastated. Throughout the book they are locked in a long distance battle of wits in which they constantly surpass, trick and outwit one another and it's just so wonderful. They are perfectly matched nemeses and I wish they would kiss about it.

( Minor spoilers! )

Overall, I had a fantastic time reading this one. Now I need to go think about Algy/EvS hatesex set at some point in his imprisonment...

On Monday last week we had Year 6 external writing moderation. We'd been preparing for it pretty much non stop for two months, and in those two months I think I might possibly have read about four pages of any book which wasn't written by an eleven year old child. And so it was with great relief that I discovered that without that sword of Damocles above my head I have managed to smash through TWO Biggleses in under a week!

Biggles Hits The Trail

My edition of this is one of the wartime dustjackets but I think it was actually printed in the early 50s. The main draw is that the text is larger so it looks like I'm read a big and worthy tome when in fact it is Biggles vs invisible radioactive monks.

Anyway, I enjoyed this! It's a very strange book, with a number of insane twists and turns which don't quite come together, but I have to admit that the sheer balls to the wall madness of it all drew me in. The initial scene at dinner with Algy and Ginger heckling Biggles is perhaps one of the greatest opening scenes in Bigglesian history, and I'll cherish it always. I also liked the way that Malty summoned them to his home to attend to Dickpa, and that I can interpret Dickpa and Malty's relationship as the sugar daddy dynamic of all time (but this time, the sugar daddy is the mid-twenties nerve case sugaring his middle aged boyfriend).

I would caution against reading this without a stronger stomach for the Oh W. E. Johns school of beleaguered sighing, though. IYKYK.

Biggles Goes To School

And on the other end of the insanity spectrum we have Biggles at Big School. I liked this well enough, especially that it had at least some continuity with The Boy Biggles, but I found that (once again) it mostly made me wail 'he's LITTLE' every time something once again happened to Biggles. He finds a father figure who seems willing to nurture him in some way who almost immediately gets shot in the chest by poachers and when he cries over it the other boys make fun of him!!! He's LITTLE!!!!!

My favourite interlude was of course the day that a pilot came to school and Biggles saw an aeroplane for the first time. And then in the same chapter he manages to save a bear from getting shot by an angry mob through the medium of kindness. BIGGLES ❤️.

Also, as a treat after all this work stress, I got myself a small friend.



He apparently had goggles once upon a time but my only evidence of that is quite a lot of perished rubber stuck to his fur and other clothes.

And so with Murder By Air staring plaintively at me each time I check my Reading Pouch (a bag I put my books/e-reader in so they don't get wet or covered in biscuit dust, chocolate stains etc), I instead powered through my new copy of Worrals Carries On in just under two days. This includes the point last night when I fell asleep on our sofa for two hours while my partner was watching House. We're on series 2.

This being my fourth Worrals, it was honestly a little strange to read about Worrals and Frecks on their first cross-channel adventure! Discovering an enemy spy by the end of chapter 1 and being discovered in the act of uncovering his deception at the start of chapter 2 really is WEJ at his pacy best, and the rest of the book barely gives any breathing room for the reader or for its poor protagonists. No wonder Worrals has a little moment at the end of the book and is solicitously given a palmful of raisins by Bill Ashton.

( Spoilers! )

In other events of the day, I read some of this on the bus home and when I first got it out my partner teacher (who was also on the bus, it was a nice coincidence) said, "Wow, that is an old book," to which I reminded him that I already told him I had SO many WW2 books for next term. Did not mention Biggles by name but at least he might be slightly prepared for the onslaught. HALF TERM STARTS NOW!!!