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Have a lurgy-enhanced book blog; otherwise this is never going to get done.
9. The Complaints by Ian Rankin
This is the second post-Rebus novel from Rankin. Malcolm Fox is a detective with the Complaints and Conduct Department (Scotland's version of Internal Affairs) who is asked to investigate another detective suspected of being a paedophile. The following day, Fox's sister's abusive partner winds up dead and the officer he is investigating is the lead detective on the case. From there it gets really complicated, and it turns out Fox is in turn being investigated by the Grampian Complaints department and has been set up big-time.
This is much better than Doors Open, and indeed is very good, but just doesn't push the same buttons as the Rebus series.
10. Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham
A pretty average bus-reading thriller. I started reading it before the Rankin, thinking "this guy really wants his detective to be Rebus", which was confirmed when the library delivered the Rankin when I was halfway through this. The publicity makes much of the "originality" of the mystery - the murderer is not trying to kill women, he's trying to put them into a "locked-in state" (yes, there's an episode of CSI where that happens) - but aside from that, it's not particularly original.
I'm not saying it's bad, and it does get pretty exciting towards the end.
11. Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent by Mary Laven
I read about this when it came out and thought it might be interesting, and then a couple years later![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mimmimmim gave it to me when she was gifting people with random books.
This is a study of Venetian convents in the 16th and 17th centuries. Convents in Venice were a perpetual problem. The nobility only married off a small proportion of their offspring in order to keep the population small and the wealth intact, and a large number of women with no vocation were therefore forced into convents. This became more of a problem during and after the Counter-Reformation, when reforms were initiated to make convents more "enclosed" in the light of accusations of corruption from Protestants. This was Europe-wide, but because of the demographic in Venice, especially problematic, where convents were popularly felt to be more corrupt than other places.
Despite the popular perception of Venetian convents as little better than brothels, what the author has found in the extant records is that most of the infractions of the rules of enclosure were women wanting regular human contact - friendships, families, business dealings rather than sexual scandals and some abuses of their positions by priests.
I started off being disappointed that this wasn't the quality of Within the Plantation Household, but actually it's very good and engagingly written. On one level it's a very similar book - hidden history of women in a condition that is very particular to a specific time and place.
The moral of this story is, if you give me a book and it takes me three years to get around to reading it, please do not be offended. It doesn't mean I don't care, it's just that between compulsively buying books, borrowing from the library and friends, and monthly book club obligation, it might disappear off my radar for a while.
9. The Complaints by Ian Rankin
This is the second post-Rebus novel from Rankin. Malcolm Fox is a detective with the Complaints and Conduct Department (Scotland's version of Internal Affairs) who is asked to investigate another detective suspected of being a paedophile. The following day, Fox's sister's abusive partner winds up dead and the officer he is investigating is the lead detective on the case. From there it gets really complicated, and it turns out Fox is in turn being investigated by the Grampian Complaints department and has been set up big-time.
This is much better than Doors Open, and indeed is very good, but just doesn't push the same buttons as the Rebus series.
10. Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham
A pretty average bus-reading thriller. I started reading it before the Rankin, thinking "this guy really wants his detective to be Rebus", which was confirmed when the library delivered the Rankin when I was halfway through this. The publicity makes much of the "originality" of the mystery - the murderer is not trying to kill women, he's trying to put them into a "locked-in state" (yes, there's an episode of CSI where that happens) - but aside from that, it's not particularly original.
I'm not saying it's bad, and it does get pretty exciting towards the end.
11. Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent by Mary Laven
I read about this when it came out and thought it might be interesting, and then a couple years later
mimmimmim gave it to me when she was gifting people with random books.This is a study of Venetian convents in the 16th and 17th centuries. Convents in Venice were a perpetual problem. The nobility only married off a small proportion of their offspring in order to keep the population small and the wealth intact, and a large number of women with no vocation were therefore forced into convents. This became more of a problem during and after the Counter-Reformation, when reforms were initiated to make convents more "enclosed" in the light of accusations of corruption from Protestants. This was Europe-wide, but because of the demographic in Venice, especially problematic, where convents were popularly felt to be more corrupt than other places.
Despite the popular perception of Venetian convents as little better than brothels, what the author has found in the extant records is that most of the infractions of the rules of enclosure were women wanting regular human contact - friendships, families, business dealings rather than sexual scandals and some abuses of their positions by priests.
I started off being disappointed that this wasn't the quality of Within the Plantation Household, but actually it's very good and engagingly written. On one level it's a very similar book - hidden history of women in a condition that is very particular to a specific time and place.
The moral of this story is, if you give me a book and it takes me three years to get around to reading it, please do not be offended. It doesn't mean I don't care, it's just that between compulsively buying books, borrowing from the library and friends, and monthly book club obligation, it might disappear off my radar for a while.
