white_hart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_hart) wrote2025-01-12 06:45 pm
white_hart) wrote2025-01-12 06:45 pm
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[Reading] Look to the Lady - Margery Allingham /The Flowers of Vashnoi - Lois M Bujold
Last year, the knitting designer Kate Davies ran a club themed around Margery Allingham's novels - fortnightly patterns based on the Albert Campion novels, interspersed with essays about Allingham and the world she lived in. I doubt very much I'll actually knit any of the patterns, but I enjoyed the essays and reading the novels, having not read any Allingham for about 35 years.
The club started with Sweet Danger, the fifth Campion novel, so once it ended I thought I'd go back and (re)read the first four. Look to the Lady is the third in the series, a fairly lightweight romp about the attempted theft of a priceless national treasure by a shadowy gang of international criminals. As a teenager, I preferred the light-hearted whimsy of the earlier Campion books to the more serious later ones, but reading this now, I found it shallow to the point of being silly, and there's a whole subplot about "gypsies" which made somewhat uncomfortable reading. I had thought I was struggling a bit with it because my mental health isn't great, but actually, I think it may just be one of the weakest of the series.
Lois McMaster Bujold's The Flowers of Vashnoi was far more to my taste - the most recently published instalment in the Vorkosigan series, although third from last in terms of internal chronology, this novella is told from the perspective of Ekaterin Vorkosigan as she investigates strange happenings around a radioactivity decontamination project.
The club started with Sweet Danger, the fifth Campion novel, so once it ended I thought I'd go back and (re)read the first four. Look to the Lady is the third in the series, a fairly lightweight romp about the attempted theft of a priceless national treasure by a shadowy gang of international criminals. As a teenager, I preferred the light-hearted whimsy of the earlier Campion books to the more serious later ones, but reading this now, I found it shallow to the point of being silly, and there's a whole subplot about "gypsies" which made somewhat uncomfortable reading. I had thought I was struggling a bit with it because my mental health isn't great, but actually, I think it may just be one of the weakest of the series.
Lois McMaster Bujold's The Flowers of Vashnoi was far more to my taste - the most recently published instalment in the Vorkosigan series, although third from last in terms of internal chronology, this novella is told from the perspective of Ekaterin Vorkosigan as she investigates strange happenings around a radioactivity decontamination project.
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