Reading: Resorting to Murder

I picked this anthology, published by the British Library in their Crime Classics series, up in the BL shop on a whim on Monday as it seemed like good holiday reading. An enjoyable collection, of which I'd only read the Sherlock Holmes story (The Adventure of the Devil's Foot) and the Chesterton (The Finger of Stone) before; the rest were new to me, and with the exception of EW Horning, by writers I'd never read before. I'm not a great fan of short stories - I prefer longer formats with their greater opportunity to develop plot and character - but this was fun, although I'm not certain, on the strength of it, that I'd seek out any of the authors' other work.

Reading: Love and Romanpunk

Love and Romanpunk is a collection of four linked short stories by Australian writer Tansy Rayner Roberts (who I know as one of the hosts of the excellent Verity! podcast) combining an interesting feminist take on the women of the Julian Caesars (very different from I, Claudius's take) with a Buffy-esque eternal struggle against monsters and the forces of darkness and a cameo appearance by Mary Wollstonecraft's daughters. I thought it was great fun, and, entirely coincidentally, 'The Patrician', about a lifetime of meetings between a woman and an immortal dedicated to fighting evil, was similar enough to The Bone Clocks that it may have helped to exorcise the demons still lurking in my brain from that.