Reading: Framley Parsonage and North Face

After two fairly heavy novels set around World War 2, I was in the mood for something comforting and decided to read Framley Parsonage, having downloaded pretty much all of Trollope onto my Kindle for free ages ago. I mostly know him from various radio adaptations, as well as the excellent 1980s TV Barchester Towers (Alan Rickman's Obadiah Slope was absolutely what his Snape should have been, but wasn't), and actually, I think I may prefer him in adaptation; on the page the chatty authorial voice can seem a bit long-winded, and the whimsical naming feels a bit too obvious. Or maybe it was just that I remembered the plot better than I thought and wasn't quite as much in the mood for frivolity as I thought; either way, it didn't leave a great impression.

I then decided to read Mary Renault's North Face for the renaultx CBC rather than just sitting on the sidelines (well, I may still sit on the sidelines, but at least I'll understand what people are talking about). Given that, I'll save most of my comments for there, but I do feel compelled to remark that I don't think I've ever read a book where I was so fervently hoping that the protagonists wouldn't end up getting together. And this despite it being described as a "romance" by Wikipedia (although as the entry also gets one of their names wrong that's probably just par for the course).