Thursday, August 1, 2013

Give me some romance

Oh it's hot and I do not like the heat. It makes me sluggish and lethargic at work when I need to be busy and efficient. It also makes me impatient of questions which is unfortunate as it's really my job to answer questions, even silly ones, and to maintain an air of calm interest when I'm penned against a wall by elderly men determined to tell me how the company should be run. To be fair the elderly party in question wasn't without insight because half way through his 20 minute harangue about what was wrong with the cafe in John Lewis (absolutely NOTHING to do with me or my job) he said 'I know I'm boring you'... 

My preferred reading for the summer is normally something Victorian suitable for use as a doorstop when it's not being read but I'm to hot to concentrate on what's going on or to have the patience with Trollope style repetition - basically it's time to break out something undemanding but absorbing enough to hold my attention. It might have been Georgette Heyer (or J K Rowling, Harry Potter books suit me very well in this mood) but in fact I found myself back from holiday and at the bus stop on a Monday morning having forgotten to pick up a book on my way out. Panic, burying myself in a book over lunch and on the bus is how I keep sane for a whole day at a time.

Happily there is a charity shop by the bus stop, it's not really a booky one but it was an emergency and in it I found a pile of M C Beaton's Regency romances, they looked like my best bet so I bought one. I've heard of Beaton's Agatha Raisin books and enjoyed Hamish Macbeth when it was Sunday night television years ago though I hadn't realized it was the same person at all until I saw the long, long, list of all the things Beaton has written and can't knock these romances because I've read 8 of them in a week. 

They're not as good as Georgette Heyer - the research isn't there and there's a slapdash approach to the way inheritance laws worked  - none of that really matters, these books aren't keepers but they have been fun and at 50p a hit a feel I can afford this slightly guilty pleasure. 

7 comments:

  1. I had no idea she wrote Regencies as well. The Hamish books and the Agathas are pretty easy to find here - I've only tried the Hamish series, but the Agathas look fun, and so do these. I also require time with a book over lunch to cope with the rest of the day - often also spent answering questions.

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    1. Yes - shutting the world out for an hour makes it a lot easier to deal with afterwards, by lunch time if I talk about work I complain about work and that really doesn't put me in the right frame of mind. These were fun, though after a bit could get very repetitive I think.

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  2. I laughed when I read "my preferred reading for the summer is normally something Victorian suitable for use as a doorstop when it's not being read." That is exactly the mood I am in right now and it is why I'm I just finished off Trollope's The Three Clerks.

    I have never read any of M.C. Beaton's other series but these books do appeal to me. My library has most of them available as audiobooks and I did try to listen to one of them recently but the reader was doing a sort of Cockney accent for the well-bred young heroine and I was too horrified to pay any attention to the story.

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    1. I hadn't thought of audio books - the cockney accent wouldn't do at all. I thought they were fun and something that could be read in a couple of hours which is quite appealing too. It's finally cooling down a bit here so hopefully I'll make some proper inroads into something with a bit more substance to it soon.

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  3. M.C. Beaton is a great way of reading without taxing the mind too much but allowing you to escape from the realities of everyday humdrum life. I have read all the travelling matchmaker series but not these regency ones

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  4. Yes she's very clever at what she does, I've been looking on amazon and am stunned by her output, she must churn these out at a phenomenal rate. Sometimes this kind of escapist froth is just what you need.

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  5. Old men spend a fair bit of time each week reminiscing to me about how things were better run In Their Day in my workplace. Almost certainly they had a more respectful listener than me back then! I had no idea Beaton wrote Regencies - something to look out for.

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