books read
Feb. 5th, 2006 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fleaKatharine S. White, Onwards and Upwards in the Garden (1978). Collection of essays originally published in the New Yorker ca. 1957-68, on various gardening topics, mostly reviews of books on gardening, garden and plant history and identification, and flower arranging, plus discussions of garden and seed catalogs. Very much a personal voice (the author likes old-fashioned flowers and scholarly work; hates dahlias, double anything, and modernist flower arranging).
Deadlier Than the Male: Why Are Respectable Englishwomen so Good at Murder?, Jessica Mann (1981). Contains a a decent (though mostly new to me, so hard to judge) description of the fore-runners of detective fiction in general and by women in particular, "biographical" sketches of the male detectives, and short mostly cribbed biographies of Christie, Sayers, Tey, Allingham, and Marsh. Does not answer the question posed in the subtitle very adequately, aside from making general noises about the orderliness and structure of detective stories, especially those set in classic English villages, and traditional upbringing and lifestyles of (most of) the women considered.
Deadlier Than the Male: Why Are Respectable Englishwomen so Good at Murder?, Jessica Mann (1981). Contains a a decent (though mostly new to me, so hard to judge) description of the fore-runners of detective fiction in general and by women in particular, "biographical" sketches of the male detectives, and short mostly cribbed biographies of Christie, Sayers, Tey, Allingham, and Marsh. Does not answer the question posed in the subtitle very adequately, aside from making general noises about the orderliness and structure of detective stories, especially those set in classic English villages, and traditional upbringing and lifestyles of (most of) the women considered.