TOO cool, Barbara! Love it.
Winchester Lady, I keep forgetting to mention that Mary Berry is to have a new cooking show, the Recipes of the Great Houses, or something like that, I can't WAIT and I can't get BBC1, what a fabulous idea. Mel and Sue are to have one about singing and dancing for Comedy Relief or something like that, on BBC1, and there are two specials already filmed in addition to the latest Great British Bake off for us to see. For some reason, and I don't want to jinx him, but I can't see Paul and Nigella doing a Great British Bake Off, but what do I know? It may be the greatest thing since sliced bread.
AND there is a new Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbach and Co., or so I read, coming in 2017.
As for reading, I needed something escapist so I made the mistake of picking up the sequel to the Gold Coast, The Gate House by Nelson DeMille and now am 3/4ths through. It's not as good as The Gold Coast, and there seem to be less flamboyant sex scenes (there's really only one, a fairly ridiculous one, in my opinion, in The Gold Coast but it's right smack in the beginning), but it's a continuation of characters you care about as they go thru the changes in the great houses on Long Island, and once those characters hook you, it's hard to let them go. I like the male protagonist. I can't say the same for any other characters in this book but he's good. He's a John Grisham type of lawyer.
Speaking of Grisham, is anybody reading the new John Grisham?
I'm still actually reading Bleak House, am trying to read it as I said within the chapters as they were published. It's a comforting read to sink into, and of course, as December, cold, fireplaces and the holidays near, nothing beats Dickens in December....I just need to catch up to the movie which I got too far ahead with.
And I'm reading T.P. Wiseman, who is supposedly the model for Dumbledore in JK Rowling's Harry Potter series. He taught Rowling at Exeter. If classicists are your taste, you'll want his Historiography and Imagination, Eight Essays on Roman Culture, I'd get it in the library, all his books are extremely pricey to be so small and succinct but boy does he hand it to Theodor Mommsen, probably the most eminent Roman historian of the past on the subject of Cicero.
Anybody who thinks academics are dull needs to read Wiseman. Actually I have to say that Mommsen himself, whom I have just started reading, laid it out on the subject of the "demagogue" and described some Roman speeches which sound suspiciously like what we are seeing today in the news. To wit:
"Cato was already acquainted with men who made a trade of demagogism, who.....hired listeners if they could find no willing audience, and whom people heard as if they heard the market- crier, without listening to their words or , in the event of needing help, entrusting themselves to their hands. In his caustic fashion the old man describes those fops formed after the model of the Greek talkers of the Agora, dealing in jests and witticisms, singing and dancing, ready for anything; such an one was, in his opinion, good for nothing but to exhibit himself as a harlequin, and to bandy talk with the public. He would sell his talk or his silence for a bit of bread. "
That's what I'm reading, anybody reading anything good? Or bad?
