it's been a week?

I could have sworn I wrote about the last Maisie Dobbs book I read last week - in any case, as expected, The Mapping of Love and Death, by Jacqueline Winspear, was quite enjoyable.  However, as I was reading this, the seventh book in the Maisie Dobbs series, I realized that I had not read the 6th, Among the Mad.  I know that I meant to, and, honestly, I would have sworn that I had read all the ones that have been published since I first discovered the series.  In fact, now that I consider it, I think I saw Among the Mad at Harvard Bookstore, then went and did a little digging, discovered it was the sixth in the series, and got the others out of the library.  So maybe I got distracted?  Still and all, the title seemed so familiar.  But the events that were referred to in Mapping were not familiar, and it was clear there was a gap between where I was in Maisie's & her companions' stories, and where Mapping picked up.  In any case, I have now checked Among the Mad out of the library, and I am sure I will be able to enjoy it despite knowing some of the major developments now.

But, as I was saying, Mapping of Love and Death was good.  Not the best as far as mysteries, but Winspear draws her characters and settings so well, it's just nice to escape into that world for a while.  I could use a place to escape to this week, so I am pleased to have Among the Mad at home.  Mapping did seem different from the other books in the series, though, in that there wasn't the usual setting out of Maisie's backstory (how she came to be a lady detective-cum-...psychologist?).  It was nice for me, because having read five other books about her, I didn't need the history lesson; that said, particularly given some of the circumstances of this story, I think that a reader new to the series would be a bit confused as to just what Maisie Dobbs does/is, how she got to be that way, and what some of the relationships between characters are all about.

After Mapping I read Jennifer Lee Carrell's Haunt Me Still - and, honestly, not sure I wish I had.  I really, really enjoyed Carrell's first book, The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling the Smallpox Epidemic, which I picked up from a  bargain bin at the COOP one day.  Now, that book, about the efforts to introduce "variolation" (inoculation - I think, sometimes I get inoculation and vaccination confused, but I THINK inoculation is giving a little bit of the smallpox virus, so you don't get full-blown smallpox, and vaccination is using the cowpox [cow/vacc-] virus as figured out by Jenner and then Pasteur) that were simultaneously undertaken in England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (such a great character) and in Boston by Zabdiel Boylston, in the early 18th century, is fantastic.  I mean - really, really fun to read and super informative.  Now, in the end papers to Haunt Me Still, Speckled Monster is described as "a work of historical nonfiction" and that is absolute bullsh*t.  It's totally a novel - JLC follows Montagu and Boylston about their day-to-day lives and imagines feelings and conversations - but it is a great novel jam-packed with historical fact and "local color," as it were.  After reading it, I was excited to discover Interred with Their Bones, her novel featuring a Shakespeare scholar-cum-theater director [I am using cum a lot today, weird.] where there are lost manuscripts and murders and she goes racing around Widener to escape a killer!!!  Except it kinda sucked.  Not at all gripping, the bad guy turns out to be exactly who you thought all along, and it's just ludicrously improbable.  I mean, there is only so much disbelief I can willingly suspend.  At least, for that calibre of writing; maybe the same plot in another author's hands would be more compelling.  But she wrote one wicked awesome book, and has a great first name :) so I gave her another chance and grabbed Haunt Me Still from the library.  I...I don't even know.  Honestly, I am not even sure that the whole story makes sense to me, now that I've read it, and it could be that I'm just not smart enough, or was just missing something, in part because I read the second half after getting a bunch of bad news, and my concentration was completely shot, but I think the plot just didn't really hang together if you examine it at all closely.  Suffice it to say the Scottish Play turns out to be an actual guide to a black magic rite involving bloody (and bloody) sacrifice...oh, and let's throw John Dee in there too.  Okay.  Yeah.

Additionally, T(2) send me a link to a Boston Globe Magazine article, an excerpt from that new Emily Dickinson biography, so that reminded me I wanted to read it.  First, though, I should finish the book about the Pilgrims I started over the weekend.  Definitely not easy / escapist enough for me right now, though, so it will have to wait.  In the meantime, just started Dissolution by C. J. Sansom, which I think I saw / came across a reference to somewhere and wanted to read - and, because I then said that in this blog, I remembered!  And was able to track it down!  Honestly, I'm only a few pages in, but I'm not so sure it would have been a terrible thing if I had forgotten about it, but I am sure it'll be an acceptable time while-away-er (whiler away?).  It's a mystery set during Tom Cromwell's abbey-dissolving days under Henry VIII, featuring a hunchback, Protestant, lawyer-cum-detective [okay, that cum I put in just because I could - but, still, it works].