Library visit
Whoops – up to my borrowing limit again, even though I had gone to the library on foot and therefore had to walk home with a great armful of books. And I’m not sure that a lot of them are very edifying or improving. Being largely true crime, fictional crime or comics. Ah well. Here they are, in all their awful glory:
- The Eagle of the Ninth – Rosemary Sutcliffe. I should have read this tale of the unlucky Legio IX Hispania years ago – and now I’m making good the deficit. I had this on reservation, this it was a major reason for my visiting the library. Everything else that happens subsequently is therefore the fault of this book.
- Dead Reckoning – the new science of catching killers – Dr Michael Baden and Marion Roach. According to the jacket, Baden is a ‘famed pathologist’ and it gets a plug from Patricia Cornwell. Call it novel research. Or blame the fact that I never seem to catch CSI on the telly these days.
- England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia – Philip Hoare. This looks absolutely fascinating – being an account of the Victorians’ fascination with bizarre spirituality in a wide array of incarnations. Challenges history as we expect to hear it – really looking forward to reading this.
- Prescription for Murder: the true story of mass murderer Dr Harold Frederick Shipman – Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie. Because this can’t be too far removed from the first draft of history and, because I’m still not really sure what happened even after reading all the press coverage – largely because it took a time for us all to come to terms with the enormity of what he’d done.
- The High Window – Raymond Chandler. “There was a stifling scent of summer on the Pasadena morning when he first called on Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdock. Later Marlowe couldn’t work out which was worse: air you couldn’t breathe, or a client who didn’t tell you the story.”
- The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action – ed. Maxim Jakubowski. “Crooked cops, ruthless bigshots, shady operators and molls with a heart of gold from pulp literature’s best writers including Ed McBain, Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, David Gooodis, Joe R Lansdale and many more…” And, by God, it is a mammoth at more than 600 pages. What on earth was I thinking of?
- Batman: Castle of the Bat – Jack C Harris, Bo Hampton et al. Because it looked nicely Gothic, alright? And because it was on the shelf next to something by Neil Gaiman.
- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – Demon House – Max Allan Collins, Gabriel Rodriguez et al. A Titan Books graphic novel. Moved to read this because my recent Buffy and Angel adventures in graphic novelage went just swell. Obviously I am not catching enough of this series on the telly…