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Jan. 1st, 2011 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherI read Mysteries of the Diogenes Club today. I'm not sure there's much point in a detailed post on it, since there's maybe two people on my friendslist who'll be interested and I expect they'll read it themselves anyway. This also means there's no point me being smug about having predicted what the cover illustration signified (and anyway that wasn't actually very hard, to be honest).
I think my favourite new story in the collection was the girls' boarding school story homage, "The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School". It's breezy and cheerful (which not all the stories in this book are) and gave me the LOLs at several points.
If you're one of the people who's going to read the book anyway, don't neglect the explanatory notes at the end. The notes on obscure British culture for foreigners are always informative and frequently witty, but I also enjoy spotting the ring-ins -- there's always a couple of notes for each story that provide background information on some fictional aspect of the story while neglecting to mention that it actually is fictional.
One of these in the present volume belatedly gave me another LOL from the boarding-school story: the story mentions in passing that one of the students at Drearcliff is a pale dark-haired American girl with the unfortunate name of Ticia Frump, which didn't ring any bells until I got to the endnote:
Ticia Frump. Later married into a distinguished New England family. At Drearcliff, she came top in French.
I think my favourite new story in the collection was the girls' boarding school story homage, "The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School". It's breezy and cheerful (which not all the stories in this book are) and gave me the LOLs at several points.
If you're one of the people who's going to read the book anyway, don't neglect the explanatory notes at the end. The notes on obscure British culture for foreigners are always informative and frequently witty, but I also enjoy spotting the ring-ins -- there's always a couple of notes for each story that provide background information on some fictional aspect of the story while neglecting to mention that it actually is fictional.
One of these in the present volume belatedly gave me another LOL from the boarding-school story: the story mentions in passing that one of the students at Drearcliff is a pale dark-haired American girl with the unfortunate name of Ticia Frump, which didn't ring any bells until I got to the endnote:
Ticia Frump. Later married into a distinguished New England family. At Drearcliff, she came top in French.
