feather_ghyll

The second week of the French Open is starting to shape up, ( Read more... )

It’s become clearer to me what the LTA and UK Government are doing about Russian and Belarussian players for the English grass-court season, which has started at Surbiton. If players sign up to certain requirements, they can play as neutrals, with the LTA ceding to the general tennis arrangements so they won’t get fined, and so all players will gain ranking points as well as prize money. But the Home Office will be doing extra checks before granting them visas, so there’s a possibility some players may not get to play as a result.

As I can’t really watch tennis (I try to listen to coverage, but it depends on whether I can find something else to be doing that doesn’t demand too much attention, and I certainly haven’t found anything that lasts a whole match), I watched the first episode of The Gods of Tennis.

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The Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virago 1993

It so happened that this volume, containing the above short story and an afterword, was the next on my ‘to be read’ pile, and I’m sure ‘Singled Out’ influenced my reading of this classic. ( Read more... )

Congratulations to Naomi Osaka and Novak Djokovic. As it was on Amazon, I didn’t see a second of the US Open.

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I’m working my way through old newspaper cuttings about tennis at the moment. They’re from the period when Sampras and Agassi were waning, and Federer hadn’t broken through, but Safin and Hewitt had. The Williams sisters were just coming through. It’s entertaining.

Little Women (2017) BBC One
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6853528/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

Episode 1 (26th of December 2017)

I mostly enjoyed the first episode of this latest adaptation of ‘Little Women’ very much. ( Read more... )

As you can see, my posting schedule is a little behind the airing schedule.

Abbey Turns the Tables: Eric Leyland, Nelson 1959

I bought this thinking it would be about a mixed-gender school, but, set at a boys’ boarding school, it’s solely a boys own adventure. I see I’ve never written a review of a boys own book before, but then I haven’t read many and most of those involved Billy Bunter. When I see boys own books in shops, I tend to wish they were girls own and move on.

The most striking feature of this book is ( Read more... )

Katya’s World : Jonathan L. Howard, Strange Chemistry, 2012

I bought this without really appreciating that it was going to be YA. Anyway, Katya Kuriakova ( Read more... )

The Castle School: Nancy M Hayes Cassell 1924

One of the most notable things about this book ( Read more... )

I've kept meaning to post about the US Open. It's been strange not to be able to watch it, but to have to check up online and on sports headlines to see what's been happening. Highlight clips aren't the same! It was particularly heartening to see Robson building on her Olympics and having such a good run in the first week. Getting beaten by a defending champion is not too shabby. ( Read more... )

However, I've been able to watch the Paralympics. After last night, it feels churlish to say that, of course, the coverage hasn't been as good as the Beeb's would have been, but I haven't been able to switch to other sports when stuff I have no interest in watching comes on etc, although I've sat gripped in front of the swimming and athletic races. Claire Baldwin is an ace, I like it when former Paralympians get all technical (for instance about how individuals' disabilities affect them and what they have to do to adjust) and the fact that we move from heats to finals (in the races) and that there are so many different categories makes it all the more explosive. Then there are the moments where you realise what these people who run or swim so fast must have to face in their daily life. There's a lot more to say about disability , elite sports, gender and a myriad things than is getting raised – there’s a consensual attitude about certain topics in the coverage that I don’t always agree with, although if both the Games get girls who thought they weren’t able to ‘do sports’ to get up/out and exercise more, that is a good thing. But then, while the Paralympics are going on, sports coverage is tending back towards the belief that what the boys and their managers in the Premier League are doing is all that sport is, which is, frankly, depressing.

I have a tag labelled: genre: career story. It’s a genre that fascinates me, covering at least two subgenres, which I talk about here, although, in the post, I’m concentrating on Girl’s Name, Job Title in Exotic Sounding Adventure serial mysteries and not the ‘straight up career girl stories’ as I describe books like the one I’m about to review. Actually, I’m not sure that that’s the best name for the subgenre.

Kate in Advertising : Ann Barton. The Bodley Head, 1961.

This is a standalone book (as far as I know) about how a girl progresses in her job, although as I hope to show, calling it a career story isn’t precisely right. However, Kate Wilson, Copywriter certainly girl has no time to be a Part-Time Sleuth!

By the by, I wonder whether career stories for boys have ever been a feature – I tend to gloss over most boys' own books at best and get annoyed when there’s a heap of them and no female counterparts on the bookshelves or bookheaps of second hand book shop, so I wouldn’t know. I suspect there might be of the Part-Time Sleuth variety.

This second impression in 1961 of a fifties story for girls is typical of its subgenre, good enough at doing what it sets out to do, except it’s already out of date, as the author’s note apologetically makes clear, thanks to the growing influence of television. In the book, TV sets were still exotic and print spearheaded any advertising campaign.

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Over the holidays, I made the most of the opportunity to just sit down and read books from cover to cover. I started off with The Big Six by Arthur Ransome, which I really don't think I'd read before. ( Read more... )

I worked my way through The Woman in White - I believe I called every character a ninny at some junction.

I should have said the same thing about Family Playbill by Pamela Brown, ( Read more... )

I loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which was recommended by callmemadam among others.

And then I read a Bessie Marchant, A Girl of the Northland, ( Read more... )

The latter was an interesting precursor to reading A Cousin from Canada by May Wynne, ( Read more... )