wednesday books
7 January 2026 19:48![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landofnowhereThe Lamp and The Bell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921. Readaloud. This is a blank verse play that Millay wrote for a Vassar College reunion -- she enrolled at age 21 after having launched her career as a poet, and caused lots of trouble by not being a proper young lady. (A previous version of this post claimed she wrote it as a student, but actually it was 4 years after graduation.) I'd been wanting to read this play aloud for a while, and enjoyed doing it! It inevitably invites comparisons to both Shakespeare and the best of Millay's poetry, and comes up short, but it's still very good at being what it is, which is a fairy-tale-ish melodrama revolving around the romantic friendship between two stepsisters.
Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot and Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, Alexis Hall. I really liked Hall's Regency romances narrated by Puck and The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, but hadn't gotten into Hall's contemporary romance -- but then I was recommended Audrey Lane, which is the third in Hall's series set on a thinly disguised version of The Great British Baking Show. This one is an f/f romance between a contestant and the showrunner (nothing happens until after after it stops being a conflict of interest). There's some nice reality show meta, in that our POV character's day job is as a journalist, so she sees the show from a more media-savvy lens even before she starts dating the showrunner. I liked it enough to go back and read Rosaline Palmer, which plays the reality TV show storyline more straight. I haven't read the second book in the series, which I've been warned is all about the protagonist's anxiety, but might eventually read it anyway.
Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky. I bought this one along with Cage of Souls when I was in Edinburgh almost 2 years ago, and read Cage of Souls on the airplane because it was the paperback, and then set this aside because I didn't want to read two Adrian Tchaikovsky books in a row. (Also it wasn't out yet in the US so I didn't have as many people to discuss it with.) Finally coming back to it now, but not far enough into it yet to say much.
Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot and Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, Alexis Hall. I really liked Hall's Regency romances narrated by Puck and The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, but hadn't gotten into Hall's contemporary romance -- but then I was recommended Audrey Lane, which is the third in Hall's series set on a thinly disguised version of The Great British Baking Show. This one is an f/f romance between a contestant and the showrunner (nothing happens until after after it stops being a conflict of interest). There's some nice reality show meta, in that our POV character's day job is as a journalist, so she sees the show from a more media-savvy lens even before she starts dating the showrunner. I liked it enough to go back and read Rosaline Palmer, which plays the reality TV show storyline more straight. I haven't read the second book in the series, which I've been warned is all about the protagonist's anxiety, but might eventually read it anyway.
Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky. I bought this one along with Cage of Souls when I was in Edinburgh almost 2 years ago, and read Cage of Souls on the airplane because it was the paperback, and then set this aside because I didn't want to read two Adrian Tchaikovsky books in a row. (Also it wasn't out yet in the US so I didn't have as many people to discuss it with.) Finally coming back to it now, but not far enough into it yet to say much.
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Date: 8 Jan 2026 05:42 (UTC)no subject
Date: 8 Jan 2026 13:00 (UTC)It would be fun to see The Lamp and the Bell restaged: I think the main obstacle to doing this is that it has a ton of parts. It's tropey in a way that's a bit cheesy, but it's also quietly feminist.
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Date: 8 Jan 2026 20:06 (UTC)