April book log

Read Spinsters in Jeopardy by Ngaio Marsh— I jumped several books and more than a decade ahead in the series with this one, landing at a point in the timeline where Alleyn and Agatha Troy are married with a precocious 6-year-old. Wild plot - cults! kidnapping! drug trafficking! undercover sting operations! - verging on the downright goofy, but a fun read.

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Read Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, which is... hm. Not my favorite of her novels. I tried to read this for the first time when I was on an Austen kick a few years ago, but I didn't get very far - I think I made it to the introduction to the Crawfords? - because everyone was just so mean to poor Fanny Price. This time I made it far enough before questioning my life choices (...not to mention the characters') that it seemed worth powering through rather than giving up again.

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Having now officially read all of Austen's (finished, "real") novels at least once, I read Helena Kelly's Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, which I once had my hands on in a bookstore back when it was possible to go places and touch things, and which in retrospect I'm relieved I didn't buy. It provided some interesting context about the social, political, and literary landscape in which Austen was writing her novels and the lens through which her contemporary audience would understand them, but some of Kelly's textual interpretations and conclusions about Austen's intent seemed like a stretch, and her first two chapters, on Northanger Abbey and Sense & Sensibility, left me feeling so ??? that I found myself approaching the rest of the book with more caution than enthusiasm.

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I also finished The Brothers Karamazov, which I will write up in its own post later because this one has gone on for long enough.