I set out on my two week jaunt to Maine with a couple of biographies with which I intended to amuse myself while sitting on the porch overlooking the bay.

The first of them, which I was already about halfway through, is Georgiana: Dutches of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman. Georgiana was a prominant late-18th Century political hostess and like her Spencer descendant, the late, unlamented Princess Di, lived a glamorous high life but lacked both emotional stability and common sense.

The second was Elizabeth Longford's masterful study Wellington: The Years of the Sword.

So what did I wind up reading instead? Well, you know what summer cottages are like - various bits of flotsam and jetsom washing in and out, left there by previous tenants. For reasons which I still don't comprehend, my hand fell on a scifi murder mystery called Spider Play by one Lee Killough.

My opinion? I've finally found a book I had no hesitancy in throwing away once I'd finished it. Who reads this stuff? (Evidently not the publishers - I've never seen so many typos.) The plot was tedious and, in the end, anti-climactic. The style was clunky enough to make Tom Clancy read like Trollope. The "futuristic" language was laughable. (Apparently, in the late 21st Century a coffee pot will be called - are you sitting down? - a "caff urn".) And not even a decent snogging scene or two to liven things up!

My only excuse for finishing once I'd realized what I'd got into was that my brain was on vacation.

Posted by: Robert at 12:35 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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