Becoming Harriet Vane

Bluestocking, feminist, itinerant scholar. She/her. Fueled by tea. Always open for questions and discussions. This adultbooklr-ish blog also includes history, fictional detectives, architecture, and Fantasy Canon Law™. Curator of @teaformrholmes.

[nkp1981]

Sylvester McCoy in Glasgow, Scotland, July 2026

[yuniper]

my specialty is liking the same movies that 50-year-old dads like but in a way that would instantly send those dads into cardiac arrest if they heard me talk about them

[rachels-memories]

Gregory Peck, ph. by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1949, for LIFE magazine

[snoopyoftheday]

snoopy of the day

[didanagy]

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (1995) dir. ang lee

[oldshrewsburyian]

Knowledge and courage contribute in turn to greatness. Since they are immortal, they immortalize. You are as much as you know, and a wise person can do anything. A person without knowledge is a world in darkness. Judgement and strength, eyes and hands; without courage, wisdom is sterile.

Balthasar Gracián, The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence, 1647

[oldshrewsburyian]

Set on August 14, this book, through the reunion of two old friends in the midst of a war, explores the complex ties of loyalty and love, and the question of what makes a tragedy.

[wearethekat]

July Book Reviews: The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood by HG Parry

I felt meh about Parry's The Magician's Daughter, but A Far Better Thing absolutely blew me away last year, so her latest book was one of my most anticipated titles of the summer. In The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood, Elaine is sent away to an isolated manor house in Wales after her job at the British Museum is bombed in the Blitz. As she catalogues the library alone, she begins to have increasingly intrusive dreams of Nimue and the fall of Arthur...

Although the book opens with the World War II setting, the Blitz is more scene dressing to emphasize the themes of the Arthurian retelling than anything else. The real plot and most of the action is with Nimue, not museum employee Elaine. The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood is definitely not a story about King Arthur running around smiting German pilots or something. The influence of Elaine's modern setting on the Arthurian plot is much more subtle. I hadn't realized that the agonizing over the inevitability of war in TH White's retelling was so closely inspired by World War II, and Parry is clearly paying homage to that link. And even as a standalone narrative, the Nimue chapters are an excellent interpretation of the character in their own right. There's a strong sense of the inevitability of story capturing people in its wake, and a certain melancholy lent by Nimue entering the story so late, only a year or two before Arthur's fall. While I'm a little disappointed that Parry didn't have much to say about the modern timeline other aside from in reflection, I've always been a sucker for yet another good Arthurian retelling, and the book delivers on that front. Recommended, if not as much as the glorious tragedy of A Far Better Thing.

[expressions-of-nature]

Golica, Slovenia by Pika Žvan

[fluentisonus]

The Ruin, Anonymous Old English Poem, trans R.M. Liuzza

[spirit-of-art]

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), 1810

[floranada-a-sense-of-place]

Train Journey Royal Scotsman

[oldshrewsburyian]

WIP ask:

Aspidistra?

As you may have cleverly anticipated, there are metaphorical aspidistras at the Duchess of Denver's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Christmas Party:

“All right,” said Peter placatingly, “nobody’s chucking aspidistras.”

[oldshrewsburyian]

'courage' for the WIP guessing game

I couldn't find courage itself directly (alas!) but found one of its relatives:

I mean: she’s so fine and courageous that she just goes straight ahead when she thinks something needs doing, and she doesn’t seem to mind the risk, and Wilfred’s the same way, and…”

[oldshrewsburyian]

WIP ask: kiss!

Surprisingly difficult to find the noun rather than the associated verb! But here it is, from The Silly Bodyguard AU:

Brienne bent, and pressed a kiss against the crown of his head.

[onefootin1941]

[oldshrewsburyian]

Ask game: whippersnapper

What a fun word! I regret to say that it is not in any of my WIPs.