The Tyranny of Socks

My habit of posting once or twice a month tops and entirely at random continues. Here is what I'm reading:

I am reaching the end of Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm, which I have liked very much even though (a) many of the characters are really annoying and (b) it suffers from a tragic lack of Pallisers. In fact it's set on a lower social level entirely, being mostly about local landowners caught up in a court case and the barristers, solicitors and witnesses involved in the case -- but being Trollope this obviously includes everyone's families and a random assortment of travelling salesmen. As always Trollope is good at writing people, but one of the characters I find most interesting, the daughter of one of the barristers, is sadly too hard-hearted and self-aware to be a proper ingenue and thus her story is left almost completely unresolved.

But I didn't want to pick it back up this afternoon, so instead I started a new-to-me Alan Furst book, Under Occupation, which I got out of the library during its brief window of openness and which is thus now mine until whenever they reopen. I used to really like Alan First but after a while the books all got too samey: he's a melancholic journalist! he's caught up in espionage! there's an undermotivated romance with a sexy French or mayve Russian woman, who is also melancholic and caught up in espionage! But this one started well because now the character is even moe clearly actually the wish-fulfillment version of Alan Furst, writer of espionage novels -- the novels that the character writes have a certain similarity to the novels Furst writes. He has sad green eyes, and women find him irresistible! If Alan First doesn't himself have green eyes I shall be very disappointed.

In any case, having taken a break from Furst for a few years, I am enjoying the start of this one even though the plot seems even more flimsy than usual -- but self-consciously so.