I was laid up last week and guess what? I did NOT read Trollope. I read Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes. This was a very British, literary murder mystery with wonderful Shakespeare references, Hamlet and otherwise. There were many other cultural references - highbrow cultural references - and I had to make a list so I could look everything up all at once. It was enjoyable, rather dated and complicated in the myriad of characters that kept parading on and off the page.
The references I enjoyed the most were not the highbrow ones, sorry to say. I was very tickled by the ever so slightly snide references to Agatha Christie's Poirot. A few of the characters complain about Police Inspector Appleby, and insist that a Real detective would be better, a foreigner. And Appleby makes a pointed reference to his gray cells early on. These little touches amused me so much I had to find out more about Michael Innes, which is a pseudonym for John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, a Scottish scholar and novelist.
In the process of researching Michael Innes, I discovered this amazing web site:
The Library Thing
You can catalog your own library, browse other people's shelves, see what other people are reading that might be to your taste. Very interesting and fun. Enjoy!
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