lunabee34

1. I finished out 2019 by reading 210 books including books read multiple times (193 distinct books).

2. First book of 2020!

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Okay, I do not do true crime. I do not do child harm. And yet this book absolutely riveted me. I read it from cover to cover the day it arrived in the mail.

Summerscale does an excellent job of weaving together the facts of the case (the murder of a three-year old boy), the details of the lives of the victim's family, the biography of the detective assigned to the case, the history of detection, Victorian attitudes toward privacy and the media, and the way that the case captured the English imagination for several years. I had no idea that this case influenced so many works of literature.

I am reminded in many ways of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, a fictionalized account of a real murder which is similarly ambiguous in terms of whodunnit.

This is really well researched and has some of that joy and fervor of scholarship for me, particularly in the part at the end where Summerscale acquires a photo of the estate and realizes that some of the family are peering out the windows; she then meticulously researches to determine who the faces belong to.

Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

3. After leaving my article alone for a week and a half, I went into the office today and revised/edited. I was pleased with what I found, thank goodness, and content revisions went really quickly. :) What took so much time was meticulously checking every parenthetical citation, creating the Works Cited list (which all needed to be checked against the copy of the text I'm using now and converted to the latest edition of MLA), and checking every single quote to be sure of punctuation and etc. I'm glad I did all that even though it took hours because I found one transposed number in a citation, one misspelling in a quote, one quote I'd incorrectly attributed to the wrong book, and several citations for which I was using a different edition in this article than I'd used in my dissertation. When I was writing my thesis and dissertation, I used a lot of my director's books, but a couple of the ones I downloaded later and subsequently used in this article were published in different years, etc. I'm going to read through it one more time tomorrow and then send it on its way. Cross your fingers for me, everyone.

4. It has been such a joy to receive comments from all the Yuletide writers after reveals. I always love discovering who has written the fic I enjoyed. Since I was home and able to read and comment more than usual, I have been getting more replies than usual, and I love it.