Oh, but reading has been a hard road recently. Why? I don’t really know but I was in one of those “good book” slumps. As in, I couldn’t find one to just latch on to and absorb without having to think too hard about it.

Because my brain has been sort of mush. And I have been busy.

But never fear, Bookies, I have plans afoot to provide you with more fantastic writing about books… all to be revealed, soonly. (See, I used “soonly”. This is not a word. But I am a flippertigibbert and I do not have time to come up with real words for you.)

However, The Scandal of the Season – just what I needed, it turns out. This is light without being pointless fluffy drivel. In fact, it’s not really that light but it is good reading. It is page-turning reading for people who have a thing for 18th century literature (that being me, thanks to a brilliant university lecturer who introduced me to thinking about history as people not events and therefore totally knowable through literature).

The Scandal of the Season is about the true life events behind Alexander Pope’s classic society poem The Rape of the Lock. Gee does this fantastic trick of turning the whole standard “18th century shallow society” trope on its head – revealing the people behind the characters and the obvious, but often overlooked, conclusion to that trope – that those people were as much victims of their society as they were perpetrators of and colluders in it.

Did that sentence make sense?

All this book needed were costume pictures, because by god some of the clothes sounded fantastic. Plus they drink chocolate first thing in the morning. Yes please.

Anyway, my Bookie readers, you have also been quiet recently. What are you reading? Are you liking it?