Sweet and just a touch musty

....there is even a perfume that smells like Barbara Pym – or at least her books, according to its designer. Paperback, sold by Demeter Fragrance in America, smells like "a dusty old copy of a Barbara Pym novel … sweet and just a touch musty".  {from 'The Blagger's (sic) Guide To: Barbara Pym,' in The Independent, March 2013}

{If only!... but it is also 'a fragrance literary with a variety of scents ranging from cosmopolitan cocktail to vanilla cake batter.'  That just makes no sense.  Different sides of the pond, I guess; but it's hard to imagine something that could smell like all of those things ... thank goodness. :)

Never mind ... I have plenty of dusty old copies of Barbara Pym novels of my own {thankfully! they're so hard to find now!} and many lovely, unmusty new friends to share her with, during the Barbara Pym Reading Week organized {thank you!} by Thomas and Amanda beginning June 1.  I'm glad I'm not the only one who can't wait that long ... I started reading A Lot to Ask, the biography by her friend Hazel Holt, yesterday.

During the fete, I think I'm going to start with Some Tame Gazelle {her first novel, and described as the most autobiographical one} and also read No Fond Return of Love {because some of our friends from A Glass of Blessings return}. I'm hoping to add at least one more (these are long-overdue rereads for me}.  And there might be a recipe or two.

Anticipation {mysterious edition}

{September}

 Inspector Wexford!
{November}

 

 

Jill Paton Walsh, The Last Scholar - a new Lord Peter Wimsey!
{December}

 

 

{Found on a blog, here}

 

Is it tomorrow morning yet?

{updated}

Guillaime Ladoucette wiped his delicate fingers on his trouser leg before squeezing them into the glass jar. As he wiggled them around the cold, slippery fat he recognized what he felt was an ankle and his tongue moistened. He tugged it out and dropped the preserved duck leg into the cassoulet made by his mother thirty-one years ago and which had been on the go ever since. The ghostly white limb lay for several seconds suspended on haricot bean and sausage flotsam before disappearing from sight following a swift prod with a wooden spoon.

Custodian of the cassoulet now that his mother had gone cuckoo, the barber gave the dish a respectfully slow stir and watched as a goose bone appeared through the oregano and thyme vapours. ...

from The Matchmaker of Perigord, by Julia Stuart

After having such an irresistibly enjoyable book with me on the bus last week, and wondering which of the books I'd already stacked up I should read next, this one came in for me on Overdrive.  Honestly, all I meant to do was load it up on my Nook, then I checked to see that it was there, and then I opened it up to the first page so it would be ready for me as soon as I was ready for it, and then since I was already there I thought I really should read the first page or two to be sure I would want to read it ... :)

Tuesday afternoon update:  as it turns out, I loved the opening chapters, and then thought about another 200 pages of the same, and decided I probably had the flavor of the book, and too many others to read.  But it was a very enjoyable round trip.

{image - and recipe - here}

The View from Penthouse B

Just jumping back on to say that this book made me happy, and sometimes, that's all a book needs to do.

Several of Elinor Lipman's earlier books were set, or at least had some scenes in, Brookline, the town next door, where I lived until last summer, and I think that's part of what drew me to her fiction.  Her characters walked by that dentist's office that you could see into, in the basement of that rambling brick house, when you got off the Green Line and walked up Amory Street, and another book was set in a women's college near my beloved second apartment - turned over-the-top condominium (communal wine cellar???) - turned bankrupt real estate speculation (hah! serves them right!!).  Some of her books have a more serious subject (like The Inn at Lake Devine) and one of them became a movie with Helen Hunt and Colin Firth and Bette Midler (!!!) .  But they're always sweet and funny, intelligent, sometimes a little preposterous.

This one is set in New York, in a Greenwich Village penthouse shared by Margot and her sister Gwen-Laura.  Margot is the dramatic older sister; she has divorced her doctor-husband, Charles, who is in prison for fraud after artificially inseminating his patients the old-fashioned way, and then invested all her money with Bernie Madoff. Gwen-Laura, the middle sister, is still mourning her  husband, Edwin, two years after his unexpected death, and their self-important younger sister, Betsy, suggests that they move in together to pool their almost-nonexistent resources.  Margot is a 'professional blogger,' with only a couple of readers and no advertisers, and Gwen-Laura considers starting a matchmaking service for timid clients called Chaste Dates. When Margot meets Anthony, who has just lost his job at Lehman Brothers and his apartment, she invites him to live in the maid's room as a paying guest, and he becomes a friend, fashion consultant, and hectoring life-coach.  When the sisters find Anthony's sister Olivia sleeping on their couch one morning, the reason that she's there takes things around the bend a little, and then Charles is paroled and just happens to find a tiny studio apartment in the same building. But by the time you're all the way around that bend, you might not mind, especially if you find that you're looking forward to riding the bus to and from your non-penthouse so you can spend a little more time with all of them.