Sometimes you just have to let the metaphor go

From the regency romance I'm reading ("Almost a Gentleman" by Pam Rosenthal):

It's as though someone had made pictures of those moments&mdash not paintings, more like horribly precise engravings, drained of color, etched by a flash of light&mdash and affixed them eternally in my thoughts. Thank heaven there's no machine that can create such pictures&mdash only my accursed guilty memory.

eg "It's like black and white photos in my head. Except cameras haven't been invented yet."

And engravings don't naturally have colour anyway.

I feel a sense of unjustified pride that thanks to hlbr's brilliant beta-ing my own regency dialogue doesn't have so many anachronistic contractions. (Or American spelling for that matter)

Some more books

Rasl 1: The Drift by Jeff Smith
I was expecting Bone and got something rather more Frank Miller-ish. Frank Miller on a not-too-bad day mind you. Very sparse science fiction, I'm not sure I can describe it much without giving away the plot of the whole volume!

Mr Impossible by Loretta Chase So, this book was pretty racist and I really liked it anyway. It's about an Egyptologist woman solving the mystery of her brother's disappearance with the help of a good natured aristocratic layabout. It wallows in old fashioned stereotypes of Egyptians as dusky mysterious simplistic uncivilized types who by turns resent the European invaders and rely on their "advanced" knowledge/leadership. On the plus side the Egyptian characters, while stereotyped, are drawn with affection, and the really unsympathetic characters are all greedy plundering Europeans. And I found the romance really engaging and and fun.

"Almost a gentleman" by Pam Rosenthal:

I have very mixed feelings. She was obviously trying to tell the story she actually wanted to tell rather than just some generic romance, and poked at a lot of interesting things to do with gender, sexuality, and class, but for me at least wasn't entirely successful.

The heroine has become bitter as a result of a terrible marriage ending in the death of her husband and child. So she reinvents herself as a man, becoming a hugely successful dandy. Cue the hero falling for her and questioning his sexuality, and various misunderstandings and misadventures until the inevitable Happy Ending.

My main worry was that she'd be Healed By His Love and Become a Real Woman Again and that is pretty much what happened, though he does learn to be less narrow minded and patriarchal and let her be herself (and he was pretty open minded and decent to start with). Also while the author makes nods towards alternative sexualities and lifestyles it's a bit "..not that there's anything wrong with that." For some reason the sex scenes skeeved me out, I think it was the mishmash of somewhat clinical explicitness with flowery metaphors about centaurs.

Reminder: birthday party this Saturday

Just to remind people, I'm having a birthday party at my house this Saturday from 11am until the afternoon sometime.

Bring some food to share. It doesn't have to be Sophie-friendly, but if you want to give Sophie-friendly food a shot here's some suggestions.

Presents definitely not required, but if you want to get one here's some suggestions for that too. But I would just as happy, if not happier, with some chopped vegetables or fruit :)