Ian’s got a delightful take on author Thomas Hardy; it’s exactly the sort of thing I expect I’d write if I seriously attempted to read Hardy, though I doubt I’d have said it so well. As it is, now I don’t have to. (Does this make me a Philistine? Possibly so.) I can’t comment on Ian’s opinion of David Copperfield (the character, not the book), because I haven’t read the book, but I suspect I’d feel the same way. (Am I the only one who can’t stand Romeo and Juliet because the young lovers are such idiots?)

These are the third and fourth volumes of
The Complete Peanuts, and they are surely a treat.

I had a pretty sizeable collection of Peanuts paperbacks once upon a
time, one or two which were bought just for me (the one I remember in
particular was a green book with an angry kite chasing Charlie Brown
on the cover–I don’t remember the title) and a whole bunch I inherited
from my siblings. As near as I can tell the set spanned the period from
maybe 1952 or 1953 until probably 1960 or so. Friends of the family had
a book or two that covered the earliest strips.

Thus, I was on familiar ground in these two books, and was delighted to
renew my acquaintance with many an old favorite.

One of my joys in reading old comic strips is watching the strip and the
characters as they develop. At the beginning of this pair of books, the
classic cast is pretty well complete: Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus,
Schroeder, Pigpen, Shermie, and Violet are all here, all recognizeably
themselves, all drawn just as you’d expect them to be drawn. Sally
hasn’t been born yet.

But Snoopy–these are the books where Snoopy really begins to come
together. In these books, Snoopy first dances, first tries to sleep
on top of his dog house (with mixed results), first kisses Lucy on the
nose, first begins to exercise his imagination. At the end of 1958, he’s
still not drawn quite like the iconic Snoopy of today, but he’s getting
closer.

I can’t wait for the next volume.

The December Issue of
Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line.

I like Hill’s mystery novels, but only his Dalziel/Pascoe books are
generally available here in the States. As a result of cleaning up my
study, I’ve consolidated my to-be-read pile onto a couple of shelves.
Here’s a book I got on my last trip to Australia (several years ago)
that I only got around to reading this week.

Trudi Adamson has had a quiet life in the twenty-five years since she
got married. Her husband has taken jobs in Switzerland and in Vienna
and such-like romantic locales, and she, being shy and agoraphobic, has
spent most of them quietly at home ignoring the world while her husband
travels on business. Now her husband is dead in a car accident, leaving
her almost nothing, and she somehow has to learn to live by herself and
for herself. She crashes for some time, surviving only with the help of
an old friend from her school days, but eventually scrapes some gumption
together and gets a job.

And then, of course, peculiar things begin to happen. Her husband’s
death didn’t occur quite the way she’d been told. In fact, she begins
to come across evidence that her husband’s life away from home was rather
different than she’d thought. And that, of course, is just the beginning.

What we have here, really, is Charade artfully redone as a thriller
rather than as a screwball comedy with moments of violence. And without
Cary Grant, of course. As I was reading it, it all seemed a little too
farfetched, and Trudi’s metamorphosis from shy agoraphobia to
self-reliant assertiveness doesn’t quite work. Still, I wanted to find
out what happened, and the final twist was both unexpected
and rather touching.

A little something from last year’s Advent Season:
The Cavalcade of Bad Nativities. I especially like the geese.