My wife is ahead of me in listening to Alexander McCall Smith's "Corduroy Mansions" series. She has listened to both volume 1 and the 2nd one, called "The Dog Who Came in from the Cold." For my money, Smith is the best writer there is: humane but still crisp, funny, original, eye-opening but basically respectful. He is the author of the many volumes of the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" Series, set in Botswana, and of the "44 Scotland Street" series. He has many other books, also.
Here he describes a certain magazine in which one of the heroines' picture will soon appear:
The publication of full-page photographs of attractive young women of a certain class was one of the great traditions of British journalism, better established than the rival— and vulgar —tradition of plastering naked women across page three of the Sun. The "Rural Living" girls could not have been more different from their less-clad counterparts in the Sun, separated by social and cultural chasms so wide as to suggest that each group belonged to a fundamentally different species. Rural Living girls were photographed in a rural setting, although from time to time one might be featured in a cloister or some other suitable architectural spot. Generally they wore clothes that were not entirely dissimilar to their mothers'. Indeed, in the case of those girls of very ancient breeding, where long bloodlines had not been synonymous with commercial success and where genteel penury was the order of the day, the clothes they wore were in fact their mothers', having been passed on with relief when it was discovered that fashions had come full circle and the outfits were once again à la mode.
Smith, Alexander Mccall (2010-07-08). Corduroy Mansions: A Corduroy Mansions Novel (1) (p. 18). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There is so much to chuckle at and appreciate in that selection that I laughed when I listened and I laughed again as I read it aloud to Lynn. Sure, she had already heard it but one of the functions of a marriage is to share language you love, preferably multiple times.
Amazon has a program of selling the audio book and the print book together at low or reduced prices. After listening a while in the car, it is satisfying to find the passage in print and read it again.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
