Next week is Mary Stewart Reading Week, the brainchild of Anbolyn at Gudrun's Tights.
I've just finished reading The Gabriel Hounds (1967), and thoroughly recommend it for all the lovely things one expects from a Stewart book: location, mystery, romance, danger, and gorgeous writing. I'll hopefully get my review out next week, but I couldn't resist posting this taster, featuring a bookshelf. To give some context, our heroine is spending the night in a ruined palace in Lebanon as she waits to see an eccentric and aged relative who has adopted Lady Hester Stanhope's lifestyle. The servant has come in to collect her dinner things:
Irritated now, and wishing she would finish her job and go, I concentrated on selecting a book. As light reading for whiling away an hour or two they were hardly promising. An Arabic grammar, a few books on Syria and the Lebanon which I had already read during my convalescence in Charles's room, and a collection which might be said to represent John Lethman's homework – some volumes (also familiar to me) about the original Lady of the Lebanon: Joan Haslip and Roundell and Silk Buckingham and the three old volumes of Dr Meryon’s diary about his redoubtable patroness. I looked at the fly-leaves. As I thought, they were Great-Aunt Harriet's own copies, presumably lent to her latter-day 'Dr Meryon' for his close study … I skipped along the row. T. E. Lawrence's Crusader Castles, Guillaume's Islam, the Everyman Koran, King-lake's Eothen … all Aunt Harriet's. No medical textbooks, which were presumably too bulky to carry on field work. The only things which carried his own name were – interestingly enough – Huxley's The Mind Changers, Fraser's Golden Bough, and a newish paper-bound copy of Théophile Gautier's Le Club des Hachachiens. No novels except Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke. The last volume in the row was de Quincey....
It would be nice to be able to record that I was the kind of person who would pick up the Dostoevsky or the Huxley or even The Golden Bough and curl up with it for a glorious evening's read. But when eventually Mr Lethman came for me as he had promised, he found me a few chapters into The Tiger in the Smoke, and half-wishing I had chosen something less exciting for a night in the deserted wing of a ruined palace.
