Day 18: in which I bore you because I am bored: Georgette Heyer, audiobooks, and free samples

After a quick scroll through bookstagram, it's obvious that almost universally, book lovers are having trouble reading anything but comfort reads. A few people are looking for thrillers or true crime to keep them sucked into a story, but most of us just want to read something that feels positive and leaves us feeling uplifted instead of despairing.

In the past few weeks, I've re-read a favorite series from childhood (Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula LeGuin), Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell, and a couple of romance novels (Red, White, and Royal Blue and Love Lettering) that worked for that. Also The Lager Queen of Minnesota, which isn't exactly a comfort read, but has lovable characters who have to deal with a variety of different (occasionally hilarious) life situations, and resolves in a thoroughly satisfying way.

But really, what I'm mainly doing is re-reading Georgette Heyer. You may remember my first obsession with her if you've been around for awhile. She's not a perfect writer-- you have to forgive her inordinate love of exclamation points, and you have to be able to skim over her sometimes excessive use of period slang. But once you get past those flaws, they're so much fun. Some of them I would say even qualify as romps.

Stack of books by Georgette Heyer

This time around, I started with Black Sheep, which wasn't one of my top favorites, but I remembered liking it. It worked so well that I moved on to Reluctant Widow. Now I'm reading Cotillion, which is one of my top faves of hers. Maybe my #1 favorite.

The problem with Cotillion is that there's vast cast of characters, and it takes awhile to figure out who's important and how they are related to each other. Kitty, an orphan who has lived for years with her miserly, wealthy guardian, is outraged when he more or less puts her up on the marriage auction block to his grand nephews. Since she is penniless on her own, she comes up with a plot to get at least a month in London, a last moment of freedom, before she has to accept the inevitable and figure out what she's going to do. Of course that gets more and more complicated, and then she meets other people and gets involved in their complications, and the whole thing is just a delight.

Spoiler alert: it ends happily for everyone; well, except for the people who deserve what they get.

And, bonus: the audiobooks are fabulous. The narrator of Cotillion, Phyllida Nash, is a genius. I made Dean listen to it the other night while we were working on a jigsaw puzzle, and he was so hooked that he ended up reading the whole thing. Just give it time, because it takes awhile to get oriented to all the characters, and Kitty's complicated plans.

And here is a clue for taking advantage of Amazon. Amazon has always allowed you download a free sample of a kindle ebook or an audiobook (through their subsidiary, Audible). The audiobook samples stream, and even if you don't have a kindle, you can download the kindle app and take advantage of the free samples. It usually amounts to about 20 pages of an ebook, or about five minutes of an audiobook. Why not use them?

I've had it work both ways--sometimes the five minute sample of an audiobook helps me get into a print book I'm having trouble with (for example, Gods in Alabama). Sometimes the 25 page sample of the ebook helps me get a complicated cast of characters straight when the audiobook feels like chaos (for example, And Then There Were None, which is ably read by Dan Stevens, but introduces so many characters in the first chapter that I was bewildered until I was able to read the print version).

That's it for me today. Thank you for letting me go on and on, since I am now considerably less bored than I was yesterday. Did I tell you yet that MadMax came home on Friday? Our internet may not be up to the task of his online classes, but he had had enough of living alone in an apartment during shelter in place. It's nice to have some company.