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Reread Catherine Grace Gore's witty Silver Fork comedy of manners Pin Money. Gore is really the ur-mother of Georgette Heyer's style of romantic Regency novel, only with far more insight and breadth of commentary on life at the time (published in the mid 1930s). For a sweeping change, two good fantasies focusing on The Other Guys as protagonists. Jim C. Hines' GoblinQuest features an appealing little goblin named Jig who gets abducted by adventurers in the goblins' mountain. These adventurers seek a magical artifact...that's familiar, right? But the rest of the story is not, when told from the goblin point-of-view. Funny, sometimes poignant, with flashes of wit and wonder (as well as entertaining gross stuff, which you just can't have without goblins). The other one is Charles Coleman Finlay's The Prodigal Troll which is about a human baby who is inadvertently raised to be a troll. Finlay does a deft job with complex world-building, contrasting of cultures, and memorable character work--all while keeping the story moving at a fast clip.

Current read, the first volume of Nikolai Tolstoy's biography of Patrick O'Brian. I read some, then turn to the Dean King bio. Tolstoy resists the impulse, so far, of hammering King for small errors, acknowledging that King could not get access to the crucial papers and people who might have set the record straight, due to O'Brian's fanatical devotion to burying his past. So far the deviating details are quite small, the main thrust is roughly the same, but it's still interesting reading. The Tolstoy tends to be ponderous, repeating quotes and points over and over though they are relatively minor. But I'm enjoying it. It also causes me to reflect, without coming to any conclusions, on the Johnson quote that Tolstoy has at the beginning as a footnote...roughly speaking, biographies are problematical when one cannot tell the truth because certain crucial people are still alive, but if one waits until they are safely dead, the most interesting and meaningful connections often die with them.

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