First up, volume 3 of the Emma M. Lion series. This one was a little bigger and had more going on, so that was nice.
Emma and her cousin Archibald (the most unlikely of duos) have teamed up to try to follow the clues in order to win tickets to the St. Crispian's secret annual performance of Julius Caesar. Emma figures the clues out (naturally, Archibald is about as helpful as a bag of hair) and gets the tickets, but Archibald breaks his leg when Emma and Niall's (the tenant) cat startles him. In a fit of spite, he eats his ticket rather than allowing Emma to choose someone to go with her, which was a damn shame. I was curious who she would have picked. There are so many eligible young men flittering around her!
And she's invited to a soirée at Lady Trewartha's house where she's seated at a table with nine rowdy young men and Young Hawkes, the minister, who call themselves the Reprobates Ten. Emma has a terrific time bantering with the spirited group, although the Duke of Islington seems rather less excited at how much fun she's having. Is that a spark of jealously I see, Islington? Oh my. I can't wait to read Volume 4.
This brick of a book, oh my gosh. It took me months to read it, but I really did enjoy it.
Henry "Chips" Channon was an American who was in Paris during World War I and that's when his diary starts: the end of the war. He renounces his American citizen to become British and inserts himself into high society and eventually gets elected to the House of Commons. He roamed with everyone back in the day: the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VIII before abdicating, the Duke and Duchess of York, who later became King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and many others. He married Honor Guinness, a wealthy heiress to the Guinness fortune, and they had a son named Paul. Chips dallied with both men and women as a youngster and apparently when London society found out he'd been keeping a diary many a peer went white with fear as to what he'd said about them. The answer is: probably something very catty and unflattering. But luckily for them, he stipulated that the diaries wouldn't be published in full until long after his death.
I'm actually really excited for the second volume, which will cover WWII. Since Chips was a fan of Germany and Hitler, I'm interested in what he thought of the whole thing and when he changed his mind and realized that the Third Reich was evil.
And finally, a really fun one: Rock, an Alternative History. Klosterman writes it as nonfiction. It was pretty funny. What if the Beatles were never really that popular (also, they never broke up and John Lennon never died) but instead Rock began in 1967 with the Velvet Underground, who were the most influential rock band on the planet?
Well, quite a few things change. Grunge was relegated to a not very influential or popular movement, it was mostly a Northwest Regional phenomenon (Nirvana wasn't even mentioned). The magazine of record was called Velveteen, not Rolling Stone, since the Stones weren't popular and broke up in the mid-'70s. Music became the most important part of American culture and a very powerful union of music critics called NARC exerted their influence over everything. Blockbuster movie scores had to be completely rock (imagine Star Wars with a Kinks song instead of John Williams, if you will), all music played in buildings and outside had to be rock and it wasn't optional--you had to play music. Even in libraries (imagine again if you will, Highway to Hell playing in the New York Public Library. Which, honestly, is probably pretty on point). Rap music was reclassified as an offshoot of Country, so as not to interfere with Rock. I pictured the Wu-Tang Clan on the stage at the Opry and about died laughing. Madonna became the height of Christian Rock in the '80s with her pro-life anthem, Papa Don't Preach.
Like I said, the book was funny, but it's also kind of interesting to contemplate how one small change could have upended everything we know. Is there an alternate universe out there where Lou Reed was the voice of a generation instead of Paul McCartney and John Lennon? Maybe.
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