More small change

It seems I've finally got back into the swing of reading. Reading all the book blogs I go through daily, visiting bookstores, starting a new book, all these things help. Mostly it's just the fading of the terrible week I had, things calming down a little, still not perfect but at least now books manage to distract me again. The new book I started, which is mostly what got me back into it, is Ha'penny, sequel to Farthing. I like it already. It's got many of the same charms Farthing had, without being a repeat. It preserves the back and forth first person main female character's chapters alternating with Inspector Carmichael's third person chapters. This time the woman telling the story is Viola Larkin, who has a sort of similar storytelling manner to Lucy Kahn of the last book, but who is definitely her own character.

The story basically begins when Lauria Gilmore, a middle-aged, well-respected actress, is blown up by a bomb in her own house. Inspector Carmichael and Seargent Royston of Scotland Yard are called in to investigate, and once again the two worlds of the alternating chapters are very related but have yet to quite meet.

This book adds another layer of my interests, with Viola Larkin being a member of an aristocratic family who has estranged herself from her parents in order to go on the stage. I've yet to reach anything much about the theatre in the book, but it begins with Viola agreeing to play Hamlet. And you know how I feel about Hamlet. So the discussions of how the play would work with Hamlet as a woman are very interesting.

I'll say more about the book when I've finished it, but it's definitely begun well what with getting me back to reading and in the course of that even to picking up Brideshead Revisited again.