The Well of Lost Plots

I just got The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fford out of the library. I think the premise of it a charming idea: that all the characters of fiction, and potential fiction, exist together in a sort of L-space. I was less happy about the ( Spoilers )

A major potentiality of thi setup would be scenarios that could never take place in-universe. ( minor spoilers )

Or how about those cross-over bunnies where you would love to see the characters interacting, but have no plot nor plausible way to intersect the universes. One could have Frodo and Luke Skywalker giving Harry Potter tips on the Hero's Journey (Watch your fingers, kid), Hercule Poirot deducing who stole the Silmarilli, or a gathering of fictional Jacobites from the 1745 rising (they probably outnumber the real ones). Or, round up fictional military and naval officers of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars—and turn Lydia Bennet loose among them! Can you imagine poor Hornblower, for example, fleeing to find some nice safe dowagers he could play whist with? Sharpe, on the other hand, would take her in his stride. Hmm...plot bunnies...

Guidance

Read a new book Mam got from the Covenanter Bookshop, about guidance. There was a lot in it I didn't understand which will take a second reading to take in, but the argument as I understood it was something like this:

Everything that happens is according to God's will, even our mistakes and sins. There is no way a 'bad' decision will shift us into God's Plan B for our lives, even if facts come to light afterwards that would have made us choose differently had we known them at the time. The way to discern God's will is to pray and exercise our God-given wisdom, not to always be looking for signs and special verses in Scripture. All those hunches, weird coincidences and verses in your Bible reading are to be treated as data in decision-making, like the rest of your circumstances, and not as an overruling revelation.

All this is what I thought myself in a vague manner. Rushing around trying to find an infallible direction, a clue to Providence, is like consulting a pagan oracle. It's trying to short-circuit the decision process, to get rid of the responsibilty. There is a reason one has to go through it; spiritual growth. At the same time, it's a relief to know that one can't make a decision the will take one out of God's will.

Still, all that is not very relevant in finding a job when there simply are no suitable jobs.

A Presumption of Death

Borrowed A Presumption of Death from the library; it really isn't a bad one considering it's in a mobile classroom in a car park.
A Presumption of Death is written by Jill Paton Walsh, set in the period covered by the Wimsey Papers in the early part of 1940. I consider it as paid fanfiction rather than anything definitive about Peter's and Harriet's future. (I have a great envy of those who are paid for works in other people's fandoms, especially the Star Wars people who have made such a hash of it).
( Spoilers )

However, all these nitpicks didn't destroy my enjoyment of the book. I would say it's worth reading, but only after you have finished all the Sayers originals.

The Unknown Shore

I've been in a rather naval mood with my reading lately (blame it on whoever decide to publish omnibus editions of the Hornblower novels), and have been working my way through Patrick O'Brian. I didn't used to like the Aubrey/Maturin books, but I think I was rather too young for them then. Incidentally, few people seem to like both Hornblower and POB, but then I've always been odd.

I just finished The Unknown Shore, which I borrowed from the library.It's one of his early books, before he wrote the Aubrey/Maturin series, and it tells the story of the Wager, part of Anson's squadron on his voyage around the world. The main characters are Jack Byron, a midshipman, and his friend Tobias who is a surgeon's mate with a taste for natural history. These two are a sort of proto-version of Aubrey and Maturin, and their unlikely friendship. For example, Jack's comment to Toby: "The last time it came on to blow the squids got mixed up with the spare blankets—most unpleasant." An echo of Aubrey's half-amused half-exasperated tolerance of Maturin's creatures (I seem to remember a swarm of bees in the quarter-gallery once).

The book has more laugh-out-loud passages than the Aubrey/Maturin series, although these come mostly in the seaborne parts; the chapters towards the end, after the Wager is wrecked on the coast of Chile and Jack and Toby are starving on a diet of barnacles and seaweed, are rather dismal. But both the characters and the narrative perk up once they have been rescued. Take this description of the behaviour of convoys:
Ships that behave perfectly well alone become over-excited in a crowd: the merchant captains lose their seamanship, the seamen forget that there is quite a difference between port and starboard and the vessels fall aboard each other in the most stupefying manner [Pause to observe that this effect extends even to a fleet of dingies on a quiet lake.]
At one time...there were no less than eight all together in the morning, some with their bowsprits through the others' shrouds, some with their yardarms entangles, some apparently lashed together for mutual support, while the men-of-war fumed with impatience and fired whole broadsides to enforce the signal to make sail.
At this point I rolled out of bed with laughter, but fortunately my camp-bed is low to the floor.

So it was a very enjoyable little book, different to the Aubrey/Maturin series but well worth reading. Now I want to get The Golden Ocean, which some pest has borrowed from the library before I could get hold of it.