Books I’ve been reading

CHILDREN’S PLEASURES: Books, Toys and Games From the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood by Anthony Burton is a well-illustrated look at the world of children, touching on doll-houses, board games, parties, clothes, teddy bears, fairy stories and Boys’ Own adventures. Nothing terribly deep, but interesting and a useful reference for historical stories—and it filled me with more nostalgia at times than I’d expected.
FANTASY IN DEATH is JD Robb’s shot at a locked-room mystery as series protagonists Eve Dallas and Roark try to figure out how a game designer could have been beheaded while alone inside a holodeck locked from the inside. The explanation is weak (without going into detail, it relies on a tech miracle well beyond this setting’s usual level), but since the focus is much more on catching the crook by knowing the characters than figuring out how it was done, that’s not fatal.
KINDRED IN DEATH was the immediately preceding novel in the series, in which Eve tries to figure out who hated a cop enough to rape, torture and kill his daughter for revenge (a nice touch that the nightmares this triggers of Eve’s abused past have lost some of their potency compared to previous books)-not to mention having to cope with the girly horror of a bachelorette party. A better book.
THE TABLE-RAPPERS by Ronald Pearsall is an informative but dry as dust account of Victorian spiritualism, from their audience (predominantly middle-class) to the mediums (ranging from blatant phonies to D.D. Home who was never caught in anything fraudulent) to psychic researchers and ghost busters to the actual effects. Pearsall himself is a borderline believer, not denying the high rate of fraud but not rejecting it out of hand because of that (arguing that the tricks for faking table-rapping were well-known enough that psychic researchers could rule them out, and sometimes did); the end result is a useful addition to my library without being a terribly interesting one.