everybody here has seams and scars

[hedda62]

So it was Three Weeks of Cellulitis, in the end, but I'm better now. Hurray for finding the right antibiotic! My primary care doctor was making noises about MRSA, but I just don't see how I have any of the risk factors, so I'm going with "nobody ever cultured it, so we will never know."

I also did get through (as of yesterday) all of the Amelia Peabody books, some of which I actually hadn't read before. I think perhaps I gave up initially somewhere around He Shall Thunder in the Sky and the emotional storm leading up to it, and didn't in fact get back to the series even though I thought I had. Glad to have come back and finished. Say what you will about Elizabeth Peters (and I could say a little about the editing in some of the later books) but she really knew how to write, and how to laugh at the right parts of what she was writing and take the right parts seriously, and I will always love her for that.

Also, it occurred to me partway through that this series is kind of the major key version of the Vorkosigan books, at least in the sense of a central family who pulls in many and varied characters to become part of their circle, viewed over a generation of time. Clearly this is something I like. And, because I enjoy exploring the intersection of writing and reading, I will admit to noticing how the Charles/Beatrice/Wilfrid triangle has similarities to Emerson/Amelia/Sethos, though at least I went a different direction with the unexpected familial relationships.

Aside from that my life is mostly tomatoes and Swiss chard at the moment.

Comments

[mmegaera]

YES! I've been saying that the Amelias and the Miles books are readalikes for well over a decade now, and that I want more series like them, but nobody's found me any [pout]. See also: http://mmegaera.livejournal.com/86042.html

[hedda62]

I don't know if there are any series like them - at least for me, because I want the fantastic adventures along with the family saga. Dorothy Dunnett does kind of the same thing, but the tone is utterly different.

I do have different responses to Peabody and Vorkosigan on the level of... emotional seriousness, I guess, and literary sophistication, but it's not just the few cozy corners of the Vorkosigan books where I see the similarities. I think it's that "we fight for our people" aspect, because the character parallels break down pretty quickly (once you get past the fact of a one-child nuclear family). Ramses=Miles is probably the closest one, but not very close really.

[mmegaera]

I've tried Dunnett several times (as you probably saw if you read the comments on the link I posted), but I just cannot get past her prose, alas.

And, yes, there are a lot of differences, but, to me, they strike the same sort of chord. I just wish I could find more that strike a similar chord for me [wry g].