The Aubrey-Maturin books are finally available as eBooks, which is very convenient on cold winter nights when one finds oneself in a foul, foul mood. The Surprise sails from the penal colony of New South Wales to address Franco-American schemes in the Friendly Isles. Clarissa Oakes, a remarkable convict woman, has been smuggled aboard. She is much admired. This is not entirely a good thing.

LeCarré’s first novel. This fine mystery-thriller prefigures much of what is to come, especially the wonderful Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. This encounter encounter with George Smiley, Peter Guillam, and Inspector Mendel is a terrific little story, a fine little mechanism of deception. Part of the mechanism has rusted because the book’s original audience, in 1961, was less immersed in feminism than we are. Nonetheless, a terrific little book.

Lieut. Jack Aubrey, RSN, meets Dr. Stephen Maturin at a concert. They dislike each other at once. Thus begins the story of an unforgettable friendship that spans twenty volumes and seven seas. Taken together, they are the great historical novel of an era of historical novels.

This delightful little cookbook explores the lost Victorian craft of jellied desserts. Using good gelatin and real food is a revelation to people accustomed to the flavor and texture of Jell-O™. The glow-in-the-dark gin and tonic jelly was great. Linda says that last night’s cherry jelly, made with frozen cherries, was the best cherry dessert she’s ever tasted.

In 1856, an eighteen-year-old English chemistry student named William Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine. He failed – quinine would not be synthesized until 1944 (by Woodward and Doering) – but noticed that one of his failures seemed to leave a pretty purple residue. This residue turned out to be mauveine, the first artificial dye and the foundation of the modern chemical industry. This readable account is short of scientific detail (although it does nicely capture how little chemistry Perkin and his contemporaries knew), but nicely captures the importance of the dye trade as a stepping stone to propellants, pharmaceuticals, and plastics.

I bought the freshly-printed paperback at City Lights, a fitting place to buy this latest chapter in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our culture wars. Maupin has a dazzling gift for renewing narrative energy, an uncompromising warmth of spirit, and he resisted from the first hwat must have been an overwhelming temptation to make his queer characters more approachable by showing us some who are even queerer.

Mary Ann returns here, and it’s like she’s never left. The horrid Republican harridan of the middle years is gone, and she’s back in town, learning about Facebook and staying with Mouse. She’s not reading her daughter’s sex blog, which makes her blush, and that turns out to be a big mistake.

I was reading Armistead Maupin’s new Tale of the City, Mary Ann In Autumn and for some reason recalled these wonderful lines of Byatt’s invented fairy poetess, Christabel LaMotte. This delightful book imagines the lives of two invented Victorians, writes their work, and imagines the scholarship that has sprung up around them. In my earlier readings, I had not realized how sharply drawn the modern academics are, or how scathing; every entrance of Byatt’s prototypical Young American Academic, Dr. Leonora Stern, makes me cringe over memories of my own blunders. Even the invented poetry is wonderful: that silent sympathy sells the whole thing.