nothing ruins your day so much as going to the dining hall with a book and looking forward to a good read over breakfast, and then finding your book is absolutely rubbish and that you can't go back and change books. you would think a collection of essays with the title "dorothy l. sayers: the centenary celebration" could not be lousy reading but how most of these essays got into print is beyond me. nearly all of the essays are poorly written and consist mostly of descriptions rather than analysis and lack real insight. many are also very poorly researched. most of them would make you wince - they read like high school essays (you know, the kind of essay that goes "*summarise episode/lengthy quote* this shows that *some obvious or facile comment repeating the summary* therefore...") and some really embarrassing essays, like the one comparing wimsey to jeeves and james bond, which is the sort of tenuous connection which gives structuralism a bad name. there was a truly horrible one called "sayers on dante" which ought to have been of some good but turned out to be a summary of the inferno between sandwiched between two gushing paragraphs about how much dorothy sayers's translation has made her wiser and richer. please, someone take her out and shoot her.

there are a few essays in the collection which are actually readable and thoughtful, but with the exception of one or two they are the ones which are critical of sayers and ultimately disparaging: "we reread the whimsey (sic) stories and to that degree they are literature, if lewis is right, but it would be wrong to rank them higher than they deserve" or "her throne rocky and much of the praise ill-considered." also, i'm rather shocked that anyone might think agatha christie a better writer than dorothy sayers, whose writing is supposed to be "strained." christie's writing being more "spontaneous" is hardly something to recommend it; you'd be hard pressed to find any memorable passages in a christie, but open something like gaudy night at random and you will find elegant passages that resonate in your mind. in general, plenty of unfair and sweeping comments like: "...dated so much compared with agatha christie," (well, so what? her books were written in the 1920s. christie wrote hers through to the early 70s and besides which hers were hardly realistic.) "wordiness," "dogmatic," "elitist" (because of the use of foreign languages and wimsey's aristocratic background...there was a bit in one of them that went: "in the same book (this is gaudy night he's talking about) there are passages of french and latin, even greek..." i like the way "even greek" is used as some kind of ultimate impeachment there.) - all of which are "indicative of a rather unpleasant aspect of the books" which was her "pandering to readers' snobbery" and parading her own "superiority," ending finally with the comment that "dorothy sayers' reputation rests on the wimsey books, and unthinkable though it may be, wouldn't they have been much better without him?" the most upsetting remark was, to me, when one of them wrote: "the height of absurdity is reached when wimsey propsed to harriet using a latin question employed in university voting." oh for goodness sake! and honestly, could YOU refuse anyone who said "placetne, magistra?" also, calling peter wimsey "effete" is a bit much.

so all in all, my breakfast was completely ruined.