Death on the High C's

Robert Barnard - Death on the High C's

Opera singers are often described as being larger than life, and certainly this is true of Gaylene Ffrench. Her appetites - for men, for booze, for attention - are gargantuan, and her ability to irritate is similarly outsized. So when someone electrocutes the bombastic Australian contralto, few tears are shed at the Northern Opera Company (though it's a pity her understudy's so lousy).

Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, 2nd Edition

With the exception of the first chapter, which is an enlightening but pretty dry history of book publishing, the author writes with an enganging and personable style that's highly unusual for an "academic" book. I picked it up thinking that I'd browse through it and found myself reading it cover to cover. There's a bit of the usual feminist/critical studies rhetoric but it's neither bombastic enough nor pervasive enough to dampen the book's accessibility nor its credibility.