<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Trash. Rubbish. Disposable or disposed of. Your trash could be my treasure – or vice versa – but we all know sometimes it’s just what you need. What you have to have, along with soft-centred chocolates in the afternoon. Trashy … Continue reading ![\"n125647\"](\"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/n125647.jpg\")
<\/a>So, my day has been devoted to sinful novel-reading. I started with The Two Mrs Grenvilles<\/em> by Dominick Dunne. Here’s the first paragraph:
\nThe room was filled with the heady scent of roses past their prime. Pink petals fell from swollen blossoms in a Chinese bowl onto the polished surface of an ormolu escritoire…
\n<\/em>(Isn’t that fantastic? Say it out loud – ormolu escritoire – <\/em>and don’t even bother about what it actually is). <\/em>The book continues for a lush, luscious and totally fabulous 375 pages of decor and name-dropping. Not to mention sex, scandal and socialites and of course, murder. The thing is, this is trash but so well-written, so perfectly done, it’s like watching a movie only better.<\/p>\n<\/a>My Cousin Rachel<\/em> by Daphne de Maurier.Please, don’t anyone get insulted if I say de Maurier wrote trash. I think she’s a wonderful writer and the biography by Margaret Forster reads like a novel. Would it sound better if I said she wrote ‘tosh”? Or ‘tripe’? ‘Cos this is amazingly, wonderfully, seriously ripe and ridiculous. First-person narration by an unwordly misfit a la Rebecca<\/em> but this time it’s a male. Sense of doom from page 1 (uncle makes child look at decayed body on gibbet, for starters). Dripping with detail and description. Takes itself seriously (absolutely no<\/em> laughs). Femme fatale. Suspicion, obsession, madness and murder…or is it? I saw the movie once – Richard Burton played Phillip and Olivia de Havilland was Rachel – but as above, the book’s the thing to immerse yourself in when you’ve just got to have high-class, fabulous rubbish to read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"