We’re actually getting to the point where we’re wondering if Alexander McCall Smith isn’t just TOO prolific. Here we were thinking we need to get hold of The Lost Art of Gratitude after seeing it in hardback earlier, and then I discover we’ve actually completely missed The Comfort of Saturdays! Really, the speed that man writes at! How are we supposed to keep up?
All is forgiven, though, the moment I start the first paragraph. As always, Smith amazes me with his ability to make me feel like I’m strolling along at a comfortable, sedate and philosophical pace while what I’m really doing is turning the pages as fast as is humanly possible. Or thereabouts.
Isabel Dalhousie is a lovable lady and her tendency to overthink achingly familiar in many ways. And her wry observations make me laugh:
The modern world was a tolerant place: even murderers brazened it out these days: they wrote their memoirs, telling all, and publishers fell upon them with delight. There was no shame there, she thought, unless the memoirs included an apology to the victims, which they usually did not; on the contrary, they sometimes blamed the victims, or the police, or their mothers, or even, in the case of one set of memoirs, the mothers of the police.
What could be better?
I can only see one drawback to this series so far and that is that it makes me devastated for a second every time I emerge from the books and realise I’m not actually in Scotland. But they are worth it.