firecat

Seemed appropriate to infect Livejournal with this as well...

if by some chance I got on Jeopardy & was facing the screens, if these were the categories that appeared, I would be grinning b/c I would know that I was about to ace the game. So what would they be? -- L1

1. Indie Punk Bands of 1982
2. Group Dynamics of Eclectic/Dianic Covens
3. Care and Feeding of Non-Tenured Scholarly Book Authors and the Correct Use of Commas
4. Product Team T-shirts of Apple Computer
5. Polyamory: Theory and Practice on the Internet
6. Cat Photography Tips
7. Homeowning on Fifty Cents a Day

Current Mood: mischievous
Current Music: Something by the Buzzcocks, I suspect

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jenett

*grin* Nice to know there's others out there.

Yep. I think I own every book she's ever written under any of her three names, barring one of her non-fiction books (the one with "Red Land" in the title..) and I think one of the Barbara Michaels ones that's a couple of decades old.

I have indeed read the new one, as she's one of a very small handful of authors I buy in hardcover.

I got to hear her speak at the Brown University Egyptological Department centennial (she apparently more or less invited herself, and they were delighted to let her.) She stood up on stage and talked for a bit, and then took questions from the audience, including some pretty cutting edge archaeological stuff. Very impressive.

I asked her what other authors she really liked reading, and was amused when one of them (and the one I remember now) was Lois McMaster Bujold (whose work I also adore.)

(For anyone not sure why one should be this enthused, Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels are pen names for the same woman, who holds a Ph.D in Egyptology (and then decided she didn't want to go dig in the hot sun all winter...) and who's written a tremendous number of books.

They're all quite well written (though she's gotten better as she's done more, her earlier books are a bit weaker) with interesting characters, strong mystery plots in a sort of Dorothy L. Sayers style (strongly character driven) and often with a strong archaeological or academic sort of setting. The Peters ones are straight mysteries, sometimes with romance, the Michaels books are romantic suspense. (Not sappy, but you end up with romantic happy endings.)