I’ve just got back from a weekend in Aberdeenshire where I had expected to be able to finish The Portable Dorothy Parker, well – I didn’t quite manage it but I’m not far off the end. Often her short stories feature married couples who are quite mismatched and spend a lot of time bickering and misunderstanding each other. One is about the stresses of dating with a young woman willing the phone to ring, praying that ‘he’ will ring her. They’re about human nature and she had a neat turn of phrase such as – His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets

I had expected her stories to have more humour in them but I’m still finding them entertaining. I had no idea that Dorothy Parker wrote poetry, there are a lot in this book and they are often quite funny.

General Review of the Sex Situation

Woman wants monogamy;
Man delights in novelty,
Love is woman’s moon and sun:
Man has other forms of fun.
Woman lives but in her lord;
Count to ten and man is bored.
With this the gist and some of it,
What earthly good can come of it?

What do you think? A wee bit dated maybe? My copy of this book is in the first half of The Penguin Dorothy Parker.

And what did I get up to in Aberdeenshire? Well, three castles were visited as was one bookshop, and I now have nine more books to find space for, but more about those in another post.