Here are some of my favorites of 2005:

My favorite Regencies that I read for the first time included Nonnie St George’s Courting Trouble (yes, it came out halfway through 2004, but I’m way behind in my reading!) and Judith Laik’s The Lady is Mine. (By the way, I’m following Amanda’s lead and not listing books by fellow Risky-ers — or we’d all just list each other’s books and, how boring would that be?) ๐Ÿ™‚ By the way, yes, I think the woman pictured on this cover is definitely falling out of her dress.

My favorite Regencies that I re-read include Joan Smith’s Sweet and Twenty.


My favorite Regency reference book of 2005 is LETTERS FROM LAMBETH: The Correspondence of the Reynolds family with John Freeman Milward Dovaston 1808-1815, introduced and edited by Joanna Richardson. For such a long, dry title, it’s surprisingly sprightly, and delightfully droll. Two of my favorite quotes from the letters of John Hamilton Reynolds that it includes are:

The arrival of the Shrewsbury Chronicle has spurred up my head & collected the few grains of wisdom that wandered about my spacious Scull into one large grain & from that LARGE GRAIN you are to expect whatever comes upon this Paper.

I am ordered by my Mother and Father to return you their unfeigned thanks for noticeing the Slovenly & noncencical Letters of Jack Reynolds. I always had a confounded bad opinion of his writings and your remark has confirmed it . . .

And, yes, the creative spelling is all Reynolds’s.


My favorite Regency-related movie was the new PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. My favorite Christmas gifts were the dvds of the Ciaran Hinds/Amanda Root PERSUASION, the Gwyneth Paltrow/Jeremy Northam EMMA, and the Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. (All of them were gifts from my husband. Yep, I picked a good one. Oh, and in exchange I gave him the complete HORATIO HORNBLOWER series starring Ioan Gruffudd, so I guess we’ll be watching a lot of Regency television come 2006!)

What were some of your favorite Regency things this year? Please share!

And for those of you taking the Read-a-Regency challenge: have you made any progress in the past (presumably extremely busy) week? If so, please update us on your reading experiences!

Happy New Year all! And may 2006 bring many Regency delights!

Cara
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — out now from Signet Regency!