("Speaking from Among the Bones", "Soulless")

[fiefoe]

Soulless (The Parasol Protectorate) by Gail Carriger
I haven't read genre fiction for ages. It's fun to pick up the Regency novel in-jokes (obligatory complaint about bad food at the Almack's etc), but my jaded taste isn't refreshed enough to make me want to stick around once the first kiss is over.

• Then she had made certain to read oodles of ancient Greek philosophy dealing with reason, logic, and ethics. If she had no soul, she also had no morals, so she reckoned she had best develop some kind of alternative.
• She paused dramatically, lowered her voice, and said in sepulchral tones—“he had a fang-lisp.”... among vampires, lisping was the height of vulgarity.
• The truth of the matter was that most Alphas and hive queens in the modern age held power by the same civilized means as everyone else: money, social standing, and politics.
• Floating had almost eclipsed hunting as the preferred pastime of the aristocracy.
• Alexia decided she must be dealing with an original.
• But vampires rarely chose drones from among those who occupied the limelight. They preferred a more behind-the-scenes approach to soul hunting: recruiting painters, poets, sculptors, and the like. The flashier side of creativity was universally acknowledged werewolf territory, who chose thespians, opera singers, and ballet dancers to become clavigers.
• Nothing was funnier than watching a vampire try to emulate a werewolf.
• Before that prestigious revolution in philosophy and science that their emergence triggered, known to some as the Renaissance but to vampires as the Age of Enlightenment.
• There were vampire hives on this tiny island before there were human governments. The feudal system was based on hive and pack dynamics. The Roman Empire took its style of organization and efficiency from our kind.
• But like all outsiders in good faith with the establishment, they tended to forget their revolutionary roots and side with the establishment.
• Strange place, that overseas land, where religion and wealth did the talking and history and age held so little sway.
• He tasted wonderful: of salt and meat—like gravy.

Speaking from Among the Bones: A Flavia de Luce Novel by Alan Bradley
The book has shades of "I Capture the Castle" but the young heroine is entirely too fond of her poisons.

• IT WAS ONE OF those glorious days in March when the air was so fresh that you worshipped every whiff of it; that each breath of the intoxicating stuff created such new universes in your lungs and brain
• She insisted on drinking it plain, “no cream, thank you,” the better to see herself in the shimmering liquid surface.
• WHENEVER I’M A LITTLE blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.
• “Her name is Nancy,” he said, indicating the instrument panel, then, glancing at me, he added, “… after Burns’s poem.”... “ ‘Though poor in gear, we’re rich in love,’ ” he quoted. “From ‘The Soldier’s Return.
• I had once improvised by removing my braces and forming the wire into a passable pick
• With filthy fingers I untied my laces and removed my shoes and socks. Shoving one of the socks into one of the shoes to give it additional thickness, I used the other to tie the shoes together, soles outermost, into a makeshift rubber brick.
• Again Father surfaced. It was like carrying on a conversation with a deep-sea diver who resubmerged after every sentence.