Muriel Spark

I've been thinking about how sequencing affects our impression of an author.

About a year and a half ago, I picked up Memento Mori, and immediately became a Muriel Spark fan.    Loitering with Intent confirmed that belief, and I followed it with Aiding and Abetting, The Finishing School, and A Far Cry From Kensington**, around the holidays, but none of these were as good as the first two I'd read.  Also somewhere in there, I started but couldn't finish The Mandelbaum Gate.

Over the course of this year, I've gone through Territorial Rights (April), The Abbess of Crewe (July), and The Ballad of Peckham Rye (September) with the same "these are all right, but not nearly as good as Memento Mori" impressions.  Why do I keep reading after seven relative disappointments?  Well, they're short.  I could complete each of these in no more than a few hours of reading (with the exception of The Mandelbaum Gate, which is why I dropped it), so there isn't a lot of risk in hoping for another Loitering with Intent.  Still, if I had read any of these other books first, I might never have discovered the ones I really like, and would have a lesser impression of Spark's abilities.

Now I finally came to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (yay!  it was in the library!) and The Girls of Slender Means.  I can't say that I *enjoyed* these as much as I enjoyed the first two Spark books I read, but they are effective and affecting tales of British women in the aftermath of WWI and WWII, respectively.  

** To be fair, A Far Cry From Kensington may be much better if read after The Girls of Slender Means