There was much excitement this weekend over the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, that quirky British time travel show that’s so very hard to explain. It seemed like a good to do an If You Like about Doctor Who– but for the fact that I’m drawing an (almost) blank. Only two books came to mind:

— Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and

— Charles Stross’s Laundry Files Novels

both of which mesh modern Britain with quirky paranormal and alien activity, with that same sort of tongue in cheek sense of humor.

Other than that, I’m having a hard time thinking of anything that fits the Doctor Who bill. What would you recommend for hard core Whovians?

This week’s If You Like comes courtesy of Christine, on a topic that certainly rings a bell for me: books you discover and then wonder what on earth took you so long.

I recently had a conversation with someone about coming in late to a book that has been around for years. She has just started reading Outlander. When I read Outlander, in 2010, I couldn’t believe I had never read this book before. It was like, where have you been all my life? Or, rather, where have I been for the last 18 years? (or maybe it’s that I was 11 in 1992 and it would’ve been really inappropriate for me to have read it then) Here are some other books that it took me a long time to find.

What books did it take you years to discover? And when did you first read a Pink Carnation book?

I feel vaguely smug that I discovered Outlander and the Kearsley books right when they came out, but there are a number of others to which I came late. To add my list to Christine’s:

– Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Chicago Stars series, starting with It Had To Be You (published 1994, read 2007). My sister had been telling me for ages that I had to read these…. It took me a while, but I quickly made up for lost time.

— Elizabeth George’s Lynley novels, starting with A Great Deliverance (published 1988, read 2002). So much better than the PBS adaptation!

— Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare and Russ Van Alstyne mysteries, starting with In the Bleak Midwinter (published 2002, read 2009). I owe this one to social media buzz. Once I read that first book, I rushed out and bought all the others to date.

— It feels like it took me a very long time to discover Kristan Higgins’s contemporary romances, starting with Just One of the Guys, but now that I look it up, I discover that I was only two years late to the Higgins party: the first, Fools Rush In, came out in 2006 and I discovered Just One of the Guys in 2008, thanks to an All About Romance review. (Thanks, AAR!)

Which books did you come late to?

… will return as scheduled next week.

Apologies for the delay!

In the meantime, I’ll try to think up something special for Teaser Tuesday tomorrow.

We all have plot devices we don’t entirely love. One of the ones that I tend to shy away from is the “girl in breeches” trope. On the other hand, once I started thinking about it, I realized that there are a vast number of exceptions to my “no books about women posing as men” rule.

If you like books with women posing as men, you’ll probably like….

— There’s nothing like the master! Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which Rosalind flees into the Forest of Arden disguised as a young man named Ganymede, and, of course, Twelfth Night, in which the shipwrecked Viola disguises herself as the page Cesario, falling hopelessly in love with Orsino, who eventually reciprocates the sentiment (as my Shakespeare prof in college used to say, “We know what the pet names in that family will be!”).

— Georgette Heyer’s The Corinthian, sheer, madcap fun in which the heroine poses, as various points, as a schoolboy, the hero’s cousin, and his nephew;

— Also Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades, in which the heroine, Leonie, has been raised as Leon, and serves as the hero’s page before being schooled as a lady;

— Going very Old School, Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s Civil War set Ashes in the Wind, in which the heroine, Alaina, poses as “Al”, the lad who helps out in the hospital (until the brooding Yankee doctor takes him under his wing and tries to make “him” take a bath);

— And more Old School, that classic of high camp, Johanna Lindsey’s Gentle Rogue, in which the heroine, Georgina, can only get passage home to America by posing as “George”, a lowly cabin boy;

— While we’re on the high seas, Carole Nelson Douglas’s seventeenth century swashbuckler, Fair Wind, Fiery Star, in which the heroine, Miranda, goes disguised as a boy on two separate occasions, once as a cabin boy, and once as a young man come to town in London;

— More recently, Eloisa James’s Duchess By Night, one of her Desperate Duchess series, in which the widowed Duchess of Berrow decides to spice up her life by attending a house party as a young man;

— And even more recently, Juliana Gray’s Princesses in Disguise trilogy, beginning with How to Tame Your Duke, in which three princesses from a German principality with a Wodehouse-esque name are whisked to safety disguised as boys– and adventure and romance ensues.

What are your favorite girls disguised as boys novels?