Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday! Here’s what I’ve been reading this week:
— Julia Spencer-Fleming, To Darkness and to Death
I finished up my Julia Spencer-Fleming marathon with To Darkness and to Death
— Jane Langton, Emily Dickinson Is Dead
I am so fortunate in my friends. Just as I was wondering what I was going to read to ease my Miller’s Kill separation anxiety, a huge care package of books arrived in the mail, hand-picked from second hand stores by someone with incredible book taste. I decided to start off with this vintage academic mystery, in which an Emily Dickinson symposium brings out all the greed, anxiety, and murderous tendencies of the scholars in attendance.
— Sarah MacLean, One Good Earl Deserves a Lover
This is the second in Sarah’s Rule of Scoundrels series (coming to a bookstore near you on January 29th!) and for you MacLean fans out there, I think this might be her best so far.
What have you been reading?
I’ve never read Sarah McClean but the one you mention looks attractive. I seem to be obsessed recently with Christmas regency romances so I’ve read this week:
1) Miss Merry’s Christmas by Callie Hutton
2) A Winter’s Knight (Christmas novella) by Elizabeth Cole
3) A Christmas Surprise by Lindsay Downs
4) Just started The Duke of Christmas Past by Kim Bowman
I know, I know….one is too many and a dozen aren’t enough!
During this week of Pre-Holiday Madness I just had to relax with small but charming volume of Christmas poems edited by John Hollander, and with my dear friends Turnip and Arabella, “The Mischief of Mistletoe” being my favorite Pink Carnation book. Every year at this time I’m skimming through the pages of “Williamsburg Christmas” and Karen Anderson “A Fairy-Tale Christmas” I picked up years ago at Tarrytown’s Lyndhurst Castle, looking for decorating inspirations.
I’m also anxiously awaiting a package with Elizabeth Peters’ “The Love Talker”, I ordered earlier this week.
I felt the same withdrawal symptoms after I read all the Julia Spencer-Fleming books one after the other. I gather that she also published some letters between Clare and Russ while Clare was in Iraq, but when I tried to get them I discovered that they’re not available to us in the UK – or to people in Australia either. But you should be able to get them!
(It isn’t clear to me why, when things are published, the global distribution isn’t taken care of: I can understand that certain publishers will only have rights in the US, but why don’ the usual UK publishers have and exercise the rights? It seems that authors aren’t making these decisions – Tracy Grant was surprised when I told her I couldn’t get hold of her His Spanish Bride. Who is not doing what they should be doing? It’s most frustrating for readers, and of course the authors lose sales too. Sorry – rant over!)
Rant resumed at lesser volume: it’s not just Tracy’s novella – I can’t get Deanna Raybourn’s Silent Night either. grrrrr!!
I finished How the French Invented Love, and now I’m rereading The Essential Ellison by Harlan Ellison. I started it before my copy of The Duchess War arrived or Forever a Lord or Ripe for Seduction hit my local B&N, and I don’t like switching between books, so I will have to get through it so I can start one of those.
Finishing up school and doing Christmas decorations has cut into my reading time, but after reading the first Laini Taylor book about Angels and Demons, I started the second one as soon as I could, and while the second is vastly different, it’s amazingly good in it’s own way!
Another little rant … the international publication of audio books is even more capricious. The last time that I tried to get one of Anna Dean’s Dido Kent mysteries, I had to order it from her UK publisher, and it had to be shipped to me in California. Apparently, they believe that no one in the USA wants to listen to them.
I just finished Cockatiels at Seven, Donna Andrew’s ninth Meg Langslow mystery.
I am currently reading Courney Milan’s The Duchess War and I love it so far.
Still reading “The Three Musketeers”. Slow going but really very good.
What with the knitting and buying of X-mas presents and all, it was another slow reading week for me… But I’m still burried deep into Alex Scarrow’s Time Riders series!
By the way… Merry Christmas to you all!
This week, I read The Racketeer by John Grisham. I enjoyed it, but didn’t feel that it was up to his normal standard of excellence. I didn’t see the ending coming, but the overall story was a bit farther removed from the realm of possible reality than I think his other books usually are. He pretty much said that it wasn’t based on facts and that he kind of winged it. I always enjoyed that his legal dramas seemed like they could really happen and that wasn’t the case with this book. It was still very good, though.
I am about a hundred pages into Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper. It is my first experience with one of her books and I am excited to see what everyone has been talking about!
Father Christmas by Barbara Metzger. I have a long list of Christmas-themed books in my TBR pile so I’m making a concerted effort to ignore Jeffrey’s list.
AmyN, eons ago, in my youth, I read all of the Musketeer books. I’ll admit they got to be a bit of a slog after awhile, but I’m glad I read them. Hang in there.