Weekly Reading Round-Up
Hello from the blizzard! Right now, I’m hunkering down with a well-worn copy of Elizabeth Peters’s Summer of the Dragon
What have you been reading this week?
Hello from the blizzard! Right now, I’m hunkering down with a well-worn copy of Elizabeth Peters’s Summer of the Dragon
What have you been reading this week?
Hope you’re keeping warm and safe!
I finished The Winter Sea and it was fantastic! I’ve loved every one of Susanna Kearsley’s books that I’ve read.
So glad for once that Wisconsin isn’t land of the blizzard… though we did get a good foot of snow this week…
I finished my re-read of Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love and I enjoyed more then I did the first time! Following which I picked up Marrissa Meyer’s second book in her Lunar Chronicles, Scarlet, which is a furturistic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood… which isn’t as good as Cinder so far, which was the first in the series.
I found a new-to-me romantic suspense author – Hester Rowan. I read Snowfall, which has been re-issued by Bello, and then tracked down and ordered Linden Tree, Alpine Encounter, and Overture in Venice. I loved Snowfall, and am enjoying Overture in Venice – they were written in the 1970s so have a lovely dated feel and do remind me of Mary Stewart.
Does anyone know i she wrote any other romantic suspense books? I think she also wrote crime under a diferent name.
Right now I’m reading the Odyssey because of my Humanities class. It was covered in high school, but I never got a chance to read the whole thing chapter to chapter, so it’s quite refreshing right now because it feels like if each chapter is coming alive.
I’m preparing for One good earl deserves a lover and reading A Rogue by any other name!
I sympathize for the blizzard, we had a bit of it here yesterday! Stay home and keep warm!
This week I read two really cute books from Jillian Larkin’s YA series The Flappers – “Vixen” and “Ingenue” and very interesting, beautifully illustrated “Keeping Up Appearances : Fashion and Class Between The Wars” by Catherine Horwood.
Since we’re having a Snow Day and my husband and kids are playing happily outside, I just started very promising Jojo Moyes’ novel “Last Letter from your Lover”.
I read The House of a Thousand Lanterns by Victoria Holt–great fun! It wasn’t as fabulous as some of her better known books (can anything touch Mistress of Mellyn?), but I really enjoyed it and its exotic colonial Hong Kong setting.
Now I’m in the middle of A Place of Secrets by Rachel Hore, which was apparently a big thing in the UK. It’s about a book appraiser (who got her Ph.D. at 24?? Um, no, I don’t think so) who is working on a set of eighteenth century astronomical manuscripts and instruments at a crumbling old country pile and, of course, stumbles onto a generations-old mystery. So far so good!
Pam, that always drives me crazy. There was a book I encountered back when I was in grad school about someone who supposedly acquired a PhD, from the Harvard history department no less, in three years. Um, no. You don’t even come up with your dissertation topic until the middle of the third year!
Although, to be fair, on the UK side, they graduate from university younger than we do and their D.Phils are much faster. They do actually do them in three years– where the average for a U.S. PhD is closer to seven or eight years.
p.s. while I’m on this rant, my other pet academics-in-novels mistake? People who widely field hop, who are meant to be experts in Renaissance Italy one minute and writing a monograph on eighteenth century England the next. Does not happen. I’ve seen people move from working on the English Civil War to the Restoration, or from Reformation Germany to Eastern Europe in the same period (although with several years of major intensive language study and retooling involved in the latter case), but field lines tend to be too firmly drawn for people to jump both countries and centuries. It would involve switching advisers, familiarizing yourself with a whole new historiography, acquiring the necessary language and paleographic skills…. End of rant.
Oh, I’m so glad I’m not the only one! I figured that it was more likely that a UK student could finish more quickly, but she’d still be about 5 years out from her bachelor’s with the M.Phil and D.Phil. Clearly I have spent too much time thinking about this…
The field-hopping drives me crazy, too, unless you happen to be Simon Schama (and his different interests are still loosely connected). There was an art historian, Sabine MacCormack, who wrote on Late Antiquity and colonial Latin America with equal aplomb, but yeah. I think my favorite is Professor Rossi in The Historian, whose “encyclopedic production” runs the gamut from ancient Greece/Crete to the Dutch Golden Age. No way! Different languages, historiographies, methodologies, oh my! And then there are the descriptions of someone spending “an entire year researching/writing a book about ___.” And then my head explodes.
(I did like The Historian a lot, though…)
Sarah Maclean’s One Good Earl Deserves a Lover– gotta love a quirky glasses wering heroine!
I read Moranthology by Caitlin Moran and The Introvert’s Way by Sophia Demling, and now I’m reading Zombie, Illinois by Scott Kenemore
On a whim, I decided to read Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s “Beautiful Creatures” — probably because every commercial break is dominated by the movie trailer. But, the book was pretty great. So, I’ve been reading the entire series this week. I definitely recommend.
I am finally reading Death Comes to Pemberley. It’s been fun thus far:)