Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all! In between wallowing in the correspondence of the members of the Smith College Relief Unit (oh my goodness, those letters!), I’ve been blazing through some new books– mostly thrillers, which I suppose isn’t that surprising, since that seems to be such a large part of what’s on the shelves right now.
First, I gobbled up Megan Miranda’s The Last House Guest, about a woman in a small New England town whose life has been shaped in all sorts of ways by her relationship to the town’s tony summer people. Things start to go very sinister when her best friend, the daughter of the town’s first family, dies mysteriously….
In a similar vein, I’d been impatiently waiting for Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key, which perfectly captures the Gothic eeriness of The Turn of the Screw for the tech generation, as a nanny in a remote Scottish manor house that’s been turned into an all-electronic “smart house” finds things malfunctioning all around her. Is it ghosts? Or is human agency involved? And why did all those other nannies leave before her?
From there, I moved on to Caitlin Macy’s Mrs, which I read more as an ethnography of the Upper East Side than as a novel (if you also attended the Gold and Silver Ball back in the day, or have children in Upper East Side preschools, you’ll find this a very familiar world). It’s a latter day Bonfire of the Vanities in which dark secrets bring down an old banking family.
After all that, I went back to the tried and true: Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery. Because, really, you can’t go wrong with Miss Marple.
What have you been reading this week?
I finally read Les Liaisons Dangereuses. I’d seen the play a couple of times, and there’s another production coming up in a few weeks about an hour away that I could conceivably go see, but I’d never read the book. The script that gets produced the most often is pretty faithful to it, but it’s funnier than I expected. (There are two different introductions, both actually written by the author but each allegedly by different people, one of which argues that what follows is most likely an authentic collection of letters, the other of which argues that it’s not, neither of which are all that sure that you should read the book.)
I just finished The Summer Country before my plane landed. So good! I loved the jump between eras with every chapter and how the characters, especially Mary Anne, stayed true to character until the very end. 👏👏👏 I gobbled it up and still have more of my journey to go, so I’ll be watching this thread for recommendations!
Time After Time by LisaGrunwald, very good.
Im reading The Secret Wife by Gill Paul.
Got an ARC of Sara Donati’s latest, Where the Light Gets In, which is the sequel to her first novel The Gilded Hour. Both are AMAZING and I highly recommend!!
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson which was excellent. Then, The Adults by Carolyn Hulsee which was very amusing and witty. I also read The Summer Country and loved it!
Oh hooray! I have been waiting with bated breath for that book! I LOVED The Gilded Hour. Do you know the release date?