Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
My new book kick continued this week with another read-in-one-sitting Riley Sager novel, Final Girls, a riff on the traditional college girl slasher story– but with a great deal of twist. I am not a fan of slasher movies. I prefer the classic ghost story, tingle on the back of the neck sort of horror. But I still loved this book.
From a cabin in the woods, I moved on to The Hazel Wood, Melissa Albert’s dark fairy tale, in which the granddaughter of a reclusive and legendary author of fairy tales finds herself drawn into the story in ways she never expected. With the breakdown of the walls between the real and the fantastic, I was reminded strongly of Ian Donaldson’s King of Morning, Queen of Day, which still haunts me, twenty-five years after I read it (I really need to re-read King of Morning, Queen of Day! Any other King of Morning, Queen of Day people out there?).
Side note: I have had the Judy Collins version of Yeats’s “Song of Wandering Aengus” stuck in my head all week. “I went into the hazel wood….” Yep. Still going.
Right now, I’m back to the Miss Silver mysteries as a palette cleanser, after which I have a whole treasure trove of new books lined up to read– including Karen White’s upcoming The Last Night in London and Serena Burdick’s Find Me in Havana.
What have you been reading this week?
Continuing with the Cormoran Strike series, finished #2 The Silkworm, mysterious & grotesque & thoroughly enjoyable (sometimes you just want a modern day crime thriller), and starting #3 Career of Evil today.
Just started Tea and Treachery –teashop set in Cape Cod. So far an enjoyable light mystery. I finished Dead-End Detective by Amanda Flowers and quite enjoyed it.
I read a fairly academic book called French Reactions to British Slave Emancipation by Lawrence C. Jennings, because I pick up odd things from Half Price Books sometimes. Before that I attempted to read The Women’s Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and committee, but couldn’t take any more anti-Semitism from some of the contributors and gave up midway through Exodus. And last weekend I read The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan, which was a delight as always.