Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Halloween!
In honor of the impending spook-fest, I’ve been in full-on Gothic mode this week. The weather has been cooperating by raining relentlessly.
I started with Patricia Wentworth’s The Benevent Treasure, which I was assured by a friend was the most Gothic of the Miss Silver novels (ingenue heroine, left penniless by the death of her aunt, entertains an invitation to visit estranged family in their eerie manor house in the shadow of a hill). No ghosts, but plenty of skullduggery, legends of missing treasure, and human malice.
From there, I moved on to the classically creepy Mexican Gothic, which has all the elements of the traditional Gothic: the mysterious house, the mysterious family, the spunky heroine finding herself increasingly beset by forces beyond her control– but fighting them. But there’s a twist to it all. The ghosts might be something more than just ghosts….
What have you been reading this week?
Finished #4 in the Cormoran Strike series, Lethal White, and starting #5–luckily it’s nice and thick, as I can’t get enough of Strike & Robin!
I finished a great Prohibition era mystery, The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye, and then read The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women by Elizabeth Norton.
I just finished a re-read of Northanger Abbey then decided to read a classic gothic – The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe.
Is that the book mentioned in Emma?
Finished The Unwilling by Kelly Braffet – it’s a cliffhanger and now I have to wait ☹️☹️! And HIGHLY recommend the Midnight Library by Matt Haigh – wonderful!
Re reading Harry Potter for a little bit of comfort-reading 🙂