Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy New Year! Here’s wishing everyone a joyful, healthy, happy, book-filled 2021 I’m so looking forward to sharing the journey of the coming year with all of you– and piles of books, of course.
Over the past couple of weeks, while I’ve been largely off-line with my family, I’ve discovered a new to me 1970s British mystery author, Catherine Aird, with an understated sense of snark that I love (the books remind me a little of Elizabeth Peters’s earlier Jacqueline Kirby books in terms of the time period and some of the internal monologue).
And, of course, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without one of Donna Andrews’s Christmas-themed excursions in her long-running Meg Langslow mystery. This year it was Lark! The Herald Angels Sing featuring a Christmas pageant with an unexpected visitor and villains routed with Christmas carols.
I devoured Matthew Haig’s The Midnight Library, about a woman who thinks she has nothing left to live for, and, in that twilight space between life and death, explores all the lives she might have lived.
I bounced hard off a novel that will remain nameless, which got amazing reviews, but I found grim, clichéd, and thoroughly unpleasant– but made up for it by bouncing happily through Charlotte MacLeod’s elderly Christmas anthology, Christmas Stalkings, and making a list of new to me mystery authors whose books I now need to read.
And I have both Addie LaRue and a new Jenny Colgan novel still waiting for me, so 2021 is off to a happy start indeed.
What are you reading as the old year passes into the new?
In my continued quest to catch up on the books that came out while I was on the American Library Association Notable Books Council, I finally read The English Wife, and before that King of the Rising by Kacen Callender, the second part of the duology that started with Queen of the Conquered last year.
Really going old school this weekend, with books #1-3 of the Judy Bolton girl detective mystery series by Margaret Sutton. Outdated, but still fun to read.
I was happily surprised to find out my library had actual paper copies of at least the first few in the series.
Re-reading the Sherry Thomas Lady Sherlock series so that I can finally start her latest…Murder on Cold Street.
2020 was all about the re-reads for me. I finished off the year in the middle of re-reading The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley. I also just finished reading Pollyanna. It’s a good reminder to look for the good in a year of so much negativity.
I loved Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michael’s books. Straying over to Band of Brothers because I just watched the miniseries again. Also reading Steve Berry and Brad Meltzer as a break from mysteries.
Lauren, please read Christmas in Angel Harbor by Jeannie Moon. She was a new author to me, but the book review was glowing in our local newspaper in Long Island, NY. The book is based in Angle Harbor which is a fictionalized version of Northport, NY which is on the north shore of LI. The story is a few steps above a Hallmark movie like a cup of tea and at times something stronger! A bookstore is featured in the story but sadly Northport does not have a bookstore. Our closet independent bookstore is the Book Review in Huntington. Eagerly awaiting The Band of Sisters! Happy New Year!
I loved Addie and Christmas At The Island Hotel. I just started Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke’s Pieces of My Heart.
I listened to the Dear Evan Hansen audiobook this week and loved it! Cast of 3 AND featured 2 songs from the musical. I have all of Jenny Colgan’s Christmas books to read now, they just came in for me at the library.
No Offense by Meg Cabot is fun so far (contemporary romance, some lite mystery thrown in too).
To Lauren and all her blog followers, a very happy New Year to you all!
I am slogging through “The Light Bearer” by Donna Gillespie. I have been craving a good read set in Ancient Rome (Loved all of Kate Quinn’s and Michelle Moran’s novels set in ancient times and wanted more) but for some reason it just isn’t taking! I hope it gets better! If any of you have any recommendations, I would love that 🙂
Eagerly awaiting Band of Sisters and some other great books coming out in 2021!