Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
In this week of book launch, I’ve found myself, in the words of the Shakespeare sonnet, “with what I most enjoy contented least”. Or, in plain English, I couldn’t seem to focus on reading books I know I otherwise would have loved, and it’s entirely not them, it’s me. So you’ll hear about those books at some future date when I can actually focus on reading them.
What finally broke the book slump was Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Album, which I am happily reading in fits and starts whenever I can get a moment away from launch stuff. Mary Roberts Rinehart is known as the American Agatha Christie (and was nearly as prolific!). I think what made this book break the slump wasn’t that there was anything remarkable about it– but that there wasn’t. Like Christie, Rinehart provides a very reliable sort of world (in her case, the upper middle class America of roughly the same time period as Christie), and there’s something so very comforting about knowing exactly what one is reading.
There’s a bit in one of Elizabeth Peters’s Jacqueline Kirby books where Kirby comments that she read mystery novels because she was a librarian, and being constantly interrupted by patrons, and they were the sort of book one could pick up and put down again. (Help! Peters fans! This is now going to drive me crazy– was this line in The Murders of Richard III or Die for Love?) At the time, I was deeply skeptical. Put down a mystery? Really? But now I think I get it…. Rinehart has been a wonderful pick up and put down and pick up again sort of companion this week.
What have you been reading this week?
In other housekeeping sort of news, Month 2 of the Pink Carnation Read Along, The Masque of the Black Tulip, has begun! You can find all the instructions and a registration link for the end of month Zoom meeting with super special guest Tasha Alexander here. (I intend to start baking ginger biscuits and posting recipes and results here shortly.)
I’m also trotting around the internet, talking about Band of Sisters for the rest of this month! And into April. You can find a list of the next few days’ events here— and a more complete list of events here.
Happy Friday and happy reading!
I’m reading the same book! It’s wonderful.
Continued catching up on the C. S. Harris St Cyr mysteries I’d missed, and now moving on to catching up with Anna Lee Huber’s Lady Darby mystery series (set slightly later, 1830s, though still largely in England). Reading #6, A Brush with Shadows, and enjoying very much!
I just finished A Brush with Shadows! I’m also reading Jodi Taylor’s St Mary’s series.
What’s funny is I’ve been watching old Murder She Wrote episodes. Mystery must be in the air. I’m currently reading my Amazon First Read pick for the month. I chose The Light Through The Leaves by Glendy Vanderah and it’s very good so far.
I am currently reading Band of Sisters and am really loving it:)
I am reading it slowly, to savor it. So far, I’ve noted 2 hints/references to Rilla of Ingleside, which were fun to pick up. (I am pretty sure they were not just my imagination connecting those dots!)
After finished ‘The Masque of the Black Tulip’ the weather had me feeling something Gothic was needed, and hence I’m reading Laura Purcell’s latest ‘The House of Whispers’ AKA ‘Bone China’ to those anywhere but the US. It’s very Daphne Du Maurier, and I’m liking it! Though much of today was taken up with assembling bookshelves to put my books on!