Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
I’ve finally been reading through some more of the Books Many People Have Said I Must Read, starting with Tia Williams’s Seven Days in June, an utterly engaging contemporary romance served up with a strong slug of social satire as a successful writer of erotica (heroine) and a celebrated author of Serious Literary Fiction (hero) have to confront their shared past, their own demons, and the fact that each has been surreptitiously writing about the other for the entirety of their careers.
After that, it was Arsenic and Adobo, a charming cozy mystery about a Filipino-American woman who goes back to her midwestern hometown to help out in her aunt’s restaurant, is wrongfully accused of murder when her evil ex lands facedown in his dessert, and has to find out whodunnit to clear her name and save the family restaurant.
Right now, I’m in the middle of Sarah Pearse’s The Sanatorium, which is many things, but not cozy. After the cheerful snark of Seven Days in June and the madcap antics of Aresenic and Adobo, moving on to the wintery grimness of this Swiss-set thriller feels a bit like being hit in the face with a fistful of snow. Although given that it’s ninety some-odd degrees in New York right now, maybe that’s a good thing?
What have you been reading this week?
I devoured ‘Survive the Night’ in *almost* one sitting. Then I moved onto ‘Rules for Vanishing’ by Kate Alice Marshall, which is about an urban legend about a disappearance of a girl on a road in the woods and teens who are trying to find out the truth at a steep cost. It’s interesting, told kind of Blair Witch style, and everyone is an unreliable narrator. It reminds me of something else, I still haven’t figured out what… Then I’ll be onto ‘Black Sun’ by Rebecca Roanhorse for my book club, following that up with the Pink re-read. I have a fully booked weekend!
I read Beck Dorey-Stein’s terrific beach romance Rock The Boat, which made me want to go to the Jersey Shore, and Lea Geller’s The Truth and Other Hidden Things, which dropped me right into the Hudson Valley. I’m starting Helen Ellis’s book of essays, Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light, she always makes me laugh.
Somehow, I never read the Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth George, despite seeing recommendations for years.
I finally started reading #1 yesterday, Crocodile on a Sandbank, and I’m hooked! It’s nice to know I have the rest of the series to look forward to:)