Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
It’s been a best friend book bonanza this week. For ages and ages, my best friend has been recommending The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. And for ages and ages, I’ve had it sitting there unread. I finally read it, and I’m kicking myself for not having had the good sense to follow her advice sooner. (This is the same best friend who gave me L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle in tenth grade. She is always right about books. Always.) Basically, it’s as if a Robin McKinley book had a love child with the Rivers of London series. In London. In the ’80s. Our heroine finds herself with unexpected powers pursuing an unexpected destiny in a world which contains many more layers than she ever began to imagine. There are water spirits and genus loci and booksellers with mythical powers (and books). It’s wonderful and I’m just sad it’s a one-off and not a series.
Properly chastened, I moved right on to something else my best friend has been recommending for ages: Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co series, about a small but scrappy ghost-hunting agency in an alternate England beset by spirits. If anyone else loved the Three Investigators books back in the day, this reminds me a bit of those, but with a strong, first person female protagonist. I read the first one, The Screaming Staircase, in one night, and now on to Book Two, The Whispering Skull.
Not to mention re-reading The Orchid Affair for the Pink Carnation Read Along with special guest co-host Karen White this coming Tuesday!
What have you been reading this week?
I’ve been doing rereads too: The Orchid Affair and Wicked City, to name a couple. I just finished Farewell Blues by Maggie Robinson and I have a bad case of the same. I absolutely hate for this four book series to end. It takes place in England in the 1920s. Lady Adelaide is coming out of her year of “mourning” after her dashing rake of a husband drove into a tree and killed himself and his latest squeeze. Unfortunately he has to redeem himself to get into heaven, which means popping up to “help” Addie and protect her when she starts finding bodies. And she gets a crush on the handsome Anglo-Indian Scotland Yard inspector.
“The Left-Handed Booksellers of London” has been sitting in my TBR pile since Christmas! Guess I better dig it out since I’ve already finished “Orchid Affair.”
“The Orchid Affair” is my reward for getting through this awfully boring and badly written bio on Jim Henson I’m currently reading for book club. It might be interesting if you don’t know much about him… maybe?
I just finished Deadly Summer Nights by Vicki Delany. It’s set in a catskill resort in 1953 and was very entertaining. I will definitely read the 2nd in the series