Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
It’s been something of a whirlwind of a week: I took my very first plane trip since 2020 to meet up with the other two thirds of Team W to plot the fifth (!!) Team W collaboration, Band of Sisters came out in paperback on Tuesday, All the Ways We Said Goodbye was featured as a BookBub deal yesterday (and is currently on sale for $2.99), and my revisions for the Cuba Book were approved, which means I get to start working on the next book! So I’m in the multi-book vortex and thoroughly discombobulated. (Not to mention spending every spare moment compulsively hitting refresh on the news on my phone.)
But, in the midst of all that, I did get some excellent plane reading time! I was meant to be reading ARCs, but really felt in the need of comfort reads, so I pulled up a book I’ve been saving for a rainy day, the fifth book in Lucy Parker’s London Celebrities series: Headliners. If you haven’t read these, they’re contemporary romance set around London’s theatre world, with plenty of snappy banter and overt homage to Austen. This one involves rival television presenters who find themselves forced to save a struggling morning show– together.
After that, it was back to my Gamadge-a-thon, with books twelve through fourteen of Elizabeth Daly’s 1940s mystery series: Night Walk, The Book of the Lion, and Dangerous to Know. Sadly, the series only has sixteen books, so I’m bumping up against the end. Which means I’m going to have to find a new sanity-saving series…. All suggestions welcome!
What have you been reading this week?
Reading Pamela by Samuel Richardson (frequently referenced in Regency romances as something the heroine has read, as it was first published 1741); it is often referred to as “the first novel,” and is interesting.
Continuing with the audiobook form of JD Robb’s In Death series; now on Loyalty in Death, cop drama set in futuristic New York, entertaining way to pass time while driving.
Loved Headliners, one of the best in that series!
Mostly I’m continuing to catch up on things that I didn’t have time to read last year because of book award committee obligations. I read A Swift and Savage Tide by Chloe Neill, the second in the Kit Brightling series, which is sort of an alternate world fantasy version of Patrick O’Brian but with romance (or as quite a few Aubrey/Maturin shippers would probably prefer me to put it, they admit to the romance). I’m about halfway through The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan and loving it. And today I started an ARC of The Lost Summers of Newport.
I just finished reading ‘Secrets of a Summer Night’ by Lisa Kleypas and am moving onto some true crime, which apparently inspired ‘Twin Peaks’… ‘Murder at Teal’s Pond: Hazel Drew and the Mystery That Inspired Twin Peaks.’