Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
It’s a particularly happy Friday for me, because I’m finally back at my desk for the first time since May 10th! There have been a lot of planes, trains, and automobiles in the meantime, which has meant a lot of reading time. I have to confess that I don’t remember all that I’ve read, so I’m going to work backwards from most recent to least, starting with….
The Marlow Murder Club! I read this in a single night this past week. Basically, it’s Midsomer without DCI Barnaby. Or maybe the more accurate comparison would be Thursday Murder Club meets Midsomer. Either way, it was an adorable, quirky, English village mystery, and I loved it.
Temeraire! I know, I know. I’m only about fifteen years behind on these. I vaguely recollect their coming out around the same time as the original Pink books, but, at the time, I was hyper-picky about my Regency reading (because I was living so much in the Regency myself) and rather shied away from the idea of an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars that involved dragons. Fortunately, it’s been a while, so when my best friend told me she was binging Temeraire and I should read them, too, I happily picked up His Majesty’s Dragon, followed by Throne of Jade, and fell into the wonderful world of Laurence and Temeraire. If you loved Horatio Hornblower, these are for you. (The best way I can think to describe them is Horatio Hornblower with dragons.)
It’s a personal tradition that I always, always read a Jenny Colgan while on book tour. This time, it was Welcome to the School by the Sea, the first in her new series of boarding school novels for grown-ups, in which a teacher from Glasgow takes a position at a posh boarding school in Cornwall. Sadly, the sequel isn’t out yet, so I dug deep into my Jenny Colgan emergency reserves and found Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend, vintage chick lit that felt like a time capsule back to the early 2000s, when I was living in London and reading books with candy pink covers.
Last but not least, I began my book tour reading journey with Kitty Zeldis’s upcoming novel, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights, in which three women’s lives intersect in Brooklyn in the 1920s: a story of resilience, reinvention, and found family, in the vein of Sue Meissner’s The Nature of Fragile Things.
What have you been reading this week?
Reading Ron Chernow’s Hamilton bio (I try to read something related to American Revolution around this time each year) and enjoying it; it’s particularly fun to trace which bits Lin Manuel Miranda used as inspiration for specific songs in the musical 🙂
Thanks to your recommendation just finished the first two “Inheritance Games” Books and was so disappointed to find out that the conclusion of the trilogy doesn’t come out until August 30th. So read “The Lost Coast Literary” by Ellie Alexander and the gentle “Aunt Dimity and The Enchanted Cottage” another great long running series about current English Village life.
I was deep in the graphic novel series Harrow County, which is Southern Gothic Horror with the most amazing art. Seriously, one of my must read graphic novels. Then I’m comfort reading Jane Austen’s juvenalia and unfinished work, oh how I wish she had finished Sanditon, but I do love the show… I think I might be diving into another Bridgerton book… BUT my copy of ‘The Lost Summers of Newport’ just arrived and it’s so pretty and shiny and telling me to read it.