Happy Friday, all!

Can you believe it’s August already?  I can’t decide if the summer is just beginning or almost over, but either way I’m pretty sure I’m behind on my to do list.

My reading recently has been equally all over the place.  I’ve been ping-ponging back and forth between my ultimate comfort read (chain-reading Charlotte MacLeod’s Sarah Kelling books in order, starting with The Family Vault— for those who MacLeod, I’m currently just past The Convivial Codfish) and a wide range of new-to-me books in a variety of genres:

— Thriller: Peter Swanson’s Nine Lives, a twisty take on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None in which nine strangers each receive a list of names… and have to figure out just why they’re being killed off;

— Non-fiction: John Wood Sweet’s The Sewing Girl’s Tale, about the 1793 rape of Lanah Sawyer and subsequent trial.  This one is cheating, because it’s really for work– the Sawyer trial comes up in the Levi Weeks trial (aka the Manhattan Well Murder) and the defense teams overlap in the person of one Brockholst Livingston.  This book sent me down some very useful research rabbit holes… which was also a good excuse to put off actually writing while I went mad with maps and census records;

— Horror: T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, a very Kingfisherian reimagining of The Fall of the House of Usher set in an alternate 1890s in a small, make-believe European kingdom– those of you who have read Danny Dragonsbreath will not be entirely surprised to hear that there are possessed bunny rabbits;

— Sci Fi: Becky Chambers’s The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.  Those of you who know me know that I make technology break by being in the same room with it and, aside from the occasional dip into Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, I stay firmly on the Fantasy side of the Sci Fi/Fantasy section.  This book is one of those glorious exceptions where the characters and their voices are such fun and the world-building so strong that I’m willing to ignore all the electronics.  It’s a bit like reading an episode of Firefly, and I’m so excited that there’s a whole series to binge.

What have you been reading this week?