Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
Confession: I’m having trouble remembering what I’ve read recently. I’ve been joking with friends that our long-running serial House of Plague has been going on for so long now that we’ve run out of new content and been reduced to reruns. This week was “Norovirus: the Return!” otherwise known as “On the Ninth Week of Viruses, My Offspring Brought Home From School…” sung to the tune of “Twelve Days of Christmas”. Really, I’d have preferred a partridge.
I’m pretty sure in the midst of all this, I read something that was both new and good, but I can’t remember what it was. But I can tell you that right now I’m reading Maureen Johnson’s Nine Liars and absolutely loving it. (Other Cold Comfort Farm fans out there who have read it– did you notice that the whole story revolves around something nasty in the woodshed? Please tell me that’s deliberate! It has to be deliberate.) Like the previous books in the series, true crime buff Stevie is presented with an unsolved murder– this time in England! Involving a 1990s Cambridge comedy troupe rather like the Footlights. Only with more murder. What could be better?
What have you been reading this week?
p.s. there are a whole bunch of things I’ve meant to be posting about but…. I haven’t had much computer time this week. Or many brain cells left. So I’ll just say that if you check my Events page you’ll find a registration link for the Two Wars and a Wedding Launch Event in Connecticut with Sarah Penner and Heather Webb. I’ve been adding details for other events as they come in. (Can you believe it’s under two months now to Two Wars and a Wedding?!?)
Right now, you’ll be able to find me at Pequot Library in CT on 3/21, Shakespeare & Co UWS in NYC on 3/22 (with special guest Lynda Loigman!), FoxTale in Georgia on 3/23, Litchfield Books in South Carolina on 3/24, the Poisoned Pen in Arizona on 3/25, and Ocean House in Rhode Island on 4/12. I’m also looking into a Massachusetts event and an Albany event, so stay tuned!
I like to refer to Nine Liars as murderous Peter’s Friends! And I totally had got the something nasty in the woodshed but the second you said that it clicked SO into place. Especially how they act cagey about the woodshed before the murders. I read all of Stephanie Burgis’s Harwood Spellbook, and it was just the right alt-Regency England with females in power and magic that I needed. Now I’m reading George MacDonald’s ‘ Phantastes’ for book club, it’s very, magical fairy journey that everyone else borrowed from for the next hundred plus years from C.S. Lewis to Tolkien and even the movie ‘Legend’ has a LOT lifted from this book. I’d actually also say Dickens too. It’s interesting as like proto-fantasy. Next up is another Regency Fantasy book ‘The Ill-Kept Oath’ by C.C. Aune and I can’t wait to start!
I ended up reading “Killers of a Certain Age” on my beach vacation and LOVED it. I had to ration my reading the first day so I would have enough for the second day. I recently read “The Last Thing He Told Me.” It’s been on my TBR but I wanted to read it before the Apple TV series is released and it becomes impossible to get at the library. It was fantastic. I started it one night after the kids went to bed, read until I absolutely had to go to sleep, they’d finished it during breakfast the next morning. Also been reading a bunch of Emily Henry for happy fluff and enjoying them much more than I thought I would.