Happy Friday, all!

This week, I treated myself to Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders, the start of a wonderfully tongue in cheek series starring a bodyguard and her retired police officer father-in-law as they trot around the globe evading assassins, along with their unlikely ally, a larger than life 1980s novelist.  (I’m so amused because Team W’s upcoming book, The Author’s Guide to Murder, also includes a larger than life leopard print wearing 1980s novelist.  Great minds?)

Appropriately for Spooky Season, I’ve also been reading Ronald Hutton’s fascinating survey, The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present, which attempts to trace the various ways in which witches and witchcraft have been defined over centuries and cultures and the attendant historiography.  (Anyone else a fan of his biography of Charles II?)  Back in my early modernist days, I spent some time writing about 16th century witchcraft statutes, but it’s a revelation seeing the broader context in which these strains emerged and the ways in which historians and anthropologists over the generations have fought over how to synthesize and interpret them.  Anyway, this is all background for the book I’m just starting work on. It’s a contemporary paranormal set in the Hudson Valley, but, yes, it does involve witchcraft, and the general slipperiness of the definitions of witchcraft, wizardry, and sorcery was annoying me greatly.  So I went back to my research roots….

What have you been reading this week?