Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
How is it only a week until the Team W Readers’ Weekend in Newport and the kick off of The Author’s Guide to Murder tour?? (If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, you can still join us in Newport next week! It looks like the weather is going to be gorgeous.)
It’s been a dizzying whirl of the usual pre-launch sorts of chores (don’t even ask how many Q&As and podcasts and essays we’ve all done this week), but in between digging plaid out of my closet and zooming in on various platforms that make my computer crash, I discovered the Hildegard Withers mysteries, starting with The Penguin Pool Murder. They’re roughly the same period as my beloved Elizabeth Daly Gamadge mysteries, but these are downtown to Gamadge’s uptown, starring elementary school teacher Hildgarde Withers and an NYPD detective who is reluctantly fascinated by Miss Withers’s detecting prowess. So far, my favorite is Murder on the Blackboard, but I have several more ready to read on tour.
After that, I decided it really wasn’t spooky season without some haunted house books, so I took the recommendation of a number of lists, and read Burnt Offerings— and rather wish I hadn’t. While I recognize its place in the haunted house canon, it was not for me, both stylistically and subject-wise. I may need to go reread John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer or Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls.
What have you been reading this week?
In housekeeping news, it’s only one week until The Author’s Guide to Murder!
You can find the list of tour stops I’ll be attending here. Beatriz and Karen will be doing a bunch more without me, and you can find those here. (For family reasons, I’m hopping off the tour November 10th, and won’t be back until the December 12th Ocean House stop.)
You NEED to watch the movie version of Burnt Offerings, it’s hilarious. Karen Black, Oliver Reed, and Bette Davis all overacting to the nth degree! I too have been needing something seasonal, so I quickly read my book club’s book of the month, Kate McKinnon’s Middle Grade debut which was OK ish, very much inspired by A Series of Unfortunate Events. So not much resolution as it’s about creating the series. But I finally read Affinity by Sarah Waters, oh, so wonderfully moody! Victorian women’s prison, spiritualism, lesbian romance, double crosses! Really trying to figure out what could follow that…
I watched the Hildegarde Withers movies with Edna Mae Oliver when I was quite young with my Dad. Remember them fondly, but have never read the book so I might give them a whirl. I think they are available at the Poisoned Pen bookshop near where I live.