Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
After a whirlwind couple of weeks on the road for The Author’s Guide to Murder I’m finally back at my computer– and I promise to share a tour round-up here soon! It’s been a marvelous blur of bagpipers, plaid, prosecco, and haggis hors d’oeuvres. Thank you so much to everyone who joined us at an event, bought a copy, or requested it at your library.
Thanks to brilliant bookseller Karyl at Charter Books in Newport (seriously, thank you, Karyl!!!), I’ve been binge-reading Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books and they were just exactly what I needed right now. Isn’t it funny how sometimes you find a book at the wrong time and then it pops up again ages later just when you need it? (Or when an extremely intuitive bookseller with marvelous taste recommends it to you?) Decades ago, I picked up a copy of the first Mrs. Pollifax book at a school book fair and bounced off it. Hard. Twelve year old me demanded that my heroines be ingenues: it was all Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt and Elsie Lee and a romance to go with the suspense.
Now? Now I absolutely adore the idea of an unlikely spy in her 60s. Mrs. Pollifax, garden club member and pusher of the library book cart who volunteers herself to the CIA on a whim, is the pluckiest of plucky amateurs. She’s a Mary Stewart heroine as empty nester. She’s Joyce from the Thursday Murder Club books if Joyce also had to be Elizabeth. She’s my new hero and I’ve blazoned my way through The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax, The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax, A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, and right now I’m very happily on safari with Mrs. Pollifax in Mrs. Pollifax in Safari. Given that there are fourteen books in the series, I suspect I shall be traveling with Mrs. Pollifax for quite some time– or at least until I run out of Pollifax books!
What have you been reading this week?
Well sadly I didn’t have a Mrs. Pollifax to hang with, just the angsty magicians of the Alexandrian Society as I started Olivie Blake’s Atlas Six series. I just finished the first book, ‘The Atlas Six’ last night and THANKFULLY, given the cliffhanger, I have the next two books on my Kindle from the library. Might not be my favorite dark academia with magicians… But it’s what I need right now. A total escape from reality… Although it was revealed in the cliffhanger they might just accidentally end the world…
The Mrs. Pollifax is one of my all-time favorites. Such fun.
I have yet to read Elsie Lee! All the others I have read and enjoyed! Which ones were your favorites, Lauren?
My very first Elsie Lee was “Mansion of Golden Windows” so that one will always have a very special place in my heart! (And it’s set in Scotland, so total win.) I also love “Satan’s Coast” and “The Spy at the Villa Miranda”.
I just stumbled across this weekly weekly reading round up. And I was happy to find it! I am now totally blind and the first book I read using the braille and talking book library player on my iPhone was the first of the pink carnation series! Thank you for many happy hours of listening to your books
Just finished and really enjoyed Wayward and now started We Solve Murders 🙂
I just read The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen. Loved it!