Happy Friday, all!  And happy November!

The stand out read for me this week was Linda Wilgus’s The Myth Keeper, coming out in April.  Set in 1830s Cornwall, this was entirely unlike anything I’ve read recently– unless you count rereading Victoria Holt and Anya Seton.  This had major vintage Victoria Holt vibes in the best possible way.  An eerie, crumbling manor house; a young woman whisked from her desperate circumstances to be lady’s companion to an erratic woman in a supposedly cursed house; a missing girl from a decade before.  The master of the house: is he the hero?  Or is he a villain?  And are there really piskies or is there human agency at play?  It’s slow, atmospheric, immersive– and I read it in a single night.  If you’re also a Victoria Holt fan, mark your calendars for this one!

Previously this week, I read The Bookshop Below, in which a woman with a checquered and secret past inherits a magical bookshop and the responsibilities and dangers that come with it, in a world in which books hold magic and booksellers sometimes grow violent in their ambitions….

I also continued my visits to Mrs. Malory’s Taviscombe with the nineteenth book in the series, Mrs. Malory and Any Man’s Death.  I’m so sad there are only two books left.  I may just have to go back to the beginning and start again so I can go on living in Taviscombe with Mrs. Malory, her best friend Rosemary, and the assorted corpses that keep coming her way.

This was a slow reading week for me because I was dragged back down the rabbit hole (although less a rabbit hole and more a sink hole) of the plagiarism drama of four years ago, when someone tried to pass off The Secret History of the Pink Carnation as her own (but with a different title and cover).  Unfortunately, print copies of that book are still floating around for sale and part of this week was spent trying to remedy that.  Again.  I also shared some thoughts (for thoughts, read Big Feelings) about the overlaps between my experience of plagiarism and the recent advent of generative AI, which you can read on Instagram.

What have you been reading this week?