This week, my amazing college roommate sent a care package to me. There was Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible for my daughter (who gave it the bedtime reading two thumbs up) and Elsie Lee’s Wingarden for me. One of the things I love about Lee’s books is what perfect time capsules they are: little snapshots…

I should listen to my best friend more often. Back in the spring, she recommended Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway mysteries, about an academic in Norfolk who stumbles upon crime– or has crime brought to her, in the form of bones to be dated. This time it was Judith Flanders’s Sam Clair series, about an editor…

What with the recent heat wave, it’s hard to believe it’s almost the middle of October already! To get myself into the right mood, I started my annual Halloween reading with Simone St. James’s Lost Among the Living, a ghost story set in the aftermath of the first World War. If you haven’t read St.…

Mostly, I’ve been reading research books about 19th century Barbados this week, which, while absolutely fascinating, don’t really qualify as light reading. (But if you want to know about liminal groups in late 18th century plantation culture, I’m your gal!) For fun, though, I finally picked up Maureen Sherry’s Opening Belle, an incisive satire about…

Do you ever get to the end of the week and find yourself completely incapable of remembering what you read– or did– earlier that week? That’s me right now. Somewhere in the mix was Bill Bryson’s essay collection, I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away, about returning to…

There are some weeks when you just need a Georgette Heyer novel. This was one of them. So I pulled out my battered old copy of one of my top ten Heyers, The Talisman Ring, which contains some of my absolute favorite comic moments (such as the hero’s absolute refusal to ride ventre a terre),…

It’s always a joy discovering a new series. Instant reading material! This week, I moved on to book two in the Invisible Library series, The Masked City. These books remind me so much of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books. Anyone else remember and love those? After that, I zigzagged back to Scotland and women’s fiction…

So many thanks to Alison for recommending Frederica! This is, indeed, an excellent Heyer, with all the best Heyer features: a lofty hero rendered human by an unlikely heroine, comic side characters, and an enforced stay in an inn (Heyer does excellent comic relief with enforced stays at inns: see also Sprig Muslin and The…

How is it September already? I saw out the summer with winter in Scotland: Alexandra Raife’s Until the Spring, in which a pregnant woman seeks refuge with her lover’s family in a remote Scottish manor house after being tossed out by her adoptive parents. This Alexandra Raife book in particular is oh so very Britain…

Nobody does comic relief quite as elegantly as Georgette Heyer, the woman who invented the Regency romance. So, this week, in honor of Heyer’s birthday, I read two Heyer novels I had somehow missed out on over the years: Cotillion and Venetia. If there are any Mischief of the Mistletoe fans out there, then hie…