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…

On tap for this week have been: — Eva Chase’s Black Rabbit Hall, a dark Gothic (think echoes of The Thirteenth Tale), with a surprisingly upbeat ending, set in a moldering manor house in Cornwall; — Barbara Michaels’s Wait for What Will Come, because once you read one Gothic set in a moldering Cornish manor…

The first half of this post was originally meant to go up last week– but the arrival of a small person intervened. So let’s call this fortnightly round-up instead of weekly round-up today? (Also because I just love the word “fortnight”.) I started last week old school, with a murder mystery from the early 80s:…

I’ve been having such a good run of new books recently. On tap for this week was: — Francine Matthews’s Death in Rough Water, the second of her Nantucket-set Merry Folger mysteries. The more I read this series, the more I love it– particularly the developing relationship between the detective and another character, which reminds…

I had a stack of books I was saving for slightly later in the summer, but couldn’t resist digging into them now. So, this week, I treated myself to: — Amy Poeppel’s Small Admissions (which just came out in paperback), a smart and snarky combination of social satire and coming of age story, in which,…