Happy December! There’s something about that post-Thanksgiving lull (and working on revisions) that just calls for comfort reading. For me, that means mysteries and British chick lit. I dipped into Laurie King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series with A Monstrous Regiment of Women and A Letter of Mary, in the latter of which one of my…

There’s something about crisp fall weather and new (or new to me) books that just go together. This week, I’ve dipped into: — Laurie King’s Pirate King. I leapt over several intervening books to get to this one, but how could any lifelong Pirates of Penzance fan resist the lure of Pirates AND Mary Russell?…

When the weather gets crisp and the sky begins to go gray at four, it makes me think– well, yes, of London, but also of the New York of twenty-odd years ago, the scarred dark woodwork and nubby blue chairs of my school’s library, and the books I read in those chairs: Mary Stewart, Victoria…

My Halloween treat this year was re-reading Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls, which was, impossibly, even better on a second read. I never thought I’d love anything as much as Simone St. James’s 1920s ghost stories (Because, 1920s. And ghost stories. Enough said.), but this modern/1950s dual timeline story is even better. It comes…

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),…