I finished reading Cordelia Frances Biddle's The Conjurer yesterday. While it didn't quite live up to my expectations I still enjoyed it in the end. I wish more attention had been paid to the two main characters, Martha Beale and Thomas Kelman, rather than some of the less important ones. Philadelphia sounds like a lovely place and from the author's afterword it is quite historical feeling even now. I had never really thought about visiting there, but I think I might enjoy it. You can check out the author's website here.
I knew before I even closed the Biddle book that I wanted to read something by P.D. James finally. I am also in the mood for something with a coastal setting, so Devices and Desires, set along the Norfolk coastline sounded perfect. I am only a few chapters in but I am already enjoying it. I think someone told me it didn't matter if I read the books out of order. Usually I like to start reading mystery series at the beginning, but I guess I will cheat this time around. I don't know much about Adam Dalgliesh other than he is a Commander of New Scotland Yard, and he writes poetry. As a matter of fact he has just had a book of poetry published to some acclaim. He is off to Norfolk, as an aunt died and left him a converted windmill. I suspect he is going to get caught up in an investigation of a serial killer while on his holiday. All this and only two chapters in!
I have also finally gotten around to starting Elizabeth Cambridge's Hostages to Fortune. This is the book selected by the Dovegreyreaders group. Some people have already finished it and started discussing, but I am a bit behind. I think I am going to like it. It is a domestic novel, which starts in 1914. It begins with the birth of a baby, and I believe it is going to basically about the trials and tribulations of married life and living in a small village. Catherine is the wife and mother. It seems she is also an author:
"...Catherine went on writing a long novel in the Wessex manner, full of strong-minded dark women and farms in lonely places and Nature and Destiny, and a great many other things which she knew nothing whatever about. For more than anything else, more than William or Audrey, Catherine loved ink.
To see, and feel, and experience things were not enough. The desire to express...to take someone else by the shoulders and force them to look too, the rare beauty for which words can hardly be found, this was the strongest impulse Catherine had. It wasn't a quiet feeling. It was a caged beast that padded up and down and banged its head against the walls of its cage and fretted to be let out. The quivering blue silk of the sea, the swimming fame of blue succory in the uncut corn, the sharp gritty sound of wheels in summer dust, the wandering scent of sweet-briar after rain, these things hurt her unless she could express them."
The first part sounds a lot like Thomas Hardy's Tess to me! William is her husband and Audrey her daughter. I've said it before, but I'm going to have to say it again--I really love Persephone Books novels!
I am also working on the Harry Potter book I mentioned. And I will need to start Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights very soon. And there are those reader's copies I should have finished by now...I somehow feel I am never going to have a reasonable books on my nightstand, which is something I have wanted to achieve all year long. Still the year's only half over.