I finished reading Barbara Vine's A Fatal Inversion (excellent--will write about it later in the week hopefully), and I thought I was all prepared with a new mystery book, but now I'm not so sure. I have Tana French's In the Woods set aside, but the Vine was so good it's hard to choose a book to follow it. I better concentrate on some other books and decide later.
After seeing this list of favorite mysteries, I was wondering if there was a definitive list out there of that included more international authors as well. I didn't find one, but I did find a couple of other interesting links. I came across this list of The 50 Greatest Crime Writers. And I love this idea--Around the World in 80 Sleuths. I momentarily toyed with the idea of making my own little reading project of it, but then thought better. The moment I make a list of books I will read, I will want to read entirely different authors! But this is a great list to use as a source for some good international crime fiction. Many of the authors are new to me.
I picked up a few books from the library after work--no mysteries however. They all sound good and I'm not sure which I'll start with. Until I decide they will join the towering pile that I already have checked out. I brought home Beatrice Colin's The Glimmer Palace (historical fiction set in early 20th century Berlin), Antonio Munoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes (literary novel set in 1960s Spain--this is a work in translation that I'd really like to read), and Erin McGraw's The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (about a young wife and mother who gives up her dull Kansas life and runs away to Hollywood when it was in its infancy--early 1900s--and recreates her life).
And I've done some serious shuffling on my MP3 player. I was not getting along at all well with most of the books I had saved. I got rid of most of them and will give some new books a try. I've been listening to Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. It is actually a radio dramatization done by the Colonial Radio Theatre of Boston, and it's very well done. I'm really enjoying listening to it. It is only a couple of hours long, but I love hearing the different voices and music and other sound effects. So this is what people did before TV! I still want to read the book, though. I have lots of other good stuff to choose from when I finish; Robert Alexander's The Romanov Bride, Katharine McMahon's The Alchemist's Daughter, Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adentures in Wonderland (read by Michael York). Surely these will keep me busy for a good while now!