The only thing that is going to get me through this week's arctic subzero temperatures is the promise of warmer than normal temps next weekend. Could it possibly be close to 50F on Sunday? It's something to look forward to in any case. Until then I will continue to stay nestled indoors under warm blankets reading my books and working on my needlework projects. I really hate wishing my life away (as in I wish it was the weekend), but I can't but help look forward to sunny, if not warm then moderate, days. And it is even staying lighter a little longer every day. Bliss.
There are new book choices up at The Slaves of Golconda. Do go take a look, and if you think you'd like to read along place your vote. Things got off to a very good start this year with Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. There's a nice mix of books to choose from, and we won't be discussing the book until the end of March.
I wish I could read South Riding by Winifred Holtby in time for Cornflower's discussion in a few weeks, but I am sure I won't manage it. I think, however, I'll have much better luck next month as she's chosen Peter Ellis's A Morbid Taste for Bones, the first Brother Cadfael mystery set in Medieval times. Although I've read Edith Pargeter before, I've yet to read any of her Cadfael mysteries she wrote under the Ellis pen name. I even have this one sitting on my reading pile.
I've started a few new books. I've been following Teresa's progress on the Morland Dynasty series of books. She has only a few more to go until she's read all that the author has published. I'm sure I've mentioned them here, but I'm sorry to say my own pile of books has been untouched for the last couple of years. I had to go all the way back to the beginning of 2009 before I could find something I'd written about the last book I read by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. Teresa has been reading one a month for the last couple of years, hence her steady progress. I wonder if I should try and do something similar--at least try and read a few this year. So I pulled out book #6, The Long Shadow, and started it this weekend. I very much like her style of storytelling, but the problem is, I think, that I am stuck in the Restoration years, which I am not particularly a fan of. I believe this and the next book center around a spirited young character called Annunciata who has strong ties to the court of Charles II. More to follow on this one.
I also raided my library book pile and started the slender novel, Stone in a Landslide, by Maria Barbal. This is one of the Peirene Press books that so many people were writing about last year. I had the set of them checked out last fall and didn't read a single one. I decided I would tackle them one at a time instead. Barbal is a Catalan author and I like her spare prose style in which she tells the story of a young girl from the country who goes to live with her aunt and uncle and falls in love with a builder. As this is set during the years leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War, I expect Conxa's life to be turned inside out.
Watching Downton Abbey put me in the mood to read something from the Edwardian period, or if not from the actual period, then about it. I've picked Katharine McMahon's Footsteps. I've read and enjoyed several of her novels, in particular her recent The Crimson Rooms was one of my favorites last year. I'm not sure any of her other books can top that one for me, but I am enjoying Footsteps. The novel has parallel storylines with one reaching back into the past of the other. This may be a case of I wish she had just told the story set in the Edwardian period, but it's too early still to tell how things will work out. Or it may also be a case of I loved Downton Abbey and how could you possibly top a story like that?
Otherwise my reading is filled with the usual suspects. I'm still working away at Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. I've not been writing about it, but I am reading it almost daily. I was planning on reading one novel a month, but I am still in the first book. I am hoping to finish it and book two by the end of the month, however. I'm determined to finish Molly Keane's (M.J. Farrell's) Taking Chances by the end of this week. Maybe I'll be writing about it next weekend? And I am very slowly reading Elizabeth George's doorstop of a mystery, This Body of Death. Despite George's shortcomings, I do love her novels. I can easily spend an afternoon whiling away my time in her stories, but they are so long that it takes me a while to read them. I admit, though, the length makes me start to think about the next mystery I'll pick up well before I get to the end of it. I'm thinking Agatha Christie, but that may well change before I finish the next 350 pages...