Since I've accumulated a new pile of books in the last month or so I thought I would share them before I look for homes for them on shelves and in book piles. Between library books and the books I've been buying lately I've been feeling a little overwhelmed by them all (now there's something I thought I might never say). Not that that's stopping me from adding new titles to my wishlist that I come across that others are reading. I often feel inundated by books and there are so many of them I am excited to read that I wish I was not such a slow reader. I've been thinking lately I might post a little less often here to give me a little more reading time (buying or borrowing fewer books somehow doesn't appeal to me...), but I enjoy posting frequently, too. So, how does one find a good balance--enough time to read, enough time to write about books and all that in the few hours not taken up with work, getting to and from work, and all the other quotidian details of life? A time warp to add hours to the day? A clone to send to work? If you've any suggestions I'd certainly welcome them.
In the meantime I'll look at these wistfully and perhaps pick one up as soon as I finish something from my current reading pile.
Maybe if I stopped picking up complete impulse buys like Lisa Jackson's Without Mercy and dropping them in my shopping cart. Actually that happens rarely as there isn't a very good selection of books at the supermarket. However this is a thriller set on Oregon's coast that is set during a brutal snowstorm. I'm going to hold on to this one for the hottest day of July when I need something cold to think about.
Stafanie Pintoff's In the Shadow of Gotham has been compared to Caleb Carr's books and I do love a good historical mystery. This one is set in 1904 New York.
I've read Erin Hart's other mysteries set in Ireland, so when her most recent (after a hiatus of several years), False Mermaid, came out in paper I had to get it. The sleuth is an American pathologist who has worked with Ireland's bog bodies, but this time around she returns home to Minnesota to look into the unsolved murder of her own sister.
South Riding by Winifred Holtby has come to me courtesy of Rachel at Book Snob and Carolyn of A Few of My Favourite Books who hosted the Virago Reading Week earlier this year, and which I enjoyed immensely. I was lucky enough to win a Virago, which I am hoping to read before the film airs on PBS later this spring.
I'm very much a mood reader and will often look for books set in a particular place or time and my latest interest happens to be Argentina. Know of any good books set in Argentina or by Argentinian authors? Ernesto Mallo's Needle in a Haystack is a crime novel set in Buenos Aires in the 1970s.
And while I still have Tasha Alexander's previous Lady Emily Hargreaves novel on my pile unread, I found her most recent mystery at such a cheap price that I couldn't not buy it. Dangerous to Know is another Victorian mystery that is set this time in Normandy France (Lady Emily does move around a bit).
Both F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See a Peepshow and E.M. Delafield's Messalina of the Suburbs are fictionalized accounts of the sensational Thompson/Bywaters murder case in the early 1920s. I have a book by Jill Dawson called Fred and Edie as well that deals with the pair. It was Simon at Stuck in a Book that pointed this out to me (not knowing about the first book at all or the subject matter of the Delafield), and I like his idea of reading them together. I'll be keeping them in the back of my mind and as Simon expressed an interest perhaps others would like to read along--though sometime in the future, perhaps, not right away.
Now I'm off to try and squeeze in a little reading so I can get to these sooner than later.