These are the mysteries I'll (mostly) be spending my time with this week. As a matter of fact I am reading one right now instead of writing a proper post! I should really choose one (or two) books to spend most of my time with, but so many are so good I can't resist dipping into all of them.
And then there is the pile I am "thinking of reading next". Don't be surprised if one or two of these gets incorporated into the reading pile (above). My piles change almost daily, so last week's "thinking of reading" pile likely doesn't much resemble this one. It's that whole spoiled for choice thing.
On a side note, I was reading Laurie King's A Grave Talent and this quote caught my eye. In Louise Penny's book the murdered woman was an artist. In Laurie King's book one of the suspects is an artist. The detective in the story, Kate Martinelli, is talking to her significant other about women artists and he "launches into a monologue" . . .
"There've been any number of brilliant women artists. Look at Artemisia Gentileschi--an infinitely superior painter then her more famous father. Or Mary Cassatt: some of her stuff is every bit as good as some of the male artists who were--and still are--better known than she was. Maybe is she'd had less of an emphasis on mothers and babies . . .I don't know. I'm afraid that women have to be ten times as good as men to overcome their early training. Little girls are raised to be cautious and sensible. Even tomboys like you are too busy fighting their upbringing to leave it behind, and it's the complete, passionate absorption in one single thing, like painting, that allows genius to produce. If you have to worry about folding clothes and constipated babies--if you have to worry about babies at all--you can't concentrate on one important thing. Geniuses of any kind are always impossibly bloody, single-minded bastards, and women have never had that option, not as a class, not until very recently."
Have I mentioned already how much I'm liking the books I'm reading? I am. I can't wait for the long Fourth of July holiday (I'm taking an extra day off from work in order to have an extended weekend). You know what I'll be doing and it won't involve a picnic outside in the heat and humidity. But it will involve one or more of these books (or some very similar).
And a postscript, I also found a graphic novel on my shelves that is a mystery, so I plan on cracking that open this week, too. How fun does that sound?