Summer seems to have returned here after a very happy taste of almost-fall-like weather. It is warm and toasty here so perhaps a last gasp of real summer temperatures. I'll be happy when the last of it moves on and it becomes milder and cooler. My reading is already syncing with fall even if it doesn't feel like it outside. My small stack of just a few books has grown a bit but I am still trying to keep it under control.
I have a nice variety of books and genres on the go at the moment. For fall-ish reading I have picked up Claire Fuller's Bitter Orange. It was this podcast with the author that made me order the book right away. Dilapidated country house, a questionable narrator, a hole in the wall (or in this case the floor) with a bit of voyeurism going on and I was sold. I like, too, that the narrator is an older woman. Lately I have been looking for female narrators over the age of 30. Why are there so few of them?
I really enjoyed Sue Grafton's B is for Burglar. She even managed to trip me up on the solution. I thought I knew how it was going to play out but I was pleasantly surprised by the twist (if you can call it a twist really). I have just barely started C is for Corpse, but it looks quite promising, too. I like reading them back to back as the time sequence in the books is really very close with each story. I find, too, that I pick up on the references to the previous case or events that I might not otherwise if I let a lot of time pass between cases.
I know it is RIP reading season but I am not formally joining in, but I can't resist picking up books that would fit nicely if I were. To that end, I saw that the movie Burnt Offerings was based on a book by Robert Marasco, so I found a copy at the library and have started reading. I vaguely recall having seen the movie (or bits of it), but it has been long enough that I only have a slight sense of what it is about. Besides more often than not the books are better anyway. Talk about dilapidated old houses. The one in this book is almost ready to collapse it seems. A family living in NYC is contemplating renting it for the summer at the moment. Considering the state it is in you would think warning signs would be going off all over the place, but we'll see. It's early days yet. The book was written in the early 1970s just when some of Stephen King's big creepy books were also being written and horror was becoming a proper genre.
To round things out I am reading Peter Lovesey's On the Edge, which is more crime than mystery. It is a standalone novel set just after WWII. Two women who were WAAFs together happen across each other after the war and start talking. Neither is particularly happy with their lives and even less so with their husbands. So they decide to kill them off. Well, one has already been buried. Will they get away with it. Am I actually sympathetic towards them? These situations always make for interesting and curious reading. Apparently this was also filmed and aired on PBS (though under a different title). I might see if I can find a way to watch it when I finish reading.
A while back I was looking for a book that has a crime in the past but is set in the present and the characters are looking back at that period in their lives. Well, I think I might have come across one that works out nicely with that particular trope--if not exactly as I was imagining it--close enough. I am going to be a part of a blog tour for Marianne Holmes's forthcoming A Little Bird Told Me. I have only gotten a taste and will be reading in earnest, but check back later next week to hear more about it.
And then for something just a little bit different I have a modern classic in translation--Giorgio Bassani's Within the Walls, which is translated from the Italian. The book is a collection of five novellas. I am only on the first and not quite sure what I think so far. It is the first book in a series of books known as the Romanzo di Ferrara, novels set in the city of Ferrara.
Happily I am also reading short stories again. Have you ever read Mavis Gallant? I always mean to pick her books up and I finally did. I randomly decided to try The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories written between 1951 and 1971. She is marvelous. I am just three stories in (at the moment the third one is quite long so I am just pecking away at it). Buried in Print has inspired me to pick up her stories as she has been working her way through all of them (and there seem to be quite a lot).
This is the pool of books I will be reading from this weekend. I am hoping to get in lots of reading time as I want to make my way through several of these soon. (And maybe I can motivate myself to be better about writing about them).
What are you reading this weekend?