Just coming up for a bit of air. Hello. I feel like I have been very absent for quite a while now. There is still a family member dealing with some health issues, but I think we are on an, albeit slow, but steady road to recovery. I may not be around much for the near future, but I am trying to squeeze in reading time as often as I can. I thought I might try and share what I am trying to lose myself in as a form of distraction!
I'll start with my reading prompts. I say prompts (as opposed to this month's prompt) as I am still enjoying October's book along with my new selection. Last month after many good reviews by fellow readers I decided to pick up AJ Pearce's Dear Mrs. Bird, and indeed it is a wonderful read and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I love Emmy's voice as the story's narrator. She is Quite Likable, and I do actually very Much enjoy her use of capitalization for Emphasis. I find I do that myself sometimes, too.
I have been feeling that WWII as a novel setting has been a little overdone lately, but I seem to have picked a number of books this month with that setting. I think my reluctance has more to do with battlefield settings or Holocaust narratives--both very important and of great interest but they can be very hard going as well.
My "blue" book for this month is BA Shapiro's The Collector's Apprentice. I started this book a while back when I first bought it, but it was not quite the right story for my mood. I am in an arty kind of mood now, however, and it seems that the more I read the more I am getting into the story and interested in the characters. This is set in the 1920s and moves about a bit. It's the story of the daughter of a wealthy art aficionado whose fiancé steals the family fortune and ruins her good name. A noirish revenge tale is what it is described as.
I am getting caught up on the Maise Dobbs mystery series finally. When her previous novel To Die But Once came out I struggled getting into the story. It didn't help that I had a library copy with a line of people waiting for it. I love Maisie and she is one of my favorite fictional characters, but if you follow the stories you will know what a difficult time she has had in her personal life. I think it all just weighed on me and I needed a break. When I picked the book up last month, however, I fell into it quite nicely and really enjoyed it. So I immediately picked up Jacqueline Winspear's most recent book, The American Agent, which like the Pearce book is set during the Blitz in 1940 or so. Maisie and her friend Priscilla are ambulance drivers and Maisie gets involved in the murder of an American woman journalist. I have read that the author is taking a year off from writing so no more adventures for Maisie until 2021!
And for a little something different I have O is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton. I could not resist just diving into Kinsey's next adventure. This is proving to be a very engaging story and I want to stay inside those pages and not come out. It's a weird set of circumstances, but a man calls Kinsey telling her he bid on the contents of a storage unit and one of the things inside was a box of memorabilia belonging to her. Intrigued she buys it from him and now we get a peek into her past, which is always interesting. When she was a rookie cop she was married to another policeman and something went awry on a case, in which her then husband asked her to lie for him. In the box is a letter, unopened, that would have shown his innocence had she opened it more than a decade earlier. But at just that moment she left him and later divorced. So, the plot (in more ways than one) thickens. I am going to be so bereft when I finish these books!
One last mention, I picked up Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to read along with Stefanie at Weeds (formerly So Many Books). I have been wanting to read books by more diverse authors, and while I have a long way to go, I can see Chimamanda Adichie is someone to read and follow. She is a wonderful writer and I am totally involved in the characters in a small Nigerian village. This is the story of a brother and sister who are in a very repressive and strict family. They get a peek at the wider world and nothing will be the same again.
I hope life gets a little less stressful and I can do more than just read the books and share a teaser here but write about them more fully as I have been reading some really great books.
And you? What has been keeping you engrossed and entertained?