This monthly summing up may not be exactly riveting for all visitors, but it certainly helps me concentrate the mind and able to take a view on my reading matter and see how I am doing. I have blogged about nearly all of these so will not repeat myself (hooray!)
This month started off in a delightful vein with two children's books (though all adults should read books like this), Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker and Apricots at Midnight by Adele Geras. I will be reading more of AG and having looked at her output methinks there is enough there to keep me going for a week or two...
I have to have my regular crime fix and this month along came John Dunning - The Bookwoman's Last Fling, one of the Cliff Janeway novels about an ex-cop turned bookseller. Not as good as his others but still great fun. Then a very silly crime story, if you can call it that, picked up in Chicago - Well Bred and Dead by Catherine O'Connell. Set in Chicago which gave it immediacy as I read it while I was there, all a bit underwhelming, but obviously the first of what is going to be a series about a merry widow living in the wealthy part of the Windy City, and I daresay I shall be seduced into reading the rest even though the murder seems to take second place to seeing how many designer labels the author can mention. Thrones, Dominations by DL Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh came next. This apparently is the finishing off of a story line and plot left by DL Sayers and is set just after the marriage of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane. Of course, I loved it and then followed this up by reading Strong Poison, the book in which Lord P met HV which I had managed not to read. Not quite sure how but it was a lovely suprise to find this out and I gobbled it up in one night.
My daughter Kathryn raved about Jeb Rubenfeld's Interpretation of Murder set in NY in the 1920's when Freud visited the US along with assorted other psychologists on a lecture tour. This strand of the story ran alongside a particular nasty murder of a young girl, very gory and obviously the work of a perverted mind. Try as I mgiht I could not get into this at all, full of pages of deep pyschological insight and chit chat between Freud et al which sounded as if it was put in there to dazzle the reader with the author's brilliance. I found myself skipping through great clumps of narrative and found the ending wildly far fetched. Big disappointment.
Then two totally fun books which I loved: Mr Darcy's Diary by Amanda Grange (have now ordered two other Austen diaries by this author and look forward to their arrival) and An Outrageous Affair by Penny VIncenzi, another book I gobbled up in great late night sessions over the weekend.
My novels this month written by contemporary writers are two Joanne Harris novels: Gentlemen and Players and Coastliners. Totally contrasting and very interesting and I shall now try more of hers. The other was Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler which I blogged about at length and received a lot of interesting comments.
So not a bad month as far as mixture of material was concerned. Wonder what June will bring? I have just started on My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell which is a book which has been lurking most of my adult life. Why I have never read it before is a mystery to me as it is wonderful and is getting me odd looks from fellow commuters as I sit in the corner giggling away as I turn the pages.
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