Summer Reading 2010

We had a wonderfully long, hot summer in New England, but it still seemed to go by so quickly. I can't believe Labor Day is already past.

In my spare moments, I've been doing a lot of escape reading. With a lot going on for our charity bike ride and doing some prep work for my writing and editing business, taking a few minutes every afternoon for a cup of tea and a few pages of a mystery is saving my sanity. I haven't posted in a long time about the books I've been reading, so I hope you'll find something you like here.

It took me almost two months to read "A Rather Charming Invitation," the third "romantic suspense" book in the Rather series. [It is a fast read, but I was working on other things!] In this volume, Penny and Jeremy are engaged, and feeling torn between his haughty English grandmother's and her snobbish French aunt's plans for their wedding. When a historic tapestry is offered on loan for the ceremony, and then stolen, Penny pores over the photographs she took of it, trying to unlock the message woven into its images. Her search takes her through Grasse, the perfume capital of France, to Paris to interview an aging ballerina, and to hunt down a vintage train car somewhere in between. Ancient coins, family secrets, and a suspect millionaire's masquerade ball at his chalet in Switzerland make for a fascinating journey...with a promise of the next assignment from the Palace at the end. I adore these books, and don't feel I do them justice here.

Continuing on with the "witty couples having summer adventures" theme, I read Fall of a Philanderer by Carola Dunn, the 14th book in the Daisy Dalrymple series. Daisy and Alec, her DCI husband, are vacationing at Westcombe on the English coast when the local lothario is found at the bottom of the cliff. Did he fall or was he pushed?

Next up, The Cape Cod Mystery by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. Chris and I discovered the newly reprinted editions of this 1930s series at a book shop in Chatham on Cape Cod. In another summertime mystery, Prudence discovers her author-neighbor dead in his nearby cabin, and she and her niece Betsey work fast with handyman-turned-detective Asey Mayo to prevent Bill, her niece's admirer, from being charged with murder. If you like "golden age" mysteries, you'll enjoy this series -- there are 24 books with Asey Mayo, and Taylor wrote 9 other mysteries under pseudonyms.

My end-of-summer reading took me back to Lochdubh, where Hamish MacBeth solved two murders, the Death of a Perfect Wife and Death of an Outsider. The Scottish setting fascinates me, and the stories are total mind candy, easy to get lost in for an evening. Having no more books in the series at present, I've now traveled south to Taviscombe in England, and switched over to Mrs. Malory. Hazel Holt, the author of this series, was friends with and wrote the biography for the author Barbara Pym. Mrs. Malory is a widowed literary author and critic, and shares her favorite authors with other characters in the books as she solves the mysteries. I've finished Mrs. Malory Investigates (British title is Gone Away), and will now move on to The Cruellest Month. There are 19 books in this series and counting, and I've been hoarding collecting them over the past year. :)

In between these titles, I read and finished the summer-long study, Becoming a Woman of Simplicity. There is a lot here to learn and put into practice, and I'm very much a work in progress in that regard!

I've also started a very different kind of fiction book for me called My Year of Meats. I've toyed with the idea of becoming a vegetarian for a long time; I don't eat much meat simply because I've never liked the taste of it, and agree with the ecological, health, and moral viewpoints too. A friend who is already a vegetarian loaned this to me, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Of course, there has been yet another visit to the Book Barn.

 

I found the Death of an Outsider there, along with the first two books in a new historical mystery series by Clare Langley-Hawthorne, and one of the Bloomsbury books [I see they've just added four new titles!], Henrietta's War. I bookmooched the writing title, even though I already have many excellent writing guides I have not yet touched. I hope to get to these soon!

What books are on your "to read" list this fall?

Comments

[robin]

I read My Year of Meats as part of an online book club a while ago and I remember liking it. Have a great weekend!

[sprite]

I've been reading like mad this summer, which means my knitting has suffered. I literally have a pile out of books out from the library currently, so that will take me into the early fall -- Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake are two of the titles I've started. And Diamond Ruby, about a female baseball player in 1929 New York, should be good company for the baseball playoffs.

[2paw]

Oh thank you for all the recommendations!!! I love to find new authors who have written lots of books!!
It is always strange to read of Northern Hemispherians talking about Autumn when we are talking about Spring!!

[Sarah]

I've read a book a week in the past 9 or 10 weeks. It was so hot this summer, reading was a good activity! I'm going to focus on knitting more again which cuts into my reading time, but have a few books lined up including one by Henning Mankell.

[Dorothy W.]

That sounds like a nice list of fun reading for the summer! Lots of good, engrossing mysteries. I really enjoyed the last mystery I read, the Sarah Caudwell novel. I'm finishing Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate right now, and then I'll read my next mystery book group selection (mine), which is Alicia Gimenez-Barlett's Death Rites. After that, who knows?

[Kristen]

I've listened to a lot of Hamish Macbeth mysteries. Not great literature, but fun. I watched a few episodes of the series based on the books but was disappointed; it felt like they changed his character.

[Danielle]

I loved those Clare Langley-Hawthorne books! I wish she would publish the third book, which I hear is written only she needs a publisher! Carola Dunn is a great cozy writer as well, though you are way ahead of me. I just pulled out the next book, which is something like #7 or #8. I'm very much in a mystery mood--aren't they great when you have lots of other stuff going on? Glad you had a nice summer and hopefully we'll still have lots of sunny days before the weather turns.