Day: May 10, 2021
April 2021 Reading Recap
First things first: The persistent bug preventing followers / readers to comment on my posts straight off the post (i.e., other than by using the WP Reader) has finally been weeded out, thanks to my hosting service’s IT team … so you can, at last, comment even if you’re not using the WP Reader. (I […]
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Simon Beaufort (Susanna Gregory): Deadly Inheritance
Having once had recourse to a book by a writer from the Medieval Murderers group in April, I figured I might as well go on and finally give a try to the Geoffrey Mappestone series that Cambridge academic Elizabeth Cruwys (aka Susanna Gregory) writes, together with her husband, under the pen name Simon Beaufort. I first […]
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Michael Jecks: The Chapel of Bones
I was in sore need of something more substantial after my foray into Georgette Heyer’s version of Regency England, and Michael Jecks is one of the authors on whom I’ve long been able to rely in order for this sort of thing — and fortunately, he came through for me yet again. The Chapel of […]
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Georgette Heyer: The Grand Sophy & Sylvester
I am, so far, not overly convinced that Georgette Heyer’s historical romances are for me: Not only as a general matter (I am not a major romance reader to begin with), but more specifically, because this is essentially Austen fanfic … and as with all fanfic and pastiches, give me the original rather than the […]
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Agatha Christie: The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories
As I already said elsewhere, this is one of my go-to comfort reading palate cleanser books; just reliably enjoyable: a mix of short stories featuring Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Parker Pyne, alongside a few nonseries short story mysteries. As I’ve also noted in the past, I could do without Simon Vance being one of […]
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Ursula K. Le Guin: No Time to Spare
Ursula K. Le Guin is an author I’ve only started to discover very recently. I knew that she fought hard against the qualification as a genre (sci-fi / fantasy / speculative fiction) author; and she has always had all my support to the extent that “genre” is used as synonymous with “less worthy” (or, as […]
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John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley in Search of America
John Steinbeck has been a favorite author of mine ever since my teenage years, when I discovered (in short, though not necessarily precisely in this order) East of Eden, The Pastures of Heaven, Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, and The Pearl, with Grapes of Wrath, The Harvest Gypsies, and Cannery Row following a […]
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William Shakespeare: Richard II & Twelfth Night
I could of course not let April go by without paying my respects to the Sweet Swan of Avon: 2021 isn’t one of the “really big” Shakespeare years (those tend to end in -4 and -6, for the anniversaries of the Bard’s birth and death years); although I have no doubt that if it weren’t […]
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Terry Pratchett: Eric & Moving Pictures (and a Reprise of the 2019 Good Omens Screen Adaptation)
In the good old BookLikes days (when they really still were good days), we used to have a Discworld group and associated book club, which had committed to reading the entire series in publication order, by way of bimonthly reads. We had gotten as far as Guards! Guards! by the time the site went down […]
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Ngaio Marsh: The New Zealand Books, plus Grave Mistake
The first book by Ngaio Marsh that I ever read happened to be her very last one, Light Thickens, which is as much concerned with a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as it is with the murder of one of the cast members. To a mystery fan without any Shakespearean inclinations, this might have proved fatal, […]
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John Mortimer: Murderers and Other Friends
This book is the second part of Mortimer’s autobiography — or rather, his chapter-long essays on life, society, politics, the theatre and movie industry (with guest appearances by Gielgud, Olivier, Niven, Harrison, Guinness, and plenty of other luminaries), the law, justice (not the same thing at all), family, friendship, education, travel, and a whole host […]
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Nella Larsen: Passing
Nella Larsen’s Passing had been sitting on my TBR for a minor eternity; when I found that her birthday, too, was in April, I knew that I had laid my hand on another entry for this particular reading challenge. The novella’s title refers to an extremely light-skinned person of color’s “passing” from their community — […]
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Charlotte Brontë: Villette
Villette was one of the Brontë sisters’ few mature works I had yet to read (besides Charlotte’s The Professor — which is actually the first version of what would, after a major revision, become Villette — and the opening fragment of the substantially unfinished Emma, as well as most of the siblings’ juvenalia). It was, […]
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Harriet Rutland: Knock, Murderer, Knock!
Harriet Rutland (real name: Olive Shimwell née Seers) is one of many Golden Age detective novelists benefiting from the recent wave of republications — her body of work, which, like that of Mavis Doriel Hay, consists of all of three novels, had fallen into near-complete oblivion by the time it was dug out of the […]
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Christianna Brand: Death of Jezebel
Print copies of Christianna Brand’s fourth Inspector Cockrill mystery, Death of Jezebel, are notoriously hard to come by even at collectors’ prices, never mind within the price range affordable to the average reader, and it baffles me why that should be the case — it’s easily one of the strongest entries in the series. Luckily, […]
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Patricia Wentworth: The Key
Like virtually all of the Appointment with Agatha side reads so far (except for Ellis Peters’s Fallen into the Pit), The Key was a reread for me, but a thoroughly enjoyable one. This is a fairly early book in the context of Wentworth’s Miss Silver series and one of her first really solid books, chiefly relying […]
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Agatha Christie: The Big Four
Ugh. Well, let’s just say this one will never be one of my favorite Christies and I’m very glad we put this one behind ourselves in the Appointment with Agatha group read project — things can only get better from here on out, and fortunately, they do. The Big Four is one of Agatha Christie’s […]
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Joy Harjo: Crazy Brave
Poet Joy Harjo is one of today’s foremost Native American voices; her recently-published memoir was thus a proximate choice for the corresponding entry in my quest to broaden my literary horizons. Harjo’s life story is that of many Native Americans of her generation: as far removed from the American Dream as you can be; socially […]
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Various Authors; eds: Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jean Mason: Trinidad Noir (Akashic Noir)
Trinidad Noir is the, well, Trinidad installment of the Akashic Noir series of short story anthologies looking at the “darker” side of the respective titular location. This can be a great way of sampling the fiction set in and / or written by authors from the place in question; and in terms of the quality […]
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