I've been pretty swamped with work the last couple of weeks, as well as finishing my
( Read more... )

I'm back!

Actually, I've been back for several days now, but I've alternated between being extremely lazy and extremely busy, so no post until today.

Our trip to Carmel was just about perfect. The weather was gorgeous -- the one time it rained was overnight, and everything was fine again by morning. The view from our hotel room was even more ( Read more... )

What I finished:
Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie. Whew! That was a long read. And fascinating, even if the Great Northern War felt almost as long to read about as to fight. I'm not a fan of the "Great Man" theory of history, but Peter's Russia was the one time and place where it probably came closest to being true (and ( Read more... )

Oops, forgot to post yesterday.

What I finished:
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. Urban fantasy about a group of strangers in NYC who become living avatars of the city (one for each borough and one for the city as a whole) and must defend it against some Lovecraftian eldritch horrors. I enjoyed it as a whole, even though it leaned a bit hard on ( Read more... )

I didn't do Reading Wednesday in 2020, but I want to start up again, and now is as good a time as any, right?

What I finished reading:
Désirée by Anne Marie Selinko
Historical fiction about Désirée Clary, whom I knew very little about before this. She was a middle-class silk merchant's daughter from Marseille who, as a teenage girl, became engaged to ( Read more... )

So I don't know if I'm at the point of fannishness yet, but I've been seriously sucked into this series. As in, I've binge-read all six books in the space of about a month (thanks, Libby!) and am impatiently waiting for book 7 due out in December.

The heroine, Irene Winters, is a Librarian at an inter-dimensional Library that collects rare or ( Read more... )

This question brought to you by my recent reading frustration.

Can anyone recommend some light, cozy mysteries, preferably published in the past ten years or so, where the amateur sleuth protagonist actually solves the murder, rather than stumble into the solution by accident or through a lucky guess or having the killer suddenly do something ( Read more... )

What I finished: Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart. This is a historical novel about Constance Kopp who, in 1915, became a deputy sheriff in Bergen County, NJ -- the first woman in the US to hold such a position. The book is actually about the events that preceded her getting the job, and is concerned mostly with the Kopp sisters' efforts to get ( Read more... )