I like my alone time. I need my alone time. Accept for rare cases when I am totally immersed in a particular book, I can’t read when there is too much background noise: TV, music, conversations. I prefer silence so that trying to block out other sounds doesn’t constantly pull me out of my reading. I also often have a Pavlovian response to the various dings my cell phone makes. My body’s reaction to cell phone alerts is something like the nonverbal equivalent of Ugh!, particularly when […]
A lepidopterist and a taxidermist walk into a mystery.
Another Victorian murder mystery rife with witty banter, palpable sexual tension, and painfully tender interludes. This is the third book in the Veronica Speedwell Mystery series by Deanna Raybourn. If you have read the other two books, you need no encouragement. If you haven’t, read them NOW. They are completely addicting. If you need further encouragement, this is the FIRST sentence of A Treacherous Curse: “I assure you, I am perfectly capable of identifying a phallus when I see one,” Stoker informed me, clipping the words sharply. “And that […]
Did she say yes to the dress?
This is the first Jo Walton book that I have read and only heard about her through reading Cannonball Read reviews (thanks, guys!). Although this isn’t the Walton title that I was looking for at the library (Among Others), it sounded interesting and landed in my TBR pile. I was truly captivated by the first 2/3. The last 1/3? Not so much. A woman suffering from dementia, and now confined to a nursing home, reflects on her life. Pretty straight forward, BUT, she “remembers” two […]
Do you disapprove of minstrels, too?
I often geek out when visiting historical sites. The whole “OMG, so and so ACTUALLY walked here, lived here, died here…” gets me every time. No surprise then that Juliana Gray’s dedication in “A Strange Scottish Shore” definitely spoke to me: To all those who have stood where history was made and felt its echo.” This is the second in what I truly hope is a continuing series about a no-nonsense administrator, Emmeline Truelove, her employer, the Duke of Olympia, and her would be paramour, […]