It turns out that it has been more than a year since I told you with any kind of detail about what I have been reading. That is for a variety of reasons. Sometimes I wasn’t reading. Sometimes there wasn’t room for me in the newsletter. But here we are, in January, and I am sitting in the bookstore and there is room in the newsletter and I have done some reading.
I read 29 books in 2021 which is…not many for me in the grand scheme of things. But those were all hard-fought reads. My life in 2021 was a dumpster on fire with wings. The same pandemic features we all faced, with the addition of work pressures and a surprise diabetes diagnosis for Penny. In November, I made a big move from my insane job selling pet food to a somewhat less insane job selling candy to be closer to home with Penny. The hope is that, among other things, this will lead to more time for reading.
So what have I been reading? My most recent read was Anna Lee Huber’s A Stroke of Malice (#8 in her Lady Darby series). I have been carrying around this book for over a year and finally finished it, which is no fault of the book itself which was as ever excellent. I have on deck A Wicked Conceit (#9) and book #10, A Perilous Perspective will be in store in trade paperback in April.
I picked An Heiress’s Guide to Deception and Desire by Manda Collins as my Christmas Eve book and promptly discovered it was book #2 in a series! I fall on team ‘Read Books In Order’ so I quickly got my hands on A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem. This is a fun and easy-reading series.
Speaking of books I had been carrying around, I also finally got to Tasha Alexander’s The Dark Heart of Florence. This was #15 in her ‘Lady Emily’ series. I hadn’t been loving the duel plotlines in the book, but I actually quite liked the one from this story if you too had been finding that a barrier. Book #16, Secrets of the Nile, comes in hardcover in October and we still have trade paperback copies of The Dark Heart of Florence. I’m excited for some Elizabeth Peters-type vibes!
I did not sit on Laurie R. King’s Castle Shade (#17 in her ‘Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes’ series). I mean, here’s the thing about series that get this long. Some are as great as the original books that hooked you, some are not. I quite liked this one and it’s clear they are leading up to a run in with Mycroft. There is no new book scheduled yet.
As you may or may not remember, my favorite book of the year is often the new ‘Lady Sherlock’ book by Sherry Thomas and the only reason I don’t pick them every year is that Michael doesn’t let me (he thinks he’s the boss of me). Miss Moriarty, I Presume was interesting and twisty and I don’t want to give anything away but maybe sometimes it’s more compelling when people can’t be together?
From the looks up my upcoming releases calendar, it’s going to be a quiet winter for me, which is great news because I still have a lot of catching up to do. That said, I just had to buy my second copy of Genevieve Cogman’s The Untold Story (Invisible Library book #8) because I read a chapter and left it on the plane. And I am looking forward to Deanna Raybourn’s An Impossible Impostor in hardcover in February very much (Veronica Speedwell book #7.