I ended up spending an extra few days in Oregon capping the week with a potluck for her book group where they chose the next five books to read. It was a very interesting discussion with lots of good books – they decided to read Canada by Richard Ford, Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth, The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich; The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman, and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. I returned home on Friday to a very grateful husband and an obsessive cat. Himself expressed his happiness at my return with a great dinner and the cat expressed his happiness by winding around my head all night. At my mom’s I started to read Shani Boianjiu’s novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid but was unable to really get into it. I did finished The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg and The Clothes They Stood Up In by Alan Bennett. Both very different books and good in their own rights.
Here is what caught my interest this week:
Fleur Fisher has a lovely post about celebrating the magic of library reservation systems with a list of books she is looking forward to reading. When I was a child, I loved reading Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe series but I know very little about her. Fleur mentions her adult novel The Yew Tree which sounds good but what rally caught my attention was Boston’s two memoirs: Perverse and Foolish and Memory in a House published in one volume named Memories. Boston had an amazing life (she didn’t publish until she was over 60) and while this book may be hard to find- I think it would be worth the effort.
Another brief mention of a book (this time by Danielle of A Work in Progress) sent mnewest e looking for information about Joan Silber and her 1980 novel Household Words. Following a young Jewish new mother from the 1940’s through her middle-age, Words is about what we say in a household and what we don’t say. Rhoda Taber lives in the suburbs, is expecting her first child (she eventually has two very different daughters), her reliable husband, and the expectation that life will follow a predictable path. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen and Rhoda must find her own way through the thicket of an unexpected life.
Two mysteries caught my notice this week. The first is Loyalty by Ingrid Thoft (reviewed by S. Krishna) and The Perfect Ghost by Linda Barnes (reviewed by Bibliophile By the Sea). Barnes is also the author of the Carlotta Carlyle detective series which I have enjoyed in the past. Her newest book features a ghost writing team – Em, the anxiety-ridden, shy partner and Teddy, the outgoing public face of the team. Except Teddy is dead (in the middle of the project) and Em must step out into the public and finish the job. Loyalty is about a family of lawyers working together who have a family problem (a daughter-in-law has gone missing). The family turns to the one member of the family who is not a lawyer – instead, after flunking out of law school, Josefina becomes the firm’s private detective. She has to navigate between family loyalties and the truth in order to find the solution.
Finally two bloggers have their Top Ten Beach Read Lists: Lakeside Musing and Capricious Reader. And Reading Matters has a list of Ten Literary Prize Winners for 2013 several of which are already on my to-be-read list.
Happy Reading!
Reflections from the Hinterland 
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