2011 in Review — Jenny’s List

It’s time to take a look back at the reading we did during 2011. Teresa and I have developed a tradition of making, not exactly a “Best of” list, since we can never decide on a set number of “best” books, but a list of books that made an impression in one way or another. [...]

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A Man Lay Dead

I’ve been reading mysteries ever since I was about eleven or twelve years old, and I’ve been friends with the Queens of Crime nearly that long. I started with Agatha Christie, blazed through at least three-quarters of her mysteries, and then stumbled upon Margery Allingham and the joys of Albert Campion and Lugg. When I [...]

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March Violets

I approached the first of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir novels, starring Bernie Gunther, with a thrill of anticipatory pleasure. I’m fond of real mean-streets noir (The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Killer Inside Me), I’ve been a mystery fan almost as long as I’ve been reading novels, and the second World War is a particular [...]

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Zorro

Before I started blogging, I read lots of books that fell into a sort of black hole. I might remember that I read them and have a vague recollection of my feelings about them, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you anything of value about them. Zorro by Isabel Allende is one of those books. [...]

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The Forgotten Waltz

Gina knows what she’s done isn’t right, but she’s trying to justify her actions—falling in love with a married man, leaving her own husband, separating her lover from his daughter, Evie. In the preface, she describes the day that Evie saw Gina and Seán sneaking a kiss at a party. Evie “laughed and flapped her hands.” [...]

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The Winding Road (Morland Dynasty #34)

And so we come to the end. For three years, I’ve been reading a volume in the Morland Dynasty series almost every month, and now I finish the series with the newly released final volume, The Winding Road. This book follows the fate of the Morland family through the latter half of the 1920s—the Jazz [...]

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A Christmas Gift for You!

Edited to add: This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to the winners, Cori of Let’s Eat Grandpa and Jill of Rhapsody in Books. We hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas day! (And if you don’t celebrate Christmas, we hope you’re having a wonderful December 25.) In celebration of the day, Jenny and I would [...]

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

You know, even at this late date, I can occasionally be tricked into thinking that the classics are books we read, not for pleasure, but because they are good for us, like medicine, books we “ought” to read. I put Zora Neale Hurston’s best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, on my list mostly because [...]

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The Hare With Amber Eyes

I read Edmund De Waal’s family biography after seeing a rave review of it over at Eve’s Alexandria. Victoria loved this book about the Ephrussi family’s generations-long ownership of 264 Japanese netsuke, loved it so much that she didn’t want to put it down, and I was completely convinced. When I saw it on my [...]

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Cosmicomics

I’m not a scientist. I’m interested in science — I read popular science, books on physics and ecology and neurology — but I don’t have the education to understand the math of it, the beams and girders that make it real (or even hypothetical.) So when a tiny meteorite of a book like this falls [...]

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