Books of October

I'm surprised I read as many books as I did last month.  It took me a while to read some.  You do understand that I don't necessarily start and finish all these books in one month.  I'm a mood reader, so I typically read four or five books at one time.

The last week of the month was particularly stressful:  we bought a house and buried a good friend.  More later about one of those.  I'm still recovering from both.

In October, I read these books:

The Curse of the Bronze Lamp  -  Carter Dickson

     Yvette posted about this book and it sounded so good I had to have a copy.  It's hard to find, but I got a copy on-line.  I enjoyed every minute of it.  How can you go wrong with disappearing people, an Egyptian curse, and a creepy old mansion?

A Fine and Bitter Snow  -  Dana Stabenow

     I like the Kate Shugak mysteries and have read most of them.  In this one, two older women, friends of Kate's, are attacked in their remote cabin.  One dies, the other is in a coma.  There are secrets and one of those secrets has appeared for revenge.  As usual, an exciting read.
   
The Magyar Venus  -  Lyn Hamilton

     Lara McClintock, antiques dealer, runs into some old college friends.  They persuade her to join them at a party for the unveiling of the Magyar Venus.  Some of her friends question the authenticity of the statue and ask her to probe its provenance.  She tracks the statue's origin to Hungary and finds a sordid tale involving one of her friends.  Another interesting book.

The Outrage on Gallows Hill  -  George Bellairs

     I've only recently discovered this author, and this is the second book of his I've read.  I enjoyed them both.  Fortunately for me, he was prolific and I have tons of his Inspector Littlejohn books to look forward to.  Littlejohn goes to the village of Ravelstone to find out who killed Ronald Free.  Free was walking home after asking his girl to marry him.  She accepted, so he was walking on air when he was garroted.  Many people aren't who they seem, there are secrets to be revealed.  I enjoyed this mystery as much as the first one I read.  I like Bellairs' style and characters.

McNally's Dare  -  Vincent Lardo

     This is another of the Archy McNally mysteries, which were originally written by Lawrence Sanders.  After Sanders' death, Vincent Lardo wrote a few more.  I can tell the difference between the two.  The Lardo books lack something, although he tries hard to emulate Sanders.  A young man shows up to claim his inheritance from his late grandmother.  On her deathbed, she cryptically questions the young man's identity.  Archy will find out if he's the real deal.

Seriously ... I'm Kidding  -  Ellen Degeneres

     I like Ellen Degeneres and have been a fan since her stand up comedy days.  I thought this book was a memoir, but it's not.  It's a bunch of stuff that's supposed to be funny.  What I realized is that Degeneres's comedy is in her delivery.  I read stoically along until I tried imagining Degeneres delivering the lines in her unique style.  Then I laughed a few times.

The Cake and the Rain  -  Jimmy Webb

     And I don't give up on the occasional celebrity books.  This one was a memoir of the 1960s and 1970s.  It's autobiographical and it's gossipy.  If you recall from my last post, as a teenager, I was smitten by the actor Richard Harris.  Jimmy Webb did the infamous album McArthur Park with Harris.  I still have a copy of the album A Tramp Shining.  So there were stories about him, about John Lennon, who comes off badly, of Glen Campbell, Joni Mitchell, and other musicians.  It was a fun, although sometimes very unfunny, book.

Murders in Volume 2  -  Elizabeth Daly

     It might have been the mood I was in, the stress and grief, all the things that had to be done to purchase the house, the long trips to and from the funeral in just a day and a half, but I could not get into this book.  I've read other Daly books and thought I liked them, but this one was dull and confusing and I had difficulty finishing it.

November, with moving and things related to moving (changing banks, updating driver's licenses, etc.), is shaping up to be a too busy month.  I've already packed and moved several boxes of TBR books.  I kept a few out but will be reading mostly on my Kindle.  The move will take quite a few weeks because we're having a bit of work done on the new house and the contractors can't start until after Thanksgiving.  They say the work will take three weeks.  It's being managed by a friend of ours who is in the business, so I hope he can keep them on schedule.  We're having shelving installed in a room that will be my new library.  We're excited about moving out of the city.  We've been here too long and I'm eager to do things like garden and bird watch.  We'll also be moving close to three of my high school friends who've remained good friends over the years.  Two of them are musicians who play gigs in local venues.  We're looking forward to being their new groupies!  Am I tempting fate to hope for a happy, healthy, peaceful life in our new home?

Reading Update

This post can double for my 'Books Read in September' post because it is, after all, September 30th today.  I'm currently about to finish a Carter Dickson book.  If I finish that today, I'll post about it, or not, separately.

I've been reading books I bought in Maine.  I read The Rubber Band by Rex Stout.  I love Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.  There's something comforting about knowing what to expect.  I expect Wolfe to be in the orchid rooms at certain times, I expect Archie to be a smart ass, I expect Wolfe to drink lots of beer and eat good food.  This book did not disappoint.

Then there was A Motor-Flight Through France by Edith Wharton.  The title misled me.  I thought she was going to be in an airplane.  But a 'motor-flight' turned out to be a trip, trips, really, through France in a 'motor':  a car.  I suppose that this was almost equally as adventurous at the time, cars being very new.  Wharton, it turns out, loved touring in an automobile.  Her husband was with her and so was Henry James at times.  Can you imagine those conversations?!  Wharton knew a lot about architecture, especially of the churches and cathedrals they hunted for.  She spends little time describing the people of the different regions they drove through and stayed in, though.  I would have liked more of that.  But she describes the buildings and landscapes in detail.

Then I read A Catherine Aird mystery called A Most Contagious Game.  I can't remember much about it now except that I enjoyed it.  Really, one day soon I'll be able to read a book, wait a week, and read it again, thinking it's a new book!

I also read McNally's Gamble by Lawrence Sanders.  I like Archie McNally and the trouble he gets into.  I found out something interesting when I read McNally's Chance a short while later.  Lawrence Sanders only wrote the first seven of the McNally series.  After he died in 1998, Vincent Lardo wrote another six of them.  The problem was / is that the books are published with Sanders' name in big letters, leading readers, myself included, to think that Sanders had written them.  Somewhere, I read that readers sued the publishers for deception of some sort and were reimbursed in some amount.  Before I read this, I was thinking that McNally's Chance lacked something.  Then I found out that it wasn't written by Sanders but by Lardo.

Several bloggers has posted good things about George Bellairs.  I agree with them after reading Death in High Provence.  I've been collecting his e-books, many of which are available at affordable prices.  I like the fact that Inspector Littlejohn took his wife with him when he went to investigate the auto crash deaths in France of the brother and sister-in-law of a friend of his.  There's a mysterious castle / estate that belongs to a man who has the village and everyone else nearby under his thumb.  He's clearly the bad guy, or is he?  Littlejohn finds out which.  I'm going to follow Inspector
Littlejohn through more of his investigations.

I found another Kate Shugak mystery in Maine.  They're usually exciting, the kind of book you can't put down.  This one was not up to par, in my opinion.  Enough said.  I'll still try to find and read the few in the series I haven't read.

AND, I just finished Glass Houses, Louise Penny's latest Inspector Gamache book.  This one is much grimmer than the others.  Gamache is now head of the Surete and it looks like he's botching it.  Crime is worse and the police don't seem to be able to do anything about it.  Are they completely inept?  The criminals are beginning to think so.  There's also a creepy robed, hooded, masked figure, a 'cobrador', that stands silently on the green, freaking people out.  Why is he there?  The thing I find most disturbing is that Three Pines is at the center of the story, which begins with Gamache on trial for several crimes.  It's a fascinating book with a spectacular ending.  I don't know how she keeps on doing it, but Louise Penny does not disappoint me.

That's it for now.  Books are my refuge, but sometime life gets in the way, bars the door to the other worlds I often prefer to inhabit.