Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Weekend in New England


Last night I waved goodbye, now it seems years... I'm back in the city where nothing is clear....- Barry Manilow

I've been away on vacation in Massachusetts for the past week or so and reading reading reading.

Remember my summer reading post? Well I've been working my way through that stack and have read Beautiful Animals, by Lawrence Osborne, and See What I Have Done, by Sarah Schmidt.

I recommend both for the beach bag this summer- Beautiful Animals is out now and is both a typical Osborne novel- suspenseful, tragic, and dark with delicious renderings of place, in this case Greece- and an interesting entry into the group of books coming out now about the refugee crisis.

See What I Have Done is about Lizzie Borden and the murders she was suspected of committing in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Author Sarah Schmidt preserves the essential mystery but still creates a truly creepy portrait of Lizzie.

When I wrote that post I forgot to include Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, that 1966 trash classic, which I picked for my trash read of the summer. That's what I'm reading now and it's a lot of fun, a girly bildungsroman about a stuffy New Englander who moves to New York in 1945 and finds her way to who knows what.

I still have Smoke hanging around and I plan to finish it. It's just one of those books that lingers- no pun intended. I do want to see it how it ends.

While on vacation I added a couple of books to my shelf too-Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and Lavie Tidhar's new book A Man Lies Dreaming.  I also picked up a galley of Alex Gilvarry's Eastman was Here, to be published in August. I was a big fan of his first book, From the Memoirs of an Enemy Non-Combatant.

How is your summer reading going? What's in your beach bag or on your picnic blanket? What new releases are you looking forward to?

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