This week I have been reading…

Easy Living magazine – Just when I decide that I won’t renew my subscription to Easy Living an inspiring issue like February 2010 comes along.

The Musician’s daughter – Rupert Holmes
I’m not sure what I expected when I picked this up. A tale of the life of a jazz musician and his disapproving daughter maybe? This is a terrific story set in pre-WW2 America. You get an excellent flavour of the era plus crime, mystery, secret codes and jokes. This is one of those marvellous books where every turn of the page changes your expectations.

Silent in the Grave – Deanna Raybourn
I spent the last few months of 2009 devouring Mike Ripley’s Angel series. I was suffering withdrawal and wondering if there could possibly be any more wonderful characters out there for me to discover. Enter Lady Julia Grey and the March family. I’m half way through this and will definitely be heading to library to pick volume 2.

Passion – Louise Bagshawe
When Louise does chick lit well it is excellent. She can be by both funny and inspiring. Her works of late have taken a turn towards action plots. So the girl meets boy, loses boy, finds herself and regains boy in process plot gets reworked. This reworking tends to take the form of some kind of murder with an international flavour. It does not on the whole make me laugh or make me feel inspired. I found the supposed passion between the two main characters in this very hard to take. Other inconstancies around religious feelings, how quickly exercise has an impact on your body and all the loose ends being swept under the carpet by various governments did not enhance things. It is James Bond-esque only in that bond is a rather cold character in the original novels.

War and Peace
I’ve started this twice and not finished it because it’s just too big to carry around. My new solution is to keep it on my desk and read ten pages of so every lunch hour. The snow has rather hampered things this week but I’ll keep on with it. It’s just starting to get interesting.