What I've Been Reading Lately

There was a time when I documented every book on the sidebar. If you miss that feature, perhaps this post will help.  For while I was recuperating from the surgery, I read.  I read a lot.  TV was too jarring, my silly game on my phone made me jittery, but books took me right in and kept me company.  I was feeling everything very intensely; the characters and the authors felt like they were lying beside me.  Here's just a snippet of what the library provided.

Do you get antsy when the author's politics rankle?  Can you ever be sure it's the author and not the character?  That's what I struggled with in Shadows Reel by C. J. Box.  I love his stories.  I love the animals and the scenery and each one of the finely detailed women in his life.  I never forget who's who or where they were when last I left them.  But this one, with Antifa a turning point, kept kicking me in the shins.

T. Jefferson Parker's A Thousand Steps was a blast from the past.  I could feel the sand between my toes in Laguna Beach, 1968.  There's a list of people to thank in this book, and I read each and every one of their names, wondering whose story was whose.  The mystery is, as his always are, well crafted, but it's the people and the scenes themselves that made me want to keep reading even as my eyes were closing.

I went on a James Patterson and company binge.  The Paris Detective was three novels under one cover.  The world's richest, suavest, handsomest human being only wants to be a detective.  His gradually-becoming-besotted partner more than carries her fair share, but there's nothing creepy about any of it.  I realized two chapters into the story that I'd read The Jailhouse Lawyer already; it's a tribute to his storytelling that I remember how the book ends.  Fear No Evil is also one I'd read before, but Alex Cross and John Sampson are some of my favorite literary duos so I read it again before picking up  Death of The Black Widow, which kept me in suspense the whole way through. 

A Step Too Far was much better than I'd come to expect from Lisa Gardner.  Her last few novels have left me cold but this one was delicate and intricate and posed questions I'm still pondering.  The Paris Apartment was a lot creepier than I'd hoped for and a lot more happy ending than is possible in the real world and was waaay more predictable than it ought to have been and yet I enjoyed each and every page.  Lucy Foley, a new author for me, drew vivid characters and her descriptions put me right in the center of Paris, eating (wishfully) pastries that broke gently under a silver fork.

I did some heavy lifting reading, too.  I'm saving those for another post.