Despite the busy-ness of March, I have been reading and listening to books. I enjoyed another Flavia de Luce mystery, A Red Herring Without Mustard, read by Jayne Entwhistle. Fluff but the chemistry and culture keep me coming back. As for reading, I made it through Outlander although I’ll admit to skimming the last 75 pages or so and am wondering about reading the next one in the series, of which I have all of them on the shelf. I was put off by the sadistic violence and found the main character to be more annoying than inspiring. Plus it was just too long. My other fictional foray wasn’t much better: I wallowed in Pat Conroy’s gorgeous, thick prose in South of Broad but found the story to be somewhat cliche with a little sexual perversion thrown in to spice things up.
Fortunately, my history reading has been a bit more riveting: I loved Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, finding it fascinating after the John Adams biography, and finally picked up Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington by Daniel Mark Epstein. I loved the way Epstein merged politics and poetry and described both men with sympathetic affection.
Now, it’s Loewen and textbooks with Zinn seeming to be the next logical choice. I may stick with nonfiction for awhile although I’ve got Ken Follett and Jonathan Franzen in the basket by my chair in the library just waiting for the house to get warm. Aaah…so much to read, so little time! But for now, I’ll hit post as we are heading to the ferry. Happy reading!
