Recent reading
I’ve been going through a lot of books lately, and most haven’t been advanced reader books either. Not to say I haven’t had enough of those, but I haven’t requested too many books lately. Most of my reading has been library ebooks and audiobooks along with rereads of others.
A Dreadful Splendour by B.R. Myers is a gothic mystery that features a clever young woman who has gotten by doing seances for rich people since her mother died. She is arrested after one reading but strangely is released into the custody of a lawyer who needs her help. He takes her away to a country manor where the plan is for her to ease the suffering of a young man whose fiance committed suicide by doing one of her performances. She arrives to find the man is not suffering heartbreak and doesn’t believe in her work. Instead, he wants her help to discover the person who caused his fiance to die. It’s a great story with a few twists and turns and even a bit of romance along the way. It was very reminiscent of the gothic romances I read when I was a teenager but in a new and improved version. I discovered the writer is from Halifax, Nova Scotia which is quite cool since we lived across the harbor in Dartmouth the year we lived in Canada.
I’d been seeing The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman on the bestseller lists for quite a while and ran across a copy in our library that was available on audiobook. Four older people living in a retirement village have a club called the Thursday Murder Club. They meet on Thursdays and review old cases to see if they can solve them. Of course, a real murder comes along to give them something to really look into. There are some great personalities involved and lots of humor along with a fair bit of pathos too. The narrator was wonderful and I could really see it all happening through her work. I enjoyed this so much that I followed up with the next book, The Man Who Died Twice and have the third book on reserve.
Another book I’d seen in various media was The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake. I had a chance to read its follow-up from Netgalley but didn’t want to be rushed to read both books. This showed up in ebook form and I grabbed it. Then the next book, The Atlas Paradox was released and available on the same platform as the first and I checked that out too. I was shocked it was available so soon. Maybe I happened upon it just after it was released. Anyway, I finished the first book last night and I did enjoy it. It’s about six of the best magic users in the world being recruited into a secret society. And one of them has to be eliminated (aka killed) before initiation a year later. A significant part of the book goes on about physics as two of the group are physicists. I’m not too sure how well the science talk stacks up but it kind of worked in my head since my knowledge is so limited. Each of the six has a different specialty and we get the point of view of all of them through the book, allowing us to see their strengths and vulnerabilities. I immediately started the next book and suspect I will finish it long before my four weeks are up. I am curious to see if the story can continue to hold on to the tension of the first. I find a lot of books don’t sustain themselves through to the next book. I remember reading a fantasy trilogy a year or two ago that I really liked through books one and two, but hated the third and final book. The first book introduces quite a number of elements and I do wonder if it will all make sense as presumably the second adds even more.
The last book of note is a regency romance book called Convergence of Desire by Felicity Niven. This is a less typical romance, featuring a neurodivergent woman who is too busy trying to solve Fermat’s theorem to bother with the marriage mart and its associated details. So she makes a deal with an earl to marry him for convenience only. What follows is a rather slow-burn romance that reflects what I think could happen in such a romance. And it allows for her to keep to her own feelings instead of being forced into the mold of others. Mostly it shows that even neurodivergent people can love and be loved. It may not be in the same way as others but that doesn’t make it less of a thing. Niven wrote two other books in the series which I enjoyed well enough, but they don’t stand out like this one.
