January's Reading List

So far, 2009 is super readalicious. I got loads of books for Christmas and accidentally bought ten more when Simon and I went to Liverpool last weekend. The charity shops there, including those in Huyton, have a surprisingly good selection of fiction, and the prices make it almost impossible to avoid buying, um, 10 books.

Here's what I read in January.

Georgette Heyer: False Colours

• Good Jane Austenesque fun!

Terry Goodkind: Wizard's First Rule

• Ugh. (Sorry, Todd!) I wish that I hadn't Googled Terry Goodkind. Then I wouldn't have discovered that he is an Objectivist (or follower of Ayn Rand). That's the kind of thinking that people really should get over by, say, the sophomore year of college. Wizard's First Rule is a mostly engaging fantasy novel. It's the first of a bajillion-part series, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that ultimately good triumphs over evil -- even though evil is clad in white! Gasp.

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories

• I am completely addicted to Kate Atkinson. Last week, I finished reading her third Jackson Brodie mystery, When Will There Be Good News? And I have on hand two of her other novels, Emotionally Weird and Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I'm going to have to ration myself to one a month.

Jeffrey Ford: The Girl in the Glass

• A clever mystery set among con artists and carnival freaks in the 1930s.

Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost

• I finished this book in two days. The parallel stories -- a little girl who disappears in the 1980s and a pair of underemployed people who, twenty years later, are affected by the girl's disappearance -- are not in themselves funny at all, but O'Flynn's darkly comic style is.

Kjell Eriksson: The Princess of Burundi

• A compelling and slightly claustrophobic (all that snow!) mystery from Sweden.

On the knitting front -- about two months too late, I'm knitting myself a wimple as I'm sick of having hat-head from wearing a watch cap (or toboggan -- pron. TOE-boggin -- as we say in the South). I'll post the pattern and pictures soon.