I now know what happens when you let life and books get in the way of blog reading.
According to my blogrolls list, I have 745 blog posts waiting for my attention.
While ignoring those posts, I have read a few books:
Desert Wives: Polygamy Can Be Deadly, by Betty Webb (2002) , 293 pages. This is a Lena Jones Mystery, that includes a frighteningly accurate depiction of life on some of the polygamist compounds in Arizona and Utah.
Halfway House, by Katharine Noel (she spells her name right -- like my middle name!) (2006) , 365 pages. This one is not fun. Good, but not fun. It tells the tale of a family whose oldest daughter has bi-polar disorder. It begins when the girl is in high school, and has her first serious "break" -- and takes her through a few hospitalizations, time in a halfway house, and through what we hope is her final growth into the ability to live safely and productively with her disease. It also takes us through the ways her disease affects her family.
The Akhenaten Adventure (reading from my kids' bookshelves again), and its sequel The Blue Djinn of Babylon. by P.B. Kerr. Both fun... nitce new mythos for the djinn.
Then, having been badgered a bit by the elder daughter, I succumbed to her demand that I read The Curse of the Blue Tattoo by Lois Meyer (383 pp). This was a fun book. I found myself reading just a few more pages... repeatedly... well into the night. I do think it's mis-named. Yes, there is a tattoo. Yes, it's blue. But it's referred to only a few times; twice when the fact that our heroine has it is discovered by those who are scandalized, and once when it is used sort of as an oath. The book is about the rousing adventures of a young woman who, orphaned in late 18th century London, having escaped life begging under Blackfriars Bridge by going to sea disguised as a boy, and some time later, after evidently performing well as a ship's boy, is discovered to be a (gasp) girl! and is swiftly sent off to a finishing school where the tale begins. As you can imagine, she doesn't fare terribly well. She does manage to foil Cotton Mather's slightly mad grandson (a preacher of Cotton's mold to be sure), and win a horse race between learning to embroider and overcoming a horror of the french.
Finally, I'm turning back to adult books with The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (who wrote the Dante Club. I loved the Dante Club. The Poe Shadow is a bit slower -- it has more time with nothing happening, but then again it starts at Poe's funeral.... in the Dante Club, it started before all the victims were dead.
I shall now return to you to your regularly scheduled knitting blog, since I'm clearly not cut out to review books in groups.
Ooh, I've been wanting to read Desert Wives. Have you finished The Poe Shadow? It sounded like not, so I'll wait until you say so to count it. :-)
Posted by: Kat with a K | July 03, 2006 at 07:37 PM