Even when we’re busy, I always have a book on the go. Once we got back from England at the end of September, we made a quick transition to Coquitlam, then a short visit to Toronto, and right back to Europe on our river cruise. I wasn’t able to maintain my usual reading pace, but there was always a library book on my ipad.

I’ve been reading Marie Benedict’s wonderful books about the women behind/beside famous men: Lady Clementine (Mrs. Winston Churchill), The Other Einstein, Carnegie’s Maid, and The Only Woman in the Room about Hedy Lamarr. They’re fascinating, presenting tons of research and facts, but embellished with conversations that make each woman seem very real.

During Covid, I discovered Fiona Barton and devoured The Child and The Widow. This fall I read and enjoyed Local Gone Missing, but when I got to The Suspect it started to feel too formulaic, and a bit like reading a screenplay of movie “scenes”, which is what eventually turned me off Michael Crichton.

I’d been waiting for Richard Osman’s latest instalment in his Thursday Murder Club series, and was not disappointed in The Bullet That Missed. There’s something incredibly appealing about his cast of crime-solving retirees with their secrets and skills.

I waited ages for A Gentleman in Moscow, a truly quirky book about an eccentric who survives “house arrest” in a posh hotel in a unique way. Having read it, I felt I also needed to read Rules of Civility. Hmm.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold and Tales from the Café were enchanting. Imagine a place where you could go to have the chance to return to a specific time in your own past, even knowing that nothing you did there would change the eventual outcome in your present.

I reread Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. If you haven’t read it in years (like me), I’d encourage you to pick it up again, and read it with the perspective of a world glued to phones and ipads, lulled into complacency by video games and bombarded with fake news. It’s much more prescient than Orwell’s 1984 ever was.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Earthseed are terrific dystopian fiction. Disturbing, thought-provoking, and they pull no punches. Just don’t read them if you’re looking for an optimistic view of the future of the USA.

Audrey Blake’s The Girl In His Shadow begins the story of one of the first female doctors in England; The Surgeon’s Daughter continues the tale. While the main character is fictional, the events and supplementary characters are true to the time period.

As we move into winter in Mexico, I’ll be pulling books from our host’s extensive and eclectic bookshelves, and posting a list of what I’ve found and read before we return to Canada on April.

Posts right: My friend Lynne just posted her list of 2022 reads, at an impressive 72 books, with 10 days still to go in the calendar year.

So…. I just had to go into Libby (the online library program through which I access my reading) to find out how my book list “stacked up”. This is the first full year where (until this week’s read, taken from our host’s bookshelves) I have read exclusively on my ipad, since we’ve been on the road and not accessing physical libraries or used bookstores.

I was actually quite surprised, given our travelling, to see that my current book (the WONDERFULLY funny “Sacré Bleu”) is # 81 (the Wings of Fire book doesn’t count since I borrowed it for my grandson) but then I realized that on our world cruise sea days I often powered through a book a day (especially the deliciously addictive Donna Leon Comissario Brunetti series of books).

There’s nothing like a good book!!