Summer is often touted as being a time to read. Take a book to the beach. Take one with you on vacation. Airplanes and airports provide time for digging into that novel you've been neglecting.
Sure, that's true, but for serious readers like me, reading goes the year round. I've been doing more reading than writing recently which means that my wriitng is suffering a wee bit. Nevertheless, I've pored through some fine books.
Monday, I finished Sara Gruen's latest--At The Water's Edge. She is best known for her novel titled Water For Elephants. I liked this latest book best. Some will describe it as a romance; others WWII story, still others a psychological study. Maybe it's a little of all three. Three socialites go to a small Scottish village in the waning days of WWII. The two men are determined to find and photograph the Loch Ness monster. These two men are as flawed in character as can be. The wife of one is a shallow woman who leads a life of a wealthy young married woman. We watch Maddie evolve into a better person when she sees what her husband and his best friend are really like. It's a story of loss, love and the downward spiral of two men. The contrasting personalities of the people they encounter in the village inn would be a psychologist's dream paper.
Other books I've read recently that I enjoyed and recommend are the following:
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
The first two links will take you to reviews on this blog and the last one is the Amazon page.
All four of the books I've mentioned here today are classified as historical fiction. I must add one other novel I read this spring that kept me turning pages in rapid succession. It's not in this same category; it's a suspense/thriller book. One of a series about an Istraeli spy who's real life job is being an art restorer. Portrait of a Spy by Daniel Silva hooks the reader and holds onto to the person turning the pages to the very end. If you haven't read any of the titles in this series, google to find the list and start at the beginning, although it is not necessary to do so. You can read individual titles without reading the ones that preceded it. I have the latest release The English Spy on reserve at the library.
Squeeze in some time for reading this summer or fall or winter or... Reading is a year round pleasure.
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