It's been another good week for me at the library. Here's a list of the books that I've picked up so far:Andrew Carmellini and Gwen Hyman, Urban Italian: Simple Recipes and True Stories From a Life in Food: I bought this one for my dad for Christmas and I confess that I had a good flip though his copy over the holidays. Now it's time to try a few of the recipes for myself and, if they're a hit, I'll buy myself a copy too.
The Coffin Trail by Martin Edwards: This is the first in a mystery series set in the Lake District featuring Daniel Kind (an Oxford historian attempting to escape to a quieter life in the country) and DCI Hannah Scarlett. From the jacket copy description it sounds like just my sort of mystery, and I note that it got an enthusiastic blurb from Peter Robinson, one of my all-time favourite mystery authors.
The Trick of It by Michael Frayn: Nick Hornby's discussion of this one in Housekeeping v. The Dirt piqued my interest. It's about a professor who meets and marries the novelist whose work has been the central focus of his career as a literary critic. How could I resist a novel premised on a marriage between novelist and critic?
The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky: This one appeared on Eva's list last week, and I immediately ordered a copy from my library. It struck me as an excellent complement to some of the other reading on poetry that I've been doing lately.
A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo: I put a hold on this many months ago after seeing an interview with the author somewhere, and this week my name finally reached the top of the list. It's a memoir of Rotolo's years with Bob Dylan when he was in his early twenties making the transition from obscurity to fame, and she was a teenager finding herself in the cultural and political hotbed of Greenwich Village. She seems to have a very engaging voice and I'm sufficiently interested in the time and the place that I don't need the Bob Dylan hook to draw me in. But that aspect of it did bring to mind another New York memoir that I loved, Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir.
Yes, I am having trouble keeping up with my reading.