Ten Books I was Reading on this Day (August 11) over the Past 10 Years

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

The topic for Top Ten Tuesday this week was to go back and list the books I was reading on August 11th in the previous ten years. I used Goodreads to find the books but I did find that in some cases it was hard to determine exactly what I was reading on that day, and I just winged it.

2025

Perplexing Plots by David Bordwell

Published in 2023

Bordwell was an influential film scholar; this book, the last one he published, focuses on crime fiction and films in the 1900s up to more recent times. He discusses the development of crime fiction plots and narratives and notes the same developments in plays and film of that time.

2024

A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny

Published in 2016.

The mysteries in this series are always rewarding. Usually very complex and sometimes circuitous and perplexing, they keep me guessing. I never even came close to suspecting the perpetrator in this book. Louise Penny is very good at creating characters we want to read about. She also continues to develop the characters, both the main characters and the continuing secondary characters in Three Pines. It is hard to look back and compare all the books, but I think this is my favorite book in the series so far.

2023

Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson

Published in 1971.

This is the fourth in a series about Jimmy Pibble. In the first two books, he was a Scotland Yard detective; now he has been forced into retirement. His wife is a volunteer for a charitable institution and asks him to look into a problem they are having. There are vague supernatural elements, which is not surprising since Dickenson was a well-known author of fantasy books. The book is very short, around 200 pages, but very dense, not an easy read at all. I loved the story and the writing.

2022

Death Around the Bend by T.E. Kinsey

Published in 2017

This is the third mystery in a series of historical mysteries. Set in the early 1900's, Lady Hardcastle (Emily) and her maid Florence Armstrong solve mysteries while living in the English countryside. The stories are excellent historical fiction, and the mystery plots are well-done. 

2021

Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

Published in 1963.

All I knew when I started this book was that it was a science fiction classic about a man on earth, in the US in the 1960s, providing a station where aliens from other planets stop overnight while traveling from planet to planet. This is completely hidden from the rest of the world. It is a very interesting and entertaining book, with lots of tension, because his station is discovered, and I was surprised at the ending. It is very much of its time, but I did not mind that at all.

2020

Young Bess by Margaret Irwin

Published in 1944.

Young Bess is the first book in a trilogy about Elizabeth I of England.  It covers her life from the time she was 12 until she was about 20, including Henry VIII's death, his son Edward VI's years as king (from age 9 to 15), and Elizabeth's relationships with her brother Edward and Princess Mary, her sister.

2019

Champagne for One by Rex Stout 

Published in 1958.

Rex Stout is my favorite author; I have reread all the books in the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin mystery series several times. One of Archie's acquaintances asks him to take his place at an annual dinner party and dance for unwed mothers. One of the mothers, Faith Usher, ends up dead. This book has all the best features of the series. The interplay between Archie and Nero Wolfe. Inspector Cramer visiting the brownstone to berate Archie for sticking to his guns regarding the cause of death. And freelance investigators Orrie, Fred, and Saul helping with the detecting.

2018 

Starting out in the Evening by Brian Morton

Published in 1997.

This book follows a short period in the life of four people: Leonard Schiller, a novelist in his seventies; Heather Wolfe, a woman in her early twenties who wants to write her thesis on Schiller's novels; Ariel, Leonard's daughter, who wants very much to have a child; and Casey, one of Ariel's ex-boyfriends. It was a wonderful read but very different from my usual reading.

2017

Hammett by Joe Gores

Published in 1975.

Joe Gores was an admirer and a student of Dashiell Hammett's writing. Both Gores and Hammett had been private investigators before they  became full time writers. Both had lived and worked in San Francisco. Thus Gores was the perfect person to write this fictionalized version of events in Samuel Dashiell Hammett's life, set in 1928 when Hammett was no longer a private detective and was trying to support himself with his writing.

2016

See Also Deception by Larry D. Sweazy

Published in 2016.

This is the second book in a mystery series set in rural North Dakota in October, 1964. The area is affected by a drought, with a severe impact on the crops and livestock on the farm.  President Kennedy was killed in the previous year, and that still affects the nation. There is a cold war going on, very visible in North Dakota, with missile silos being drilled into the ground. Marjorie Trumaine and her husband Hank are owners of a working farm; her husband is an invalid and Marjorie has to run the farm, and take care of her husband. Marjorie is a freelance indexer, creating indexes for non-fiction books. It is this aspect of the book that drew me to the series from the beginning. I think indexes in books are wondrous things and I can only imagine the work that goes into creating one. My husband pointed the first book in the series out to me because he knew I would be interested in it. I loved this book and I don't know why I haven't read the 3rd book yet.

Top Ten New-to-Me Authors Discovered in 2024

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2024. Last year, I read books by a total of 29 new-to-me authors, which accounts for about a third of the books I read. I suppose that number should not surprise me, but it does.

And here's my list of my 10 favorite new-to-me authors. The authors are not listed in any order.

Kate Wilhelm

I read The Hamlet Trap, the first book in the Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn mystery series, first published in 1987. Kate Wilhelm has written two mystery series and many standalone novels in the mystery and science fiction genres. She was married to Damon Knight, a very well-known author of science fiction. Kate Wilhelm's fiction was first recommended to me by Todd Mason at Sweet Freedom.

Willa Cather

My Ántonia is the first book I have read by Willa Cather and I now understand why other readers are so effusive in their praise for this book and its author. There are so many interesting aspects to this book: life on the prairies and in the small towns; the descriptions of backbreaking work on a farm; the difficulties of the immigrants who move to the Nebraska prairies, most of which cannot speak much English.

Gabrielle Zevin

I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Zevin in early 2024. That book was about two young people who worked together to create video games. The story does focus on video games and the process of creating them, but it is about many other things: relationships, families, judgement and misunderstandings, and ambition. Later in 2024 I read The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and enjoyed it too.

Catherine O'Flynn 

I read What Was Lost, the author's debut novel, which was published in 2007. A ten-year-old girl, Kate, lives with her grandmother; her goal is to be a detective, and run her own detective agency. She has few friends, hates school, and entertains herself with investigating cases that she has made up. One day she disappears and most of the story focuses on how this event affects other people in her neighborhood, over the following years.

Fredrik Backman

A Man Called Ove was Backman's first novel, published in 2012, but I did not read any of his books until 2024. Ove is an older man, nearing sixty, whose wife has recently died. He has decided that he does not want to go on living without her. This story is alternately humorous and sad, and I loved it. I will be reading more books by this author.

Joseph Kanon

Defectors was the first book I have read by Joseph Kanon, and it definitely won't be my last. The story focuses on a group of American and British spies living in and around Moscow during the Cold War, after defecting. Frank is a US spy who defected to Russia in 1949. Simon, his younger brother, had to leave his job in intelligence to work in publishing after Frank's defection. In 1961, Simon is in publishing and has been allowed to come to Moscow to work with Frank on publishing his memoirs. I loved the exploration of family relationships, but the story has plenty of action also. I have six more of Kanon's books on my shelves.

Young-ha Kim 

I read Your Republic is Calling You. Published in 2006, the setting is South Korea. It was a different kind of spy fiction and I liked it very much. The story takes place over the course of one day in the life of Ki-Yong, a South Korean with a wife and teenage daughter. Except that he is really a North Korean spy who has been in Seoul, working as a film importer for over 20 years, and has now been recalled to North Korea. 

Karen Joy Fowler

The Jane Austen Book Club was not what I expected but I liked it very much. The book was less about the Austen books than I would have liked, but I enjoyed the individual stories about the members of the book club. I liked the different way the story was told and how the back stories were worked into the story gradually. It made me want to go out and find more books by Fowler.

Anthony Trollope 

Until this year I had not read anything by Trollope. I chose The Warden, the first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series. I had gotten the impression that Trollope's writing was humorous but I failed to see the humor in this story at first. It seemed that all would end very sadly. As the story continued, it lightened up and I became immersed in it and did enjoy the humor of the situation. And I was happy with the ending.

Samantha Harvey

I read Harvey's Booker Prize winning book, Orbital, which depicts one day in the life of six astronauts on the space station, watching the sunrises and sunsets and monitoring a typhoon threatening inhabited islands. It is short, about 200 pages, and very meditative. The difference between Harvey and the other authors on this list is that I don't know if I want to read anything else she has written. I will certainly try other books by her and be interested to see what she writes in the future.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Goals, 2025

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is Bookish Goals for 2025. You can check out other Top Tuesday blog posts here. 

This is the third year I have come up with a list of goals for reading and blogging in the next year. The goals for 2025 have been informed by my experiences in 2023 and 2024.

My goals for the year:

1. Aim at reading mostly books that I owned before January 1, 2025. My goal is 48 books.  This ties in with my next goal...
2. My husband and I have a joint goal to not buy any print books before the Planned Parenthood book sale in September. That means 9 months of not buying books.  
3. Read more graphic novels. We have a lot of unread graphic novels in the house. In 2024, I read one graphic memoir and one graphic novel. I will aim for 8 or more this year.
4. Read more novels or short stories in the fantasy genre.  Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb is definitely on the list. Also books by Terry Pratchett and Ben Aaronovitch.
5. Read more ebooks. I have two incentives to read more ebooks: I have a lot of ebooks, many of which I forget I own, and I bought a Kindle Scribe last year. I read two novels on my Kindle in 2024 and some short stories from a few collections. I need to do better.
6. Increase my short story reading. I think I have read more short stories each year over the last four years but I haven't tracked my reading. This year I want to keep track of what I read each month. 
7. Write shorter book reviews. This has been a goal for several years but I am not giving up. It might help if I come up with template for a mini review to use as a framework.
8. Read some longer books. Except for the nonfiction book The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, most of the books I read in 2024 were between 250-350 pages. I am intimidated by long books and tend to let them sit on the shelves unread. Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb (650 pages), Fellowship Point by Alice Elliot Dark (600 pages), and The Charm School by Nelson DeMille (750 pages) are some possibilities for 2025.
9. My last goal, but an important one, is to review this list several times a year and make an effort to catch up in some areas that I have been neglecting. In 2024, I don't think I came back to review this list at all. 

Addendum: 

I have some authors I want to read more books by. I obviously won't finish the series mentioned any time soon, but I can use this post as a reminder to keep working on them.

• Ross Macdonald (13 remaining books in the Lew Archer series.)
• Ross Thomas (Mostly standalone books; I have only read 3 of his books.)
• Victor Canning (3 remaining books in the Birdcage series.)
• Anthony Price (12 remaining books in the David Audley series.)
• Reginald Hill (10 remaining books in the Dalziel and Pascal series.)
• Ann Cleeves (I will continue reading books from three of her series: the George and Molly Palmer-Jones birdwatching series; the Vera Stanhope series; and the Shetland series.)
• Catherine Aird (20 books in a 29 book series left.)
• Bill Crider (I have 17 more books in the Sheriff Rhodes series to read, but I want to try his other series too.)
• Robert Barnard (He wrote over 40 crime fiction books and I probably have read half of them.)
• Thomas H. Cook (Cook is a new author to me. He was born in Alabama, and several of his books are set in Alabama. I have not read anything he wrote.)
• Thomas Perry (Author of the Jane Whitefield series and The Butcher's Boy series, he has also written a lot of standalone novels.)
• Donald E. Westlake (He wrote a lot of crime fiction, under his own name and under pseudonyms. I have read six of his books.)

Top Ten New-to-me Authors in 2023

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023. 

Some of the authors on this list write crime fiction or spy fiction, but a good number of them write books in genres I read less of (fantasy, general fiction, science fiction). All of them were good discoveries, and I plan to read more books by every one of the authors on this list. 

My list is in no particular order.

Kotaro Isaka

Bullet Train is the first book I read by this Japanese author. I like Japanese books, but have read more mysteries and thrillers than other genres. It looks like this book was the 2nd in a series of three books that have been translated into English.

Robin Hobb

Robin Hobb is a  pseudonym used by Megan Lindholm. Assassin's Apprentice is the first book in a fantasy series, The Farseer Trilogy. I plan to read the 2nd book in the series this year. I discovered this book and author via Cath at Read-Warbler when she reviewed The Mad Ship, part of a different series.

Deanna Raybourn

Killers of a Certain Age is a story about four older women who have worked for years as assassins. The organization that hired and trained them is called the Museum, and now the Museum has turned against them and ordered their deaths. It is not exactly spy fiction, but it reads much like a spy thriller, so it was perfect for me. Deanna Raybourn has written several series in the historical fiction genre. 

Carson McCullers 

Carson McCullers was a well-known American author whose novels were mainly set in the Deep South. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the first book I read by this author.

Helene Hanff

This author is best known for 84, Charing Cross Road, a book comprised of the letters between Hanff and Frank Doel, who worked at a book store on Charing Cross Road in London. The correspondence began in October 1949 and continued for the next 20 years.

Jesse Q. Sutanto

This author has written young adult fiction and some adult mysteries. The book I read was Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.

Michael Christie  

Christie is a Canadian author. I read his second novel, Greenwood, set in Canada, from 1908 through 2038. It is a multigenerational family story with a focus on nature and ecology, especially trees. 

Becky Chambers  

This author writes science fiction, and my first experience with her writing was The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, a space opera. 

Rosamunde Pilcher

Pilcher was a very well known British author of romances and family sagas. Many of her books are set in Cornwall, but the one I read, Winter Solstice, is primarily set in Scotland in the two months leading up to Christmas. Luckily, I purchased The Shell Seekers at the book sale last year, so I have another to read sometime this year. 

Bob Cook

This was a new spy fiction author for me. Paper Chase is a humorous book about four old spies who retired years ago, and only get together at the funerals of other old friends who were intelligence agents. They are forbidden to publish their memoirs, but they decide to do it anyway. Felony & Mayhem reprinted Paper Chase and Disorderly Elements, but I am going to try to track down other books by this author.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Goals, 2024

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is Bookish Goals for 2024. 

Last year was the first year I have given a lot of thought to reading and blogging goals over the next year. The goals for this year are similar to last year, and informed by my experiences in 2023.

My goals for the year:

1. Aim at reading mostly books that I owned before January 1st of 2024. I have signed up for Bev Hankin's Mount TBR Challenge 2024 on Goodreads in order to track the number of books I read that fit that criteria. My goal is 48 books.  This ties in with my next goal...
2. My husband and I have a joint goal to not buy any books before the Planned Parenthood book sale in September. That effectively means almost 9 months of not buying books. One exception: We can buy ebooks. 
3. Read more graphic novels. I read a total of 4 graphic novels last year, which was an improvement. I will aim for 8 this year.
4. Read more science fiction and fantasy, novels or short stories. In 2023 I read 3  science fiction novels and 1 fantasy novel. I read a few science fiction short stories from 4 different books. My aim is to improve on that, the more the better.
5. Read more espionage novels. In 2023, I met my goal of at least 10 novels in that genre. I would like to read more than that this year, maybe 15. I will also aim at reading more spy fiction by authors that I haven't read but are on my shelves, virtual or otherwise.
6. Read more ebooks. I buy a lot of ebooks but have a hard time reading them. I read one novel on my Kindle in 2023 and some short stories from a few collections.
7. Read at least one classic a month, preferably from my Classics Club List, since I have been working on my Classics list for over 5 years, and still have a lot left on the list. But any classic reads would be good.
8. Increase my short story reading. Last year I lamented the fact that I start short story anthologies or collections but often take months or years to finish them. However, I have decided that enjoying reading short stories is more important than completed books. Instead I will aim at reading more short stories per month (which will require tracking them in some way, which I am not good at). 
9. Share my thoughts on every book I read. I borrowed this goal from Jana's list from 2023. I try to do this already, even if it is only in my monthly book lists, but sometimes I only provide a summary. I may start putting shorter reviews in Goodreads. This will be a work in progress, and I don't expect to succeed at it overnight. It goes along with my last goal...
10. Write shorter book reviews. This has been a goal for several years but I have had little success. Last year, when I tried to write short reviews, they turned into long reviews. I don't necessarily want to write only brief reviews, but I would like to master that art.

Addendum: 

I have some authors I want to read more books by. This is not something I could do in one year, but I want to use this post as a reminder to read more by these authors:

• Raymond Chandler (4 remaining books in the Philip Marlowe series)
• Ross Macdonald (14 remaining books in the Lew Archer series)
• Ross Thomas (He wrote mostly standalone books; I have only read 3 of his books. I have 10 on my shelves.)
• Victor Canning (4 remaining books in the Birdcage series)
• Anthony Price (13 remaining books in the David Audley series)
• Reginald Hill (10 remaining books in the Dalziel and Pascal series)
• Rex Stout (Reread any books in the Nero Wolfe series that I have not read since I started blogging. Around 24 books.)

Top Ten Tuesday: My status on my Bookish Goals for 2023

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the topic is "Reading Goals I Still Want to Accomplish Before the End of the Year." 

I am choosing an alternate option, to report on how I have done on my Bookish Goals for 2023, which I shared in more detail last January on my blog. After each goal, I am adding a brief note about my status as of the end of September.

1. Read more graphic novels.  I was aiming for one a month.

Current Status:  I read a total of five so far: two graphic memoirs in August, and three books in the A Man and His Cat series (Japanese manga). This is an improvement over last year.

2. Read more science fiction. My aim in 2023 was to read ten novels or short story anthologies.

Current Status: I did not do very well in this area. I read two science fictions novels (one by John Scalzi, the other an alternate history book). And a few short stories. Next year I would change this goal to also include fantasy novels. 

3. Read more espionage novels. My goal was to read 10 or 12. Specific authors I would like to catch up on are Anthony Price, Victor Canning, Len Deighton, Mick Herron, and Charles Cumming.

Current Status: I have only read six spy fiction novels in 2023 so far. I read novels by Anthony Price, Victor Canning, and Mick Herron, but haven't read any by Len Deighton or Charles Cumming.

4. Aim at reading books on my shelves rather than buying new books. 

Current Status: I did very well on reading books from my own shelves. My goal for 2023 is 48 books, and I am only one shy of that at this point. But I have not succeeded at all on cutting back on buying new (to me) books.

5. Read more ebooks. I continue to buy ebooks but hardly ever read them. 

Current Status: Total Failure. I have read one ebook this year.

6. Read some every morning. Anything would be fine, but I can't read ebooks at night because it interferes with my sleep, so ebooks would be a priority. 

Current Status: Not much progress on this one either. I sometimes read in the morning or afternoon, but only now and then.

7. Read more books from my Classics List. My goal was to read at least one classic a month. 

Current Status: I think I only read five books from my classics list this year. I am far behind on completing my Classics List.

8. Train myself to write short reviews. I don't necessarily want to write only brief reviews, but I would like to master that art.

Current Status: I did make some efforts in this area, but with little results. However, it is still an important goal for me.

9. Complete more short story anthologies or collections. I currently have many half-finished short story books all over the house. 

Current Status: My goal was to complete one short story book a month. On a quick glance through the blog, I think I finished 5 collections or anthologies so far this year. That is not bad, but I may have to accept that I just don't like that approach to reading short stories; usually I just want to dip in and out of short story anthologies or collections.

10. I want to regularly track my goals and any challenges I participate in. 

Current Status: I knew that would be a real challenge for me, and I haven't kept up with it. I have to decide how much I care about this, and whether it is worthwhile for me.

Summing up

To be honest, I don't know that I am going to push to finish any of my current goals in the last three months of the year. In the summer months, I read a lot of books from my TBR shelves for the 20 Books of Summer (all of which I enjoyed), and now I am more interested in just reading what strikes my fancy for the rest of the year. Between now and the end of the year, I plan to read two books for the 1962 Club in October and I hope to read some books with Christmas themes in December.

However, this has given me a great opportunity to think about what Bookish Goals I want to aim at in 2024.

 

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Spy Fiction Authors

 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is a Genre Freebie (pick any genre and build a list for that genre). 

I picked espionage fiction and I am listing my favorite authors in the genre. I limited the list to eight authors. The first two authors are my top two spy fiction authors but beyond that it is hard to decide and the order could change at any time. 

The number of books by the author's name is the number of books that I have read by them.

Charles McCarry (10 books)

I discovered the spy novels of Charles McCarry in 2009 and read them all in a few months (including the two political thrillers that are only peripherally related). Most of the novels written by Charles McCarry are about Paul Christopher, an intelligence agent for the CIA (called "the Outfit" in his books). Some of them go back and forth between events around the World War II years and the 1960's, exploring Christopher's youth and family history. Those nine books were written between 1971 and 2007. McCarry also published The Shanghai Factor in 2013 and The Mulberry Bush in 2015.

Len Deighton (16 books)

Deighton has written two spy fiction series. My favorite is the Bernard Samson series. I have read all nine books in that series, plus Winter, a historical novel which features characters from the Samson series. Deighton is probably best known for his Nameless Spy series (also known as the Harry Palmer series, because of the film adaptations). I have read four of those and I like them, but they are not my favorites of his books. And the great thing about him is I still have at least ten books of his to read.

Anthony Price (5 books)

Anthony Price only wrote 19 novels, all about David Audley, a British spy. I love this kind of spy fiction, which TV Tropes describes as the Stale Beer flavor: more realistic, not romanticizing the subject, grittier. The focus in these books is on characterization and intellect, not action, although there is some of that present. Most of the books in this series have historical events infused into a present day story. In Other Paths to Glory it is World War I and the battlefields of the Somme. In Colonel Butler's Wolf, the site of the story is Hadrian's Wall.

Mick Herron (9 books)

Mick Herron is best known for the Slough House series about MI5 spies who have been demoted due to some disgrace or screw up in their jobs, and are now working under Jackson Lamb. The first book was Slow Horses. I have read 7 books in that series, and the stories get better and better. I still have the last two books in that series to read, plus a stand alone book (set in the same universe as Slough House). And some novellas that are related to the series.

Olen Steinhauer (11 books)

Olen Steinhauer has written twelve full-length novels and I have read all but one of them. His first five novels were historical novels (the Yalta Boulevard series set in a fictional Eastern bloc country) and not strictly spy fiction but there were some espionage elements. After that he began the Milo Weaver series. Weaver is in the CIA; in the first book he is in the "Tourist" division, a group that does dirty work for the CIA. He also wrote a couple of very good standalone novels.

John le Carré (8 books)

I could not do a list like this and not include John le Carré. I don't know exactly how many novels he has written, somewhere between 25 and 30? I have only read 8 of his books, and most of the ones I read featured George Smiley, his best-known character. However, my favorite book by le Carré is A Perfect Spy, about a British spy assigned to an important post in Vienna who disappears after he gets a call that his father has died. It is around 600 pages long and I loved every page of it. John le Carré writes eloquently; he develops his characters bit by bit and pulls me into the story. 

Charles Cumming (5 books)

Charles Cumming has been publishing spy fiction novels since 2001 but his books are relatively new to me. I have only read five of the eleven books he has published. The books I have read and enjoyed are A Spy by Nature (Alec Milius #1 and his first novel), A Foreign Country (Thomas Kell #1), A Colder War (another Thomas Kell book), and Box 88, the beginning of a new series. Box 88 features Lachlan Kite, an agent for a covert spy agency. Kite is abducted, possibly by terrorists, after leaving the funeral of an old friend from boarding school. It turns out that the abduction is related to an event in the late 1980s when Lachlan was just out of boarding school, visiting his friend in France. At that time Lachlan began spying for the Box 88 group, and there are flashbacks to his introduction to the craft of spying. It was an excellent book.

Dan Fesperman (5 books)

I debated whether I should include Dan Fesperman or not. He has written thirteen books, but I am not sure how many of them are spy fiction. I have read several of his books which are combinations of spy fiction and adventure. Examples are The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (set in Bosnia, 1998) and The Arms Maker of Berlin (two time lines, one in 2009, the other in World War II). His most recent series is definitely spy fiction; both Safe Houses and The Cover Wife feature female CIA agents in Germany. And I was very favorable impressed by those books. 

 

These are not the only authors of espionage fiction that I enjoy, but for many of the authors I have only read one book or their focus is on other types of fiction.

I would love to hear from anyone who has opinions about these authors or suggestions for other authors I should try.

Top Ten New-to-me Authors in 2022

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's topic is a Freebie (any topic). I missed last week's topic, which was New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2022. So that is what I am doing this week for my Freebie.

I was surprised to find that I read books by 43 new-to-me authors in 2022. I only read 88 books in 2022, and some were by the same authors, thus over half the authors I read were new-to-me. 

Since I had so many to pick from, I decided to focus on authors who I want to read more books by OR I thought their writing was very special.

My list is in order by the date I read them.

Elizabeth Strout

I have only read one book by Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, a book of linked short stories. Most of the short stories were depressing but I thought that the writing and the characters were excellent, and I want to read more books by her.

Richard Osman

Richard Osman is an English television presenter and novelist. His debut novel, The Thursday Murder Club, was published in 2020. I read all three books in that series in 2022, and loved them all. My favorite was The Man Who Died Twice.

Matt Haig

The Midnight Library was my first book by Matt Haig.  I liked his writing, and I will read Haig's other books on my shelves (and my husband's).

Molly Clavering

Because of Sam by Molly Clavering is a lovely postwar story set in a village in Scotland, written in 1954. See Cath's review at Read-Warbler.  

John Burdett

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett is the first book in a crime fiction series set in Thailand. The main character is a Thai policeman, Sonchai Jitpleecheep. I had had this book on my shelves for 15 years and now I hope to read more of them.

T. E. Kinsey

The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries are historical fiction, set in the early 1900's. Lady Hardcastle (Emily) and her maid Florence Armstrong solve mysteries while living in the English countryside. I was attracted by the idea of a lady and her maid solving mysteries, and I liked the first one so well I read two more. This is another series recommended by Cath at Read-Warbler. 

Ted Wood

Dead in the Water by Ted Wood, published in 1983, is the first book in a ten book crime fiction series starring Reid Bennett. The book has a great Canadian setting, in a small town on the water, and one of the best characters is Bennett's dog Sam.

Stef Penney

I read The Tenderness of Wolves for my Canadian Reading Challenge. The story is set in 1867, primarily in a small settlement in the Northern Territory. This is a historical mystery, but the crime and the investigation are not the primary aspect of the story.

Elspeth Barker

This is the only author on this list that I will not be able to read further books by. Elspeth Barker's only novel was O Caledonia, published in 1991. This book is short, about 190 pages long, set in Scotland in the 1950s.  It is a sad but beautiful story  of a young girl, part of a large family, who doesn't fit in anywhere.

 

Mariah Fredericks

A Death of No Importance by Mariah Fredericks is a historical mystery set in 1910 New York. It is the story of a young woman who works as a lady's maid for the two daughters of a rich family and the first in a series of four books. I want to read more of that series and see where it takes the character.

Let me know if you have read any of these authors and have recommendations for further reading.