At Bertram's Hotel by Agatha Christie
Summer is not complete unless you read a murder mystery. Taking place at a classic English hotel on a quieter street in London, Ms. Marple goes to stay at Bertram's Hotel on holiday. It's a perfectly charming hotel, the last of the truly British hotels with real muffins, butter, and tea time. Hospitality and decor is top notch, but darkness is looming underneath the surface. Strange scenes start to occur. Characters act in suspicious ways. Ms. Marple notices these things, but kind of stores them away for later. When a murder occurs just outside the hotel, things must be solved, and Ms. Marple's excellent memory is a key to solving the case.
High Time by Hannah Rothschild
In the world of finance, crypto-currency, and shorting stocks, there's a ton of room for the rich and greedy to become more rich and greedy, to cast themselves into immoral situations. A modern book is not often my cup of tea, but this one connected with the world of finance caught my eye, as well as the location at a castle in Cornwall. It is high drama, ultra rich making things worse for themselves. Deceit in the world of finance steeps into personal relationships, breaking everything apart. Ponsi schemes still work on the foolish and desperate. It was a little bit too flashy in those ways. I think the sympathy was supposed to be with the main character, as her husband set out to leave her penniless in pursuit of his ideas, but I didn't feel sympathy for her, nor anyone in the book, for every character in this world was a deceiver.
John Milton Selected Poems
A selection of his greats. Milton wrote during the most tumultuous time in English history (their civil war). Includes some of his most well-known poems and large chunks of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. I haven't spent a long time studying and reading Milton, so I thought it was a good time to do that. Plus this lovely edition of the Penguin classic cover is hard to resist.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
An explosion at a museum. The 'unintentional' act stealing a painting and keeping it hidden for years (in memory of his mother killed in the explosion), the decision made as a young teen haunts Theo and changes the course of his life into a slippery slope of a dark world. Donna Tartt is a brilliant writer. She writes about one book per decade, and each is a masterpiece in its complex way. She takes you into dark worlds, but you are so drawn in as a reader, and there are deeper truths that she is wanting to show through her characters. Philosophical questions are raised throughout the book - what is a good life? Do we choose a good life, do we make it, is it handed to us? What happens when you are turning into your father (who left you and treats you badly) when you deeply loved and admired your mother and would want to be more like her? Seeing in the distance the good you want, but not being able to get there because of different transition points and the choices made at each.
A Sultry Month by Alethea Haytor
It's June/July, 1846 in London. A heatwave spans weeks where the temperatures hit 100+ on a regular basis. This literary journey takes us into events taken from the diaries, letters, records, and news from the lives of creatives like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Haydon. This snapshot from a hot June/July 1846 was written in the 1960s but reads like a modern group biography, of which this is a first of its kind. When it's summer now and the long-term heat wave is ever-present, it was a perfectly timed read.
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