February was a relatively light reading month for me, so there are some nearly-done books in the stack at the beginning of this month, along with new additions. Naomi Novik's Black Powder War, N.K. Jemisin's The Kingdom of the Gods, Baratunde Thurston's How to be Black and the Margaret Millar
From the age of twenty-eight, Mavis Gallant lived and wrote in Europe, writing about "Canadians, Americans, Australians, Eastern and Western Europeans and their distinctive social and cultural milieux": she was "a citizen of the world". On the edge of beginning a deliberate reading and rereading of her stories, I peeked
Readers familiar with Margaret Millar's suspense novels, will immediately recognize her style and language in Wives and Lovers. (Just yesterday I discussed Vanish in an Instant, another volume in the Syndicate reprint series.) "It was a shoebox of a room, with the ceiling pressed down on it like a lid, and
Margaret Millar's mysteries are being brought back into print by Soho Syndicate. The Master at Her Zenith volume is comprised of five of her well-known books, including the Edgar-winning Beast in View. Throughout, her interest in psychology is evident. Both she and her characters are fascinated by detail. And the
The snow has melted from all but the most sheltered parts of the yards and the temperature has hovered above zero for so long that any fresh flakes that fall do not accumulate on the ground. The earth has warmed, the daylight lingers well past five o'clock, and sometimes it smells
