Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby.  I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book.  Here are my reads for September, 2012…

Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy #2), by Deborah Harkness – I’ve been calling the All Souls Trilogy “Twilight for the grad school set.”  If you’ve somehow missed the hype, this is the story of Diana Bishop, a witch who falls in love with a brooding, possessive vampire and manages to anger half the “creature” world, and also finds but then loses a mysterious alchemical manuscript called Ashmole 782 and manages to anger the other half.  In this installment, Diana and Matthew travel back in time to Elizabethan England, both to hide from their many vicious enemies and also to find a witch who can help Diana unlock her powers.  Great literature, this is not.  Meticulously detailed, fastidiously researched, sexy, attention-grabbing, and fun… it is.  As an Anglophile and history nut, I loved seeing the parade of historical figures trot through Shadow of Night (Matthew is a member of the mysterious School of Night and friends with Walter Raleigh, Henry Percy, Thomas Harriott, and Christopher Marlowe… and Shakespeare makes the occasional appearance… and Matthew and Diana spend time at the courts of Queen Elizabeth and Rudolf, the Holy Roman Emperor… good stuff all around).  Okay, so I’m not bragging about having been sucked into this trilogy… but I will definitely be reading the third book.  And I hear the movie’s been picked up… I vote for Daniel Craig as Matthew.  He’s perfect, yes?

The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (Laurence Bartram #3), by Elizabeth Speller – So, I did an oopsie and started reading this book without realizing it was part of a series.  I was really confused for 50 pages or so, at which point I discovered two things: (1) there were two other books before this one; and (2) I was now in too deep and had to keep going.  Laurence Bartram, World War I veteran and church expert, is called to the strange town of Easton Deadall to lend his expertise to the squire’s widow, who has an ancient church to remodel.  There, he finds the town still haunted by the memory of young Kitty Easton, who disappeared from the squire’s mansion when she was five years old.  Then a housemaid disappears and a body is discovered in the church, and Laurence wonders if there is a connection between these recent events and the long-cold case of Kitty Easton.  I really enjoyed this literate, well-written, chilling mystery – once I figured out who everyone was and how they knew each other.  (And the confusion, again, is my fault.  I need to do my homework before jumping into the middle of a series because I saw the third book on a book blog.  D’oh.)  I’d definitely recommend the series to fellow Anglophiles and lovers of the literate, historical mystery.  And I’m planning to find the first Laurence Bartram book and start from the beginning now.

Storm in the Village (Fairacre #3), by Miss Read – Whenever life gets to be more than I can handle, I like to turn to comfort reading to get me through.  Lately, my favorite comfort reading has been Miss Read’s gentle yet sly renderings of English village life.  I was starting to get really frustrated and depressed over life as a NICU mom, so I called in the troops (a.k.a. Miss Read, Miss Clare, the Annetts, the Patridges, Mrs Pringle, Miss Jackson and the schoolchildren) to perk me up.  It worked, as I knew it would.  Still, although they made me smile, life was no bed of roses in Fairacre in this installment.  The atomic energy plant is looking to build a housing estate for its workers, and they want Hundred Acre Field, a picturesque area between Fairacre and Beech Green.  This means more buses and better plumbing, yes, but it also means hoardes of people and the despoiling of a landscape frequently depicted by beloved local artist Dan Crockford.  And, to make matters worse, Fairacre School might close.  Say it ain’t so!  Miss Read and the villagers must band together to defeat the housing estate plan and save the soul of the village.  The Fairacre books are sweet and fun, witty with a slight edge, and all-around perfect for lifting the spirits.

Just these three books in September.  It was a tough month for me, spending eight or more hours every single day in the NICU.  My days of sitting for hours with a book are definitely in the past, at least for awhile.  Still, I liked what I did read this month.  I started out with a bit of guilty pleasure (it’s no Twilight, but Shadow of Night was still a vampire book – look, Mom, I’m trendy!), then discovered a new mystery series to follow, and finished with some comfort reading in Fairacre.  I’m hoping to get my reading groove back in October and have a few more books to report to you at the end of the month.