Another missed post last week (sorry! blame late summer) and another slow couple of weeks on the book front. (I expect the pace to pick up considerably come September, so thank you for hanging in there with me.) Last week started on an especially hectic note – we returned home from our summer road trip through the Dakotas (with Wyoming interlude) at 8:30pm, and I left the house for a business trip to Connecticut at 4:30am the very next day. Oof. It was a whirlwind couple of days and I didn’t get home until after midnight on Tuesday night – or technically, Wednesday morning – and I didn’t read at all. When I wasn’t in meetings or driving between sites, I was trying to catch up on a mountain of work that piled up during my vacation, and I spent my almost non-existent free time on Monday night chatting with my favorite aunt over the phone, not reading. No regrets!

Anyway, bookish focus came back in direct proportion to the amount of work that I whittled away, and by the weekend I was back deep in pages, which is how I like to be. By midweek I finished up Midsummer Mysteries and mostly enjoyed it – although as with every short story collection, some of the offerings were better than others. (The Marple and Poirot stories in the collection were, of course, the highlights!) There’s a sort of matching edition for winter and the holidays, so I’ve got that on my to-purchase list for this fall.

Then I stayed in the general mystery/golden age crime category and returned to my kindle book – Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life. I usually only read on my kindle when I’m traveling or reading something so large and unwieldy that I don’t want a physical book, but I also don’t like leaving a book partially read. I enjoyed this doorstopper of a literary biography, but was pretty much over it by the weekend, with hours of reading still ahead of me; I finally got through on Sunday night. I’m still rather in the mood for golden age detective fiction (and ancillary nonfiction) and have a few titles on my to-read-soon pile, but in the meantime I decided to take a break from murder and mayhem and read something different. Father, by Elizabeth von Arnim, is Miranda Mills‘ choice for the Comfort Book Club this month, and I happened to have a copy – so decision made, and that was an easy one! I started it so late on Friday that I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but I’m already enjoying it – Father’s determination that there should be “no fuss” about his surprise marriage, and adult daughter Jennifer’s determination to move out as a result, had me chuckling out loud within the first couple of pages. Can’t wait to see where the story goes from that strong beginning.

No instagram picture to share this week! We did literally nothing over the weekend, which felt AMAZING. Back to busy life, and posting regularly, this week – I PROMISE.