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Saturday, August 31, 2013

I Have Been Reading...

This evening I finished reading Josephine Tey's first novel, The Man In The Queue, published in 1929. It's the first Inspector Grant novel. I had been rereading, yet again, The Daughter Of Time, which put me in the mood for Richard III fiction(and I'm still rereading We Speak No Treason). That, in its turn, made me think of Josephine Tey's other books. I wanted to see what Inspector Grant did when he was not confined to a hospital bed researching Richard III. I discovered the title of his first appearance and bought it in iBooks. And while looking up the titles of Tey's other novels, I found one by Nicola Upson, a murder mystery in which Josephine Tey is the sleuth! It was only $2.99, so what-the-heck. I have just started that one. I also, on an impulse, bought and downloaded Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief, which I have just finished. It was basically a road story with Greek mythology slotted in, quite entertaining, though the author surely must know that Athena is a maiden goddess, unlikely to have children, but chose to ignore it for the purposes of the story. I can see, though, why the series is popular among our kids - not hard reading and the characters meet a fresh challenge in each chapter.

Speaking of road stories, I've finally begun to get stuck into Libba Bray's novel, Going Bovine, which I bought at the Reading Matters conference. It's the story of a boy who has been diagnosed with mad cow disease and is taking a road trip, with a Little Person friend from school, to find a cure which he has been promised by a punk angel. They have several bizarre encounters and I get the feeling it's meant to be a version of Don Quixote... Not sure if it's really YA fiction, though the hero is a teenager. It just has too many references which will go over the heads of many teens. I'll make up my mind when I've finished it; I'm halfway through, having read quite a bit when I woke up at 4.30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep.

There are some review copies awaiting their turn, so I'd better get going on those!

Any interesting reading going on out there, readers?

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