Lazy 3-day weekend poll ~ winter reading list, edition 14 :: Now Smell This
There are 47 days until the spring equinox, but only 29 days until the first day of meteorological spring. (Plus, if you’re reading this on Sunday, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit and welcome to February). That means it must be time for our annual winter reading poll!
Tell us about a great book to curl up with on a frosty winter night, and what fragrance we should wear while reading it. (Or, do what I do and record here everything you have read since the last quarterly reading poll. And if you want more recommendations, scrolling through the literature tag will bring up all the older reading polls.)
Or, as always, just talk about something else.
What I’ve read since the fall poll:
On the non-fiction front, I finally read Tom Piazza’s Living in the Present with John Prine, a short tribute which has been sitting on my bedside table since I got it for my birthday last year. I knew it would make me cry and it did. This is the book I will scent: Demeter Gingerale, for Prine’s favorite cocktail — vodka and gingerale — as referenced in the book and in his song When I Get To Heaven.
I also read 2 non-fiction books by Patrick Leigh Fermor. DeniseH recommended him in the fall poll, and then I got lucky on two visits to used book stores (he is not well represented in our library system). So far, I have finished A Time of Gifts and Between The Woods and The Water, plus I’m in the middle of Artemis Cooper’s Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, and I have a nice stack still to go.
For fiction, I finished off the works of Elizabeth Strout (My Name Is Lucy Barton; Olive, Again; Oh William!; Lucy by the Sea and Tell Me Everything). Now I’ll have to wait for her next book, which is due out in May. I also read Maria Reva’s Endling (fantastic), Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (long and meandering but I am glad I read it), Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field (ditto), Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter (wonderful but a bit bleak and I kind of wish I’d saved it for summer) and Jonathan Buckley’s One Boat (ditto).
I read two older spy novels (Robert Littell’s The Defection of AJ Lewinter and Joseph Kanon The Prodigal Spy) and a few mysteries: Margaret Frazer’s The Squire’s Tale, Laura Lippman’s Murder Takes A Vacation and The Killing Stones by Anne Cleeves.
Note: top image is detail from The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1562, oil on canvas, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.