While cleaning out my late mother’s house this month, I had ample time to think about “stuff”, and not just the life, love, legacy stuff, but the stuff stuff—as in objects, tchotchkes, and possessions. Whether you are downsizing, settling an estate, selling the summer house, or just organizing ... [Continue Reading]
A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee
A Rising Man is the first in a historical crime series which takes place in Calcutta, 1919. Captain Sam Wyndham, newly arrived from Scotland Yard, and his Indian colleague, Sergeant “Surrender-Not” Banerjee, one of the few Indians to be recruited into the new CID, must solve the high-profile murder ... [Continue Reading]
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough
In keeping with my retro reading theme, I just finished for the dozenth time, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (OHWYG). Originally published in 1942, OHWYG is the hilarious memoir of Skinner and Kimbrough’s post-college (Bryn Mawr) travels through Europe in the 1920s. Laugh out loud funny. What Other ... [Continue Reading]
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
My niece Mary Elizabeth cautiously recommended this “cute read” saying, “Incredibly predictable and I was at least one-third of the way through before I started to really enjoy it…” Since I am always looking for cute, love predictable (after all I frequently read the last chapter of a book ... [Continue Reading]
Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Published in 1930, Diary of a Provincial Lady is the gently satiric fictional diary of an upper-middle-class lady living in a Devonshire village. In a witty and self-deprecating tone, the Provincial Lady (PL) records her daily struggles to keep her little household afloat and her sanity intact. PL ... [Continue Reading]
Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill
Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill In Killed at the Whim of a Hat, the first novel in the Jimm Juree series, Jimm and her kooky family have recently moved from the big city of Chiang Mai to a dismal and all but deserted coastal resort town in southern Thailand. Having given up her ... [Continue Reading]
Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard
Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard Do we really need another biography of Winston Churchill? Well, yes, when it is written by talented Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic. In Hero of the ... [Continue Reading]
Mysteries from Paretsky, Clark and Black
Sara Paretsky, Marcia Clark, Benjamin Black In Fallout, Sara Paretsky relocates her Chicago based detective, V.I. Warshawski, to Kansas, where the fish out of water V.I. gets caught up in a convoluted and not entirely plausible plot involving old nukes. I raced through Moral Defense, another in ... [Continue Reading]
Nashville HOME SALES June 2017
Single Family Home Sales Davidson County June 2017 In Davidson County, there were 988 home closings in June, versus 1095 closings reported for the same period last year. The average sales price increased to $383,600 from $361,301. Single Family Home Sales Williamson County June 2017 In ... [Continue Reading]
Camino Island by John Grisham
Camino Island by John Grisham After John Grisham’s last novel, the dreary The Whistler, which wasn’t so much a novel as a thinly veiled diatribe on judicial misconduct, I wasn’t sure I’d pick up another Grisham book-- ever. But the subject of Camino Island is BOOK theft, so how could I resist? ... [Continue Reading]