Thanks for the rec of "My Sister is a Serial Killer", Lynn. I also enjoyed it.

Has anyone read :The Windsor Knot" by S.J. Bennett?? It's a hoot! The Queen turns detective after a murder at Windsor Castle. Clever writing.

Thanks for the recommendation. I had noticed the title as one of the new arrivals just earlier today but didn't do anything about it. Have now gone and put it on Hold - 3rd in line.

I tend to read several books at once, always have since I was a kid. Right now I have a bedside book, a bathroom book, and a book on my tablet for when I'm not at home. And it's funny how often the books seem to resonate with each other, though I never choose them with that in mind.

Right now I'm reading Edna Ferber's "Giant" from the mid fifties. A big sprawling story of Texas, with one of its themes being anti Mexican racism. It also looks at power imbalances, with million acre ranches and those who labour on them, all wrapped up in what is mostly a personal story of one marriage.

Also Susan Isaacs' "Red, White and Blue", set half in the present (when the book was written, in the 90s) and half in a timeline from the late 1800s to now. It's essentially a romantic semi-thriller. Under the story runs a theme exploring what it means to be an American. Set mostly in Wyoming, with white supremacists as part of the plot.

And last, Jess Walters' "The Cold Millions", set in Spokane, Washington, a period piece exploring the early labour movement, specifically the Wobblies. A serious new novel looking at class and race.

All set in the west, all looking at class and race and identity, but differing widely in tone and style. And they're just bouncing around in my head, striking sparks off each other.

So now I've finished all three of those.

It's interesting reading a bestseller from generations ago. You can see why "Giant" was a big hit - it has a lot of appeal in a lot of ways. But it's also very much a bestseller, and the thing about bestsellers is that usually they are not particularly great books. I read a review that said that this is one of the rare cases where the movie is better than the book, and I have to agree.

Any Susan Isaacs book is going to be fun, and this one is. Likeable characters, enough action and humour to keep it from being dry, and, in its analysis of right wing extremity and where it could lead the country, pretty much bang on thirty years later.

"The Cold Millions" is the best book of the bunch. Its politics are pretty clear, but most of the abuses and atrocities here are well documented - this stuff happened, and it is, for the most part, forgotten history. Lots of modern day echoes here, too. Funny how the past keeps coming back - it's almost like we never learn anything.

I envy you being able to juggle 3 books at once! My memory's not the greatest and if I tried to do that I think I'd meld them all together. If I leave a book sitting too long, I have to start all over because I can't remember any of it!  I read a book a few months ago that I really loved and would love to recommend here, but now I can't remember what it was and don't see it in my digital orders.

I'd heard of Michael Chabon of course, but had never read anything by him. My son recommended "The Yiddish Policemans Union" and I loved it, so now it looks like I'll be reading a lot more - I'm currently enjoying a short story collection.

While I've not read the books, has anyone heard of the Garage Sale mystery series? Hallmark aired 15 movies with Lori Loughlin as the protagonist, Jennifer Shannon. I've seen the author of the books several times, and maybe one day, should think about getting the series. I believe the fourth book released just recently. I'll mention the author published her first book at age 72.

I'd post a link to the site, but I'm refraining as outside links are looked down upon here.

Just pulled out Margaret Laurence's "A Bird in the House" the other day.

I don't know if she's well known outside Canada. Her style is fairly standard mid-century literary fiction; she covers much of the same sort of ground as Alice Munro, who is probably these days better known in the wider world.

She was just so darn good - so insightful, so readable. I've got all the books here in the house, so I think I'll read them all over the next little while.

I've at least heard of Margaret Laurence although not read any of her works. It's The Stone Angel that sticks in my mind as the one that sounds familiar.

My local library has zero of her books! But I have access to five of her novels plus two short story collections along with some non-fiction. The Prophet's Camel Bell sounds interesting and I usually enjoy women's stories of their life in other countries.

I'm not fond of short stories, but do you have a novel of hers that you recommend, a favorite?

Yes, go with "The Diviners". You know when they call a novel "richly textured"? This is the kind of book they mean.

"The Stone Angel" is good, but I like it probably the least of the novels. But honestly, all the novels are good. "A Bird in the House" is probably marketed as a short story collection but it's really an episodic novel - all the stories are from the point of view of the same character over the course of her childhood.

I was a little underwhelmed by the Somali stories, but I haven't read them for forty years so maybe they're better than I remember. Laurence's strength was her acute observation of small town prairie life, and women's interior lives.

Thanks, Agony! I'll put The Diviners on my TBR list - and mark down about A Bird in the House.

Reading "The Stone Angel" now and I'll take back anything uncharitable I said about it. She's not likeable, our Hagar, but she sure is real.

Thanks for the correction, Agony. I've added that notation in my TBR file. I totally understand how you could look back and consider it your least favorite. I often have trouble enjoying books if I don't like the main character.

Just finished "The Diviners". Race is one of the themes of the novel and I was a little worried about how that aspect would have aged - some things that felt progressive at the time can be pretty cringe-worthy fifty years later.

On the whole I'd say it holds up fairly well. No white saviour here, no noble savage full of ancient wisdom. What does feel dated, a bit, are the "sixties hippie" bits. Pique never really comes to life the way other characters do, I think. But maybe that's intentional, showing the distance between generations, between races. Maybe.

And, yeah, just in case people have an idea of Canada as a not-racist country, well...

Kind of have to laugh at marketing, though. The cover of my paperback has a woman, looking pensive, standing on a hill with a small town behind her. And the blurb reads "... the novel of an independent woman and her urgent need for love". And, OK, sure, that's not...untrue. It's one of the things happening in the book.

But you have to wonder what someone who bought this looking for what it appears to be, from the marketing - a romance - thought about the book they actually got. Which, while there is love and sex in it, is by no means a romance.

I first read Don Marquis's "Archy & Mehitabel" and "Life of Mehitabel" decades ago, but until I was surfing the web recently I never knew he'd written another bit of the history called "Archy Does His Part". I got a copy and I didn't enjoy it anything like as much as the earlier works. Too much contemporary politics and not enough humour in my opinion.

Wow, I don't thinK about them too often - decades ago is right, about five of them.

I just took a quiz on "The Bloody Chamber", a series of short stories by Angela Carter. I was so intrigued that I just bought the book and finished the first short story. I can't remember who wrote the quiz but I tip my hat to that author for pointing me in the direction of this book!

Rereading some Elmore Leonard.

If you're not familiar with him, he wrote mostly caper crime novels. Movies like "Get Shorty", "Out of Sight" and "Jackie Brown" were based on Leonard novels.

The books are always well plotted, fast moving, and fun, but the thing that makes them stand out, to me, is the way every character has their own motives, their own agenda. Minor characters, who another author will just put in place to populate the scene, in an Elmore Leonard book might just take matters into their own hands for their own reasons. There's a very real sense that every character in the book has their own story - we may not find it out, but they've got one, they have lives of their own. I don't really know another author who does this so well, and with such economy.

Maybe it's a trend, maybe it's just coincidence, but I've read several thriller/mystery novels lately where our hero brings his/her dog along. The dog's presence is seldom germane to the plot, I think it's just that either the author likes writing about their dog, or they think it adds depth to characterization, or maybe some other reason of that sort.

Anyway, it really doesn't work, for me. I spend far too much attention and emotional bandwidth on the well-being of the darn dog. I'm supposed to be full of suspense about the fate of our hero, but all I'm thinking is "That dog hasn't had a chance to pee for a good twelve hours!"

It's very distracting, is what I mean. Rather than humanizing our hero for me, it just has me thinking "You need to take better care of your animal. Don't you have a good kennel who can take the dog when you're going to be out of town? You should!"

Agony, if you haven't read the F.B.I. K-9 series by Sara Driscoll (pen name of Jen J. Danna and Ann Vanderlaan), you might try those. I love them! Meg and her dog Hawk are part of the Search and Rescue squad and Meg cares more about her dog's safety and comfort than her own. When they've been in danger, she often sends Hawk off to safety while she tries to deal with the situation. It's a fairly new series, there are only about half a dozen so far.

For care of dogs, Bethany Blake has a cozy series about a pet-sitter.

Another possibility is David Rosenfelt's Andy Carpenter series. He's a reluctant attorney who had rather be dealing with animal shelters and rescue, specifically dogs. Lots of tongue in cheek humor as Andy is rather self-deprecating. I enjoy the audio books as the narrator Grover Gardner perfectly fits my idea of Andy.

An older series which has been going for over two decades but doesn't deal with law enforcement is by Susan Conant. Holly Winter has Alaskan Malamutes. If you read eBooks, almost all of them are free to borrow from Internet Archive or you can go there to sample the first one to see if it is to your taste. I'd label them cozy also.

One of my favourite "Dog Series" is Hamish Macbeth by M.C. Beaton. I love the way he loves his life and shuns promotion. More important is the way he loves his dog.

I'll check some of those out, thank you.

At least in the book I'm reading right now, there is another person who also cares for the dog, so at the times when the dog is so conveniently not with our hero, we don't imagine it sitting at home really needing to go out.

I dearly love that series! If I tried to make a list of my top ten favorite mystery series, it would definitely be included. If I made a list of my top favorite characters from various series, Hamish just might be number one. He'd almost surely be in the top three.

When Beaton started her Agatha Raisin series, of course I had to try them. I didn't at all care for Agatha at first - too acerbic (if that's the right word) for me. But over the course of the first few books, I really grew to love her. Not that she'd make the list of favorite characters, but the series might as I really enjoyed them too.