Giving A Gentleman in Moscow to my dear friend and book club buddy for Xmas-I hope she loves it as much as I did. I just finished the latest Cork O'Connor mystery suspense novel. This is a series that is always interesting; the protagonist is an investigator of mixed Ojibwe/European ancestry and it's set in northern Minnesota. Lots of great insight and background about both topics and almost always a riveting storyline as well. I started Hillbilly Elegy last night, enjoying it very much so far. Helps that my own family background is Scots-Irish hillbilly although my family doesn't have the, um, colorful style of the author's to say the least! On my bookshelf for holiday enjoyment is the latest Flavia de Luce, the latest Longmire, Ordinary Light, Sweetbitter, and Today Will be Different which is the latest by Maria Semple of Where'd You Go Bernadette fame.

yoyo, I don't think I can recommend anything to you but I will agree about the 'Essex Serpent' which was much over-hyped here a couple of years ago and was up for various 'awards'. I felt the story had way too many 'strands' none of them either very believable or interesting and lacked the essential 'Victorian' feel . . . plus had I been from Essex I would not have been happy that the author felt people from that county were then all half-wits.

Thank you so much for all the recommendations. I'll be traveling a lot soon and I'm sure I'll read a lot of these. I have Aunt Dimity queued up to read, along with the first Ngaio Marsh book. I'll probably try Miss Read next and/or Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Many of those mentioned I have read. Rhys Bown mysteries, Amelia Peabody mysteries, Georgette Heyer, Mitford books, etc. But it was helpful to have those recommendations because it was lovely to see there are others who enjoyed those books as well. And I will try the audiobook of the Amelia Peabody mysteries because I often fall asleep to an audiobook, so it's helpful to have a good recommendation. I tried A Man Called Ove and I'm sure I'll finish it, but it is unbearably sad to read it right now so I laid it down. I have a friend who has cancer and also a suspicious spot on her liver and she is the light of her husband's life. I want to escape from pain and loss right now. A murder mystery like Agatha Christie writes should be sad, I guess. It's murder, but somehow that doesn't reach out and snatch my heart out like the pain of Ove losing his wife. Another time in my life I would probably have liked A Gentleman in Moscow and A Man Called Ove. So thank you so much to all of you for taking the time to respond. It will be nice to have this thread to check when I finish the stack of books I have now.

The 1000 books to read, Sue? bravo!!! Circling back to promote another fave book gift of mine. It is not for everyone for sure. It is more for someone who loves words, but I will throw it out there. This is the condensed version of the 27 volume (iirc) OED or Oxford English Dictionary. You have to use a magnifying glass (comes with) to read it. It is a very handsome very large and substantial book. The OED, as you may know, not only defines a word but gives the history of the word over time. I love this book, as you can tell. It can also be a great gift for graduates IMHO. , under each definition of a word is a chronologically arranged group of quotations that illustrate the word's usage down through the years, beginning with its earliest known appearance. The result is a dictionary that offers unique insight into the way our language has, over the centuries, grown, changed, and been put to use. More than 100 years in the making, The Oxford English Dictionary is now universally acknowledged as the world's greatest dictionary—the supreme arbiter on the usage and meaning of English words, a fascinating guide to the history and evolution of the language, and one of the greatest works of scholarship ever produced. The Washington Post has written that "no one who reads or writes seriously can be without the OED."