I got tired of Patricia Cornwell. The early books were SO good. I will read anything by Jeffrey Deavor John Sandford is a favorite Nevada Barr and J A Jance are a must-read when a new one comes out in paperback I have everything Dick Francis ever wrote..his descriptions are spot on (I even found one plagiarized, word for word, in a Robert Parker novel) Iris Johanssen pleases me Sometimes Maria Stewart I will read a book a day if I allow myself to do so. Literally hundreds of books are donated yearly to the library, or Habitat, or whoever will take them.

We had a wonderful mutt we named Woodstock Nation. When a kitten adopted us, our 4 yo dtr named her Dorothy. I have no idea why. We had her for many years. The most beautiful cat we ever had was very tiny with the longest, softest, all black fur you can imagine. Her name was Malificent Underwood. Beautiful as she was, she didn't like to be bothered with any one but our baby boy. (We got them at the same time.) As soon as could walk he carried that cat around all day long, and she slept with him. We called her Cat. I love this old happy thread.

Lauramarie, ahhh yes, the Ligurian coast. I enjoyed Extra Virgin but for some reason never reread it. Another one for the reread pile! I've liked several of Paul Gallico's books, though I don't think I ever read the one you mention. Annie Hawes' book reminds me of a category I left out in my list above: Travel memoirs and the related I-Bought-a-House-in-a-Foreign-Country books a la Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. I read a whole bunch of those several times, until I think I must have burnt-out on them. I never bought a house outside the USA, but I've rented a few delightful ones and many dumps. And, oh! the landlords. Lydia, I suspect that's right: the magazines had to cut out the lit so they could make room for more beauty tips, advice columns, fashion spreads, interior decorating displays, and other pretty pictures. Give the reader what she wants... Actually I don't know if all the magazines did that, since I haven't bought those sorts of general magazines in several decades. I think the UK publications held out longer than US ones -- some of them may still print stories and poems...I don't know. I was introduced by the magazines to a lot of writers who later became well known. I recall a Judith Viorst story from the early 1970s called "The Tenth Good Thing About Barney" and the Redbook novel for August 1973 was Richard Bradford's So Far from Heaven (a condensation, of course). I liked the Bradford one so much that I sought out the complete version and have reread it several times. Sylvia Plath got her start in magazines, too, although that was a little before my time. I've never heard of the Everywoman's magazine your grandmother collected, but I know that those 'little' magazines could contain gems. Yes, I suppose they were tame, but watch out! The characters may not be hopping in and out of bed with each other, etc., but they might smoke cigarettes! :-b Lydia, the dustjacket on my copy of Before the Sun Goes Down says it won the $20,000 Doubleday Prize and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $125,000 Annual Novel Award for 1945. Evidently, it was quite popular in the 1940s and '50s because even small-town libraries usually had a copy. I didn't read it until the early 1960s, although I had heard my mother and grandmother often refer to it. I suppose it became one of those family favorites that all the readers know what the other readers are talking about when they quote from it at apropos times. It's rather old-fashioned in the storytelling style, so I'm not surprised that modern readers might not like it -- it's too straightforward. Oh, and what it's about: The setting is a small town in Pennsylvania, the year is 1880. The main character is the town's doctor. The story is his interaction with the townspeople, most of them having been his patients, and he attended the births of nearly all the children in the previous twenty years. It's an evocation of another time, of course, but there's change in the...

For some reason I ended up buying both hard cover and paperback copies of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night and never read it until now. Loved it. I know little about the main character's special needs, but enjoyed the way the plot surprised me. I guessed the "murderer" early on, but that was such a small element of the story that I didn't care. I also came away thinking that dealing with those special needs was very much like computer programming. Unless one gets it exactly right communication doesn't happen. Which in the context of the story seems to be a major subtext for those of us who've spent a lot of time programming. Been doing some re-reading of Zelazny. Jack of Shadows I didn't remember at all. Mythic and lyrical, his is a world where one side of the earth always faces the sun and is ruled by science, the other side is always in darkness and magic reigns. Much as I love Gaiman, he just misses, except in Sandman, the charm of Zelazny.