Thursday, February 4, 2016

On my bedside table today . . .

Too easy!

My brain is currently cut into four pie wedges: work in progress; structural edits (Dandy Gilver and A Most Misleading Habit); page proofs (Quiet Neighbors); Sisters in Crime publishing summit on diversity in the mystery community. And The Great British Bake Off. And Left Coast Crime. And Malice. And the Edgars. And life.

So it's lovely to get a point-and-press question here at Casa Criminal today.



On my bedside table, from bottom to top are:
  • The Girl in The Spider's Web - the posthumous Stieg Larsson that I failed to read at Christmas.
  • John Irving's Avenue of Mysteries - which Santa brought me. Santa really mucked up my Christmas reading plans, actually.
  • Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins (Santa's ruins)
  • Tracy Kidder's Among Schoolchildren. Now this is embarrassing. I bought this and Kidder's  Hometown because I had so much enjoyed the Broadway play August: Osage County. By Tracy Letts.
  • The slim blue volume is Mr Frick's Palace, a guidebook about the Frick Collection in New York that acts on me like meditation.
  • Pablu Neruda's The Captain's Verses. I keep one volume of poetry by my bed to read and read until it's in my veins forever. Shakespeare's Sonnets was there for four years.
  • Ann Cleeves' Harbour Street - which is what I'm actually reading right now, because I'm interviewing her at Left Coast in a few weeks. Poor me, eh? What a slog!
  • Lori Roy's Let Me Die in his Footsteps - Lori is my SinC co-board-member and she's written three books. The first one won an Edgar, the second was a finalist and now the third is on the shortlist too.
  • Malcolm MacKay's The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter - which I bought in celebration of the Edgar announcements a couple of weeks back. We Scots are punching well above our weight at this year's awards: there's this, Val McDermid, Denise Mina and *coughsmodestlybutbragsanyway* me.
  • Triss Stein's Brooklyn Graves  - which I've just finished last night, in preparation for moderating Triss (along with Terry Shames, Carla Buckley and Nancy West) at Left Coast. Favouritism? Why, no. Carla's The Good Goodbye and Nancy's Smart But Dead are waiting for me at The Avid Reader and I've already read every word Terry has ever written.
  • And a disc-set of A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book for when those four wedges turn into a pie-fight at 3am.
Happy reading, everyone.


3 comments:

Catriona McPherson said...

By the way, everyone's names are hyper-linked with mystifyingly invisible hyperlink ink. Only "John Irving" and "me" showed up red. ???

Paul D. Marks said...

Everything's red on my screen, Catriona. But I have this problem too, where some links don't show up as links even though they are. Not sure what causes it.

Art Taylor said...

You're like me, Catriona--always piles of books (and in my case short stories) waiting. Good stuff here!