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Posts Tagged ‘Susanna Kearsley’

With eleven days to go in 2012, it’s entirely likely this list may change or at least grow before the end of the year. But I got thinking today about some of the best books I read this year.

I’m extremely lucky to have a number of good friends who are writers and who are generous enough to share their not-yet-published works with me, and some of those were my most memorable reads of the year so far, but for this post, I’m including only published books.

I glanced at my bookshelves before I sat down to write this post in case I was overlooking anything great. But in the end, I decided to stick with the handful that came to mind first. It’s a good sign that I remembered them off the top of my head, I think.

I have a TBR pile that includes books that are years old that I’ve only recently discovered, new books, books I’ve been meaning to read but have never quite been in the right mood for and ones I buy because I have to read them Right Now, so often what I read is not newly in print, and that is certainly true of some of this year’s favourites.

last letter from your lover I talked about this one in the summer, and all these months later, it’s the first book that comes to mind when I think about recent reads. Lovely, lovely book, beautifully written.

 

 

 

 

the rose garden This is the third Susanna Kearsley book to feature on my blog. ’nuff said.

 

 

 

 


my husbands sweethearts This book’s unusual premise caught my interest. In it, a wife whose husband is dying figures she shared her husband’s good years with other women, so they can bloody well take a turn at his deathbed, too. It had the potential to be vindictive or perhaps voyeuristic on her part, but it’s neither of those. It’s about finding support and creating a family out of unlikely circumstances, and I enjoyed it.

 

 

renegade This is the second in Jack Whyte’s Guardians trilogy, (The Forest Laird is the first) and focusses on the young life of Robert the Bruce. I feel like I know young Robert after reading this book, and am looking forward to the next installment.

What were some of your favourite reads this year?

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Read anything good lately? I’ve been making a bit of a dent in my TBR pile. That’s not to say I haven’t added more to the pile as quickly as (*cough* more quickly than) I’ve taken some out, but still…

The past few months of reading have brought a mix from meh to marvellous. Nothing I didn’t care to finish, which is a nice bonus, and a couple of excellent ones with characters and stories that have stayed with me, clear in my memory, long after putting them down. That’s rare, and I appreciate it. Here are a few, chosen for being memorable enough that they came easily to mind when I was sitting on my patio thinking about what I’d read recently:

 

The Self-Preservation Society by Kate Harrison
This is the second of Kate’s books I’ve read. In the first, Brown Owl’s Guide to Life, she impressed me with her handling of multiple points of view and a flashback timeline, too. This one has a simpler structure, but is also well written. It’s a little bit silly and a I’ve no idea how well she handled the medical subject matter, not knowing anything about brain injuries, but as a summer read, it was fun and I appreciated that the main character resisted changing. Don’t we all?

 

 

 

 

Mariana by Susanna Kearsley

Regular readers of my blog may remember the kudos I gave Susanna for her The Winter Sea. I loved this one, too. Within a few pages she had me absolutely hooked, and had my writer wheels turning trying to figure out how she’d done it. Once you’ve read it – not before – you should check out the lovely video Susanna has on her blog, sent to her by an Australian woman who reads Mariana over and over and over again.

 

 

 

 

 

The Last Letter from Your Lover by Jojo Moyes

I’d been eyeing this one for awhile, and finally bought it a couple of weeks ago. I had a feeling it would be something special, and it is. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time. Jojo Moyes does a beautiful job with both the parts set in the early 1960s and the present day.

 

 

 

 

Not unusual for my recent favourites to be British women’s fiction. (Yes, Susanna is Canadian, but her publisher, Allison and Busby, is in London.) I tend to love books that would fit handily in the soon-to-be-nonexistent “strong romantic elements” category of the RWA Rita awards, and many of the books I love best have been nominated for the British version, the Romantic Novel of the Year award from the Romantic Novelists Association.

What’re your favourite recent reads?

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Being a writer changes you as a reader. It’s not as easy as it once was to suspend disbelief and let a story take you away when you’re aware of the writer at work, crafting the tale. Even in the books I love best, I can see some of the choices the writer made along the way. In good books, I see those choices with appreciation for the skill of the person who made them, and they don’t take away from the pleasure of reading. In other books, well, the story gets lost because I’m too aware of the author sitting at his or her word processor trying to finish the damn thing.

So when a book makes me squirrel myself away from the world for a couple of stolen, don’t-really-have-them-but-am-taking-them-anyway hours to read the last hundred pages or so in one sitting, and the only thing that makes me put it down during that time is the need to go get tissues because it makes me cry, that is something very special indeed. The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley is one of those books.

I finished it two days ago, and I haven’t started reading anything else. I am never without a book on the go, but this is one of those rare cases where I’m still thinking about what I just read and don’t want to interrupt that with something new. That’s in part because I enjoyed the book so much and in part because it left me wanting to be a better writer, and I’ve been thinking a lot about just what Susanna did that made me want to aspire to be able to do it, too. That is probably a topic for another post, but for this one, kudos to Susanna Kearsley. If you like Scottish history and books with writer protagonists, this one’s for you.

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