Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
Sharlene has the Mr Linky this week.
A week of very new reads for me: five of these have been published within the last four months. For once I get to feel up-to-date! I’m not feeling well (probably not Covid but who’s to say these days? We’re encouraged to stay at home rather than get tested if symptoms are mild and no medical help is needed) so have plenty of light reading here (definitions of “light” may vary) to keep me distracted.
The Siren of Sussex by Mimi Matthews – a brand new release from Matthews, whose historical novels I only discovered last year.
A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske – much-praised historical fantasy debut that I’m excited to get in to.
Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon – colleagues scheming to set up their bosses sounds like solid rom com material (and was, in fact, in Netflix’s forgettable but economically-named Set It Up). I enjoyed The Ex Talk by Solomon last year so am hoping for good things with this.
The Kill, After the Fire, and Let the Dead Speak by Jane Casey – my obvious obsession to kick off 2022 is this crime series from Jane Casey, centered around detective Maeve Kerrigan. I cannot read them fast enough (which I both love and hate because the series is only 9 books – plus a few stories – long) and am so impressed that they are all so good. Good enough to have me turning away from all other books, despite this being a genre I usually run away from.
100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet by Pamela Paul – Paul (who also wrote My Life with Bob) looks – sometimes comically, sometimes sadly – at all the ways our lives have changed since the internet became widely available.
Royal Flash by George Macdonald Fraser – I’m trusting that the adventures of Flashman will provide the right comic balance to all the crime novels I’m reading.
Let’s Get Physical by Danielle Friedman – I’d prefer to have this in physical rather than ebook form but am too excited to wait. This is a history of women’s exercise culture and it looks great.
What did you pick up this week?
The Captive Reader 
I have Let’s Get Physical on my TBR so hopefully it’s a good read!
Although I read a lot of “serious” lit, I love to escape with a gentle Mini Matthews-type of book, but they are hard to find. Here’s a list of what I am getting at in terms of a gentle escape.
1. Mimi’s Fair as a Star🕊, The Work of Art, and similar (I liked the Siren of Sussex.
2. The Blue Castle 💕
3. Much less good, only ok, but in the ballpark: Metzger’s An Enchanted Affair & A Lotal Companion
4. Different but somehow also quite gentle: Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, The Jane Austen Society, and The Other Austen Sister
5. Altogether another class, but in the same category in that all of the heroines in these books choose authenticity: I loved Jane Eyre.
6. Less warm and gentle but with immensely likable (if completely unrealistic) heroines: Madeleine Brent’s books
7. Not romances, but if we were to somehow remove the icky colonial asides from these, they’d be in a similar category: The Secret Garden and The Little Princess (Brent’s books share some of those same icky attitudes but less egregiously, btw.)
8. Another non-romance that has the same heartwarming feel is Perestroika in Paris
9. Austen’s Persuasion
10. I have enjoyed some D.E. Stevenson and L.M. Montgomery, the former being a bit too slow and light at times but can be good and the latter being the Blue Castle author (one of my favorites) but her others haven’t quite captured me to the same degree.
Anyway, I will be looking through this blog, as it is a new discovery for me, but I’d love any suggestions!
P.S. Sorry for the typos! I sent that from a tiny phone screen after a long, sleepless night worrying about our dear fellow humans in Ukraine🇺🇦🕊🌻🙏.
You have come to the right place for gentle escapist recommendations! Here are some of my favourites:
-Anything by Eva Ibbotson. Madensky Square is her best book but all of her adult novels (occasionally repackaged as YA now) are enjoyable
-Rosy Thornton’s early books, esp the epistolary romance More Than Love Letters
-Anything by Susanna Kearsley. She writes intelligent historical novels with wonderful characters and realistic romances that enhance but don’t dominate the story
-Obviously Maeve Binchy
-Jude Morgan’s Regency novels are clever and fun. They are: Indiscretion, An Accomplished Woman, and A Little Folly
-I’ve only just read it but The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune was an especially sweet and loveable story about a dull man living a dull life until he suddenly, miraculously, finds people to love and comes alive
-Marisa de los Santos’ Love Walked In (and sequels)
Happy reading!
Oh, thank you so much! My TBR list is suddenly much lovelier 🙏.