I have been reading a lot lately, on the deck after dinner. Here are my recent favs. I always enjoy Anna Quindlen.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

Another favorite author is Joanne Harris. This is the 3rd book in Chocolat story. Unfortunately I thought it was the second one.

Vianne Rocher, her partner Roux and her daughters Anouk and Rosette have been living on a houseboat on the Seine. Eight years have passed since the events of Chocolat. Anouk is fifteen years old, Rosette eight, and Vianne believes that finally she has found a way to escape her wanderlust and to settle down and be happy. However, the arrival of a letter from Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the fictional village in which Chocolat was set, brings a new challenge to Vianne. The letter is from Armande Voizin, an old friend from Lansquenet. Armande died eight years ago, but she left the letter in her will, to be opened and delivered by her grandson, Luc. In it, she predicts that Lansquenet will some day need Vianne again, and asks Vianne to visit, if only to put flowers on an old lady's grave. Vianne, intrigued goes back to Lansquenet, taking her daughters with her.

This is the second of a 4 book series. They can be read out of order which I have done. Here are the 3rd and 4th.

Death hangs heavy in the disturbed air of Ireland's lonely Loughnabrone peat bog, an ancient holy place, steeped in legend, drowned in sorrow, and long since abandoned by man. Pathologist Nora Gavin has been called to an archaeological site in the bleak midlands west of Dublin—a place known as the LAKE OF SORROWS—to assist at an excavation where a well-preserved Iron Age body has been found in a bog.

So.... what interesting things have you been reading?