It's Monday: What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, a bookish meme hosted by One Person's Journey Through a World of Books, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list. So hop on over to Journey and join in...and leave a comment here so I can check out what you're reading. Here's mine:
Books Read Last Week (for a review click the title):I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Robert F Kennedy: A Memoir by Jack Newfield
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
The Book I'm Reading Now: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
(from Amazon site) Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who grew up in the West Indies on a decaying plantation. When she comes of age she is married off to an Englishman, and he takes her away from the only place she has known--a house with a garden where "the paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched." The novel is Rhys's answer to Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë's book had long haunted her, mostly for the story it did not tell--that of the madwoman in the attic, Rochester's terrible secret. Antoinette is Rhys's imagining of that locked-up woman, who in the end burns up the house and herself.
Books that spark my interest this week:Katherine by Anya Seton
(from Amazon) The true and hitherto untold story of John of Gaunt, the great Duke of Lancaster and Katherine Swynford, and of their love which changed English history.

The Bohemian Girl by Kenneth Cameron
(from Amazon) When Denton, the famous American author and expatriate in turn-of-the-century London, receives a letter from a young woman saying she’s in danger and needs his help, he doubts there’s anything he can do. The letter is months old, and was only forwarded to him when the buyer of a painting found it stuck behind the frame. But why did she hide the note instead of sending it? The search for answers leads Denton into the heart of Bohemian London—the world of artists and their models, of brilliance and depravity, where the border between genius and madness is hard to discern but easy to cross. And before he has learned the shocking truth, Denton will discover what it’s like to be the object of a lethal obsession and endure a terrifying confrontation with his own demons.

The House on the Strand by Daphne Du Maurier
(from Amazon) In this haunting tale, Daphne du Maurier takes a fresh approach to time travel. A secret experimental concoction, once imbibed, allows you to return to the 14th century. There is only one catch: if you happen to touch anyone while traveling in the past you will be thrust instantaneously to the present. Magnus Lane, a University of London chemical researcher, asks his friend Richard Young and Young's family to stay at Kilmarth, an ancient house set in the wilds near the Cornish coast. Here, Richard drinks a potion created by Magnus and finds himself at the same spot where he was moments earlier--though it is now the 14th century. The effects of the drink wear off after several hours, but it is wildly addictive, and Richard cannot resist traveling back and forth in time. Richard eventually finds emotional refuge with a beautiful woman of the past trapped in a loveless marriage, but when he attempts to intervene on her behalf the results are brutally terrifying for the present. Echoing the great fantastic stories of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, The House on the Strand is a masterful yarn of history, romance, horror, and suspense that will grip the reader until the last surprising twist.