It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is a bookish meme hosted by Book Journey. It's where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It's a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list. So hop on over via the link above and join in...and leave a comment here so I can check out what you are reading

Books Read (click on titles for review):
Detection Unlimited by Georgette Heyer
March Violets by Philip Kerr
Death of an Englishman by Magdalen Nabb


Currently Reading:
Middlemarch by George Eliot: Dorothea Brooke can find no acceptable outlet for her talents or energy and few who share her ideals. As an upper middle-class woman in Victorian England she can't learn Greek or Latin simply for herself; she certainly can't become an architect or have a career; and thus, Dorothea finds herself "Saint Theresa of nothing." Believing she will be happy and fulfilled as "the lampholder" for his great scholarly work, she marries the self-centered intellectual Casaubon, twenty-seven years her senior. Dorothea is not the only character caught by the expectations of British society in this huge, sprawling book. Middlemarch stands above its large and varied fictional community, picking up and examining characters like a jeweler observing stones. There is Lydgate, a struggling young doctor in love with the beautiful but unsuitable Rosamond Vincy; Rosamond's gambling brother Fred and his love, the plain-speaking Mary Garth; Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's attractive cousin, and the ever-curious Mrs. Cadwallader. [Getting closer! only about 200 pages to go (of 848)]

A Chapbook for Burned-Out Priests, Rabbis, & Ministers by Ray Bradbury: For Bradbury enthusiasts, religionists and nearly everyone else, here's a delightful scrapbook of poems and essays, familiar summations but no less vital from a brilliant young fantasist grown older but not old. A "fallen-away Baptist," Bradbury has found a faith localized in a man-centered universe. Without recourse to the stylistic mannerisms that have made him prey to parody throughout his long career, he preaches with heartfelt urgency a return to space as an antidote to war. In essays he reimagines his lifelong idols, George Bernard Shaw and Herman Melville (GBS as a potential fan of Singing in the Rain, the "only science fiction musical film"; Ishmael as space voyager). His poems, the bulk in free verse, are no less exhilarating and infectious. One opens with an "apeman" sketching "science fictions" on cave walls while another addresses the modern "dichotomy" between Einstein and Christ ("Try this for size;/ A bit of both?"). There is humor, insightful in "Eccentrics Must Truly Have Loved God. They Made So Many of Him" and playful in "Has Anyone Ever Seen Anyone Reading in the Christian Science Reading Rooms?" (He concludes with a poignant image of the ghost of "Mary Baker eddying/ In pools of liquid ectoplasm.../ Reading her own stuff.") Bradbury hails Shaw: "GBS!" The future will add: "Ray!"

Books that spark my interest:
Haunted Gound by Erin Hart
The High Crusade by Poul Anderson
Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins
Lucky Jim by Kinglsey Amis
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
Let's All Kill Constance by Ray Bradbury
Blood Atonement by Dan Waddell