Good Reading

Part of my post-PhD relaxation regime has been reading. Lots of reading. Here's a few from the past week:

• Finished Night Watch by Sara Waters (who wrote Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet). Fascinating historical novel set during and immediately following World War II. Richly detailed intertwined stories of love and fragility. Being Real Literature, rather than a solid genre read, ending is less than satisfying. Like, I don't know what happens! I guess it's a good sign that I'm that frustrated--I want to know.
• A librarian acquaintance recommended Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspeare, and it was a spot-on suggestion! First in a series about a private investigator of a deeply spiritual sort. Maisie is the daughter of a vegetable peddler in pre-WWI London. She goes to work in the house of a wealthy suffragist who wants to improve the lives of impoverished young women, and is thus tutored and sent to Cambridge. The first mystery of her solo business forces her to face the horrors she experienced in the ambulance corps. (Coincidentally, strong British women in war-time ambulance corps shows up in both these novels.) I'm looking forward to reading further in the series.
  
• Also in the vein of historic series mysteries, I read the fifth Jane Austen mystery. I do so enjoy these. I always have a desire to put on an empire waist gown and meander about in country meadows, my bonnett dangling inappropriately from my hands...