Welcome to our 6th annual fall reading poll! Please recommend a great book to add to our fall reading lists, and tell us what fragrance we should wear while reading it.
Or, as always, just talk about something else, and of course, do report your fragrance of the day if you like.
What I’ve read since the summer poll:
On the fiction front, I finished Javier Marías Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, Howard Norman’s Come to the Window, Armistead Maupin’s Mary Ann in Autumn, Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day (short stories), and Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster.
The book I will scent this time is Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook, book 6 in her Jackson Brodie mystery series. It’s a bit of a departure from the other Jackson Brodie books — a comic take on a classic British country house murder – and it would probably be a perfect fit with something from the Penhaligon’s Portraits series, but instead I will scent it with the memory of Floris Malmaison. It’s currently Saturday morning and I’m wearing Aedes de Venustas Oeillet Bengale because that’s the closest I can manage to Malmaison.
Other mysteries I finished: The Last Word by Elly Griffiths, Fear in the Sunlight and The Death of Lucy Kyte, both by Nicola Upson, and The Eighth Detective by Alex Pavesi.
I read 3 non-fiction books: Jessica Mitford Hons & Rebels, Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman by Robert L. O’Connell, and the hysterically funny The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. If you’re a used-bookstore sort of person and you aren’t put off by snark and general curmudgeonliness, do give it a read! I’m currently in the middle of (the very long!) Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Note: top image is At a Favorite Book Shop [cropped] by Bill Smith at flickr; some rights reserved.