I’ve been reading a lot since March, and have a lot of catching up to do in writing blog posts.  I need to organize the reading into a few broad categories, and I’ve already started with the Tried and True and Book Club posts.  I’m pleased that so many of the books I’ve read are by new authors, and I want to start by loosely organizing those books and authors into this post.  I will write in more detail about some of them in other posts.

I discover most new authors through recommendations from readers I know.  Two of the best recommendations I’ve had this year were for Jacqueline Winspear, author of the wonderful Maisie Dobbs series, and Susan Elin MacNeal, who writes the Maggie Hope series.  A member of the CCR book club recommended Maisie Dobbs, and my friend Lois G. recommended Maggie Hope.  I might have discovered these wonderful historical mysteries on my own sooner or later, but it’s just as likely that I wouldn’t have. 

I heard about another author, Steve Berry, at a picnic to celebrate our friend Ann’s U.S. citizenship.  During a group conversation about books, the topic of Dan Brown’s historical conspiracy-based bestselling thrillers came up, and, while most of us had read all or some of them, there were a couple of disparaging remarks about Brown’s signature writing style and lurid far-fetched plots.  Somebody remarked that an author named Steve Berry was a better historian and better writer than Dan Brown, and that his Cotton Malone series is good.  I just finished my third Cotton Malone novel, and I’ve also read one of Berry’s stand-alone books, so I’m enjoying this recommendation.        

I also find new authors in the book swap at the once-a-month lunches organized by Dave (Dave’s Lunch Bunch).  I enjoyed The Two-Minute Rule, by Robert Crais, and this accomplished author of thrillers is a great find.  I didn’t find The Alibi, by Sandra Brown, that good.  Sandra Brown is a prolific mystery/suspense writer, and I should give her another chance.  It looks like the library has a lot of her books.

Amazon is a good source of recommendations on new-to-me authors, as well as new books by familiar authors.  I love browsing the book titles that show up in the ‘Customers who bought this item also bought’ scroll bar.  This is how I found The Monuments Men, by Robert Edsel, an unusual non-fiction take on World War 2:  Army art curators and architects who were assigned to protect and retrieve some of the great art treasures of Western Europe.  Sometimes customer reviewers mention authors who they find similar to or better than the books under review.  And the Kindle Deal of the Day has introduced me to many new authors.  I have bought several $1.99 Kindle Deal books, and have even read some of them.  Sometimes a little new-author overlap goes on with the Deals.  I bought, read and enjoyed Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais, the author I discovered in the swap pile.  I bought, read and found silly Lady Fortescue Steps Out, by M.C. Beaton, an author recommended in a customer review.  Books and authors I took a complete $1.99 chance on and liked are Berried to the Hilt (Gray Whale Inn mystery), by Karen MacInerney, and Dead Insider (Loon Lake mystery), by  Victoria Houston.  These are from detective series set, respectively, on an island off the Maine Coast and in northern Wisconsin.  The rest of the Deals purchased to date are awaiting my attention in the Kindle Stash.

Movies and TV shows based on books can also lead to some good reading.  I ordered a delightful Australian TV series called “Miss Fisher’s Mysteries” from Netflix, based on Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series.  I read Cocaine Blues, the first book in the series, and the tone of the book is quite different than the TV series, and will take some getting used to.  Some of the recurring characters I liked most on the TV show have very minor roles in the book, and Phryne is sadder and more brittle than the sprightly, gorgeously dressed heroine on the show.  But – Phryne’s back story, thoughts and motivation are much more fully developed in the book, and she is a compelling and interesting character on the page.  And a beautiful little film called “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” led me to the excellent novel of the same name, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, by Paul Torday.  The novel is written in the form of e-mails, memos and interviews, and anyone who has ever worked in a bureaucracy will recognize the inexorable forces that can compel a competent, sane bureaucrat to work on a project as bonkers as introducing salmon to a river in the Yemeni desert.  The main characters in the book and the movie are the same, and the scheme to help an enigmatic Yemeni sheikh to transplant his beloved sport of salmon fishing to Yemen is still the same, but the characters’ fates are different.  In the movie, Ewan MacGregor and Emily Blunt logically have a happy ending; in the novel, the ending is sadder but just as logical.  Somebody did a great job of adapting a wonderful book into a wonderful movie.  The stories may vary, but the moral and emotional impact are the same. 

Newspaper book reviews and articles are also excellent resources for learning about new authors.  For me, the find of the year so far is The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith.  Except, this is a bit of a new author cheat, since Robert Galbraith is a pen name for J.K. Rowling; her name was in the title of the online article, so I clicked on it.  The Cuckoo’s Calling is a detective novel, and the hero, Cormoran Strike, was in the military police until he lost a leg in Afghanistan.  J.K. Rowling is a wonderful author, and she sets up a great plot when Strike is hired to investigate the death of a fabulously successful fashion model, who was also the adopted daughter of a wealthy and spectacularly disfunctional family.  Like the later Harry Potter books, Rowling does get bogged down with too much detail and more plot twists than necessary toward the end of the book, but that is a comment, not a complaint.  The book is a great read and I loved it.  To make it extra special, a couple of pubs we visited on our trip to England had Doom Bar, Cormoran Strike’s favorite beer, on tap. It is delicious, although I didn’t drink it eleven pints at a time, like Strike does.

And then, there is browsing in bookstores, guaranteed to bring new authors to my attention, and new books onto my already crowded bookshelves.  This is why I very seldom go into bookstores, unless the bookstore is very special, like Blackwell’s in Oxford.  Blackwell’s is not only a thoroughly wonderful historical bookstore, it was also the sponsor and starting point of a walking tour of sites associated with the Inklings, the literary drinking club famously attended by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.  Naturally, I bought The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends, by Humphrey Carpenter when we got back to Blackwell’s. I’ve since read most of it, and flipped through the rest, and all I can say is:  Nearly all of the book is about C.S. Lewis and C.S. Lewis was one strange person.  While I was in Blackwell’s, I resisted browsing further, but did pick up a book called The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer.  I’d seen the book in the giftshop at Clifford’s Tower in York, along with a novel called The White Queen, by Philippa Gregory, but didn’t have time to buy them then.  I bought The White Queen at a W.H. Smith bookstore in Heathrow Airport, my last chance, last book fling in the U.K.  There was a good “buy one, get one half off” deal there, so I also bought Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin.  The White Queen is Elizabeth Woodville, the unsuitable woman who married England’s last York king, Edward IV, and the book is high-grade historical romance, with surprisingly good details about the last years of the Wars of the Roses underpinning the romantic doings.  A good, fun plane flight read.  The Ian Rankin book is his latest Inspector Rebus mystery, and it was excellent, so I’ll be looking out for more of his books.  I especially enjoyed Rebus’ comments on the extensive, disruptive roadworks in his hometown of Edinburgh; we had just visited Edinburgh, and the roadworks were still in full swing a year after the book was published.  

Great finds in new authors and new series, no worries about fulfilling my need to read for a while.