March Books

Aunt Dimity and the Duke
Aunt Dimity Digs In
Aunt Dimity Takes a Holiday by Nancy Atherton

There are about twelve billion of these books, all very amusing and gentle. It's nice to read a mystery series that doesn't involve murders. I like mysteries, but it can strain credulity to have the protagonist encounter murders wherever they go without developing a nervous complex after the twelfth book or so, at least if they're not a police detective.

Betsy-Tacy
Betsy-Tacy Go Over the Big Hill
Betsy-Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace

One thing I like about my library is the number of classics from my childhood I've rediscovered. I loved the Betsy-Tacy series as a child, but hadn't realized that the series went beyond Betsy-Tacy Go Over the Big Hill. As it turns out, the series goes all the way up through her marriage and my library has the lot (except Betsy-Tacy-Tib, which I should remedy at some point). They're a fun series of books, which like the Harry Potter books have the nice trick of having the writing style grow up with the main character.

The Field Guide
The Seeing Stone
Lucinda's Secret (The Spiderwick Chronicles) by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi
We saw Spiderwick in the theatre recently (capsule review: pretty good!), so I needed to re-read the books. Taken together, all five books make up a rather short children's novel, so it's not surprising I blew through the first three in the last two days of the month. I haven't read these since they came out in 2003/4 and I'm a little surprised at how little I remembered of the plot. But I enjoyed refreshing my memory, and I'm planning to get the next series out of the library soon.

Well! Apparently the secret to reading a lot of books in a month is to read children's books. If only all my monthly book lists were this long.