I don't remember how I stumbled on Amy Stewart's newsletter, It's Good to Be Here. I've been a fan of her Miss Kopp lady detective novels for years, and have enjoyed many of her countless other books about plants, trees, and, forthcoming, birds. So when I did come across her newsletter, I was intrigued. And when I discovered that it was mostly about sketching, with a lot of emphasis on travel sketching, I was sold. A prolific writer of historical crime(ish) novels and books about nature, plus an inveterate traveler and artist? Yes please. (It's like she's living my dream life--or as she might put it, wrote my dream job description.

Her posts include a lot of thoughts on creativity, introduction to other artists' work, and a ton of tutorials on various aspects of painting and sketching, which I enjoy a lot, because they're short and down-to-earth, and she doesn't present only "perfect" works of art--she is happy to share videos of art attempts that don't go exactly as planned, and she has the perfect attitude when that happens: oh well. One of the perks of being a subscriber is that she will occasionally do a painting (and painting tutorial) from a photo sent in by a reader. I recently sent her this photo that I took from the wall of Dubrovnik on our last day in Croatia two years ago:

Here is the painting she did from the photo:

I love how she used red ink plus a very limited color palette. It really conveys the depth of the endless red roofs of the city with the Adriatic Sea in the distance, plus the energy of this ancient city. Her tutorial is here, and here's my attempt at the same:

I used a maroon Micron 0.5 pen, rather than a fountain pen, so I didn't quite get the variation in line, but I think it worked well enough, and I really love how the color is softer and earthier than black ink. I would never have thought of using purple for shadows, and it was liberating for me to sketch in the buildings in a slap-dash fashion, rather than using pencil and neat, straight lines (what in real life is neat and straight anyway? Certainly not a Medieval city!).

Here is the painting I did of a similar view (from a slightly different perspective) in my travel journal:

This was also done from a photo, after the fact (I gave up on drawing/painting onsite after the first couple days of our trip). This image was done in all watercolor over pencil--no ink--with a wet-in-wet technique. I like it fine, but it doesn't have the energy the other one has, the texture of the tile roofs is totally lost, and it took much longer to paint (wet-in-wet takes forever to dry!), so it would be impossible to do in real life. I'm excited to try some on-site sketching using a similar technique, with red ink and a few quick swipes of color.

Okay, well, this book stack is a little embarrassing. That's 12 books in one month--all but one a re-(re-re-re-)read. Let me tell you how it happened:

Fiction
When I got home from my week-long writing retreat on September 1, I started reading Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first Amelia Peabody mystery by Elizabeth Peters. This was supposed to be a research read. During the retreat, I'd decided to go forward with writing a historical mystery novel that I'd begun toying several years ago and which I'd set aside due to the pandemic shutdown making research a challenge. My book will take place in a similar time period to Crocodile (although in a very different place), and I thought, since I'm so very familiar with the story, I could concentrate on the mechanics, reverse-engineering the novel. Haha, joke's on me. Instead of deconstructing the book, I delved in, as delighted with every twist and turn as if I'd never read it (several times) before. And when I closed the last page, I couldn't stop, and picked up the next book and the next and the next. I won't list them here, but I read the first 11 books, from Crocodile through Guardian of the Horizon. And, as you might have guessed, I've kept going this month. Why fight it? Perhaps, on a subliminal level, I'm learning a thing or two about plotting and character and dialogue and all the other elements of putting together a book. But most of all, I'm having a grand time.

As for how and when do I read so much: Normally I only read fiction at bedtime, but I've made an exception and read these books while I'm eating lunch and breakfast, as well as during any lull I might experience at the end of the day, either before I embark on making dinner or after I've made it and am waiting for C to get home from work. I also probably stay up reading a teensy bit later than I usually do, especially if my current read is less exciting. (Something about knowing how a book will end makes me want to get to that end even faster than when I'm trying to figure out what will happen.) One good thing is that reading has largely taken the time previously occupied by doomscrolling, which means I'm in a happier frame of mind.

Nonficiton
I did manage to squeeze one nonfiction book in among the tombs and pyramids: We Are Animals, by Jennifer Case, a collection of essays about pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood in modern America. Case is unflinchingly honest about her feelings about her second pregnancy (i.e., not happy), and her personal experiences are fleshed out with thorough research about our country's incredibly horrid, misogynistic, and racist birth industry. It's a timely book, when women are losing their access to choice around conception and birth, and it's engagingly written. 

In last month's newsletter, I wrote about my ambitions to both travel more and document those travels more regularly and skillfully. I've kept travel journals for many years:

Some notes about these journals: All in the top row are in Moleskine Cahier blank books. These are thin enough that I can usually fill them up in a week or ten days, and they are light and small enough to be portable while big enough to not feel cramped. But the thin paper is not great for watercolor. The first one on the next row is Field Sketchbook, with heavier paper, smaller in size but with a lot more pages (and a ribbon bookmark and elastic closure, which I love!). The middle one is a landscape oriented watercolor sketchbook whose brand I can't recall. Great for watercolors, but not great for writing (partly because I didn't want to "waste" watercolor paper with words). I couldn't keep up with painting while on this trip, which was jam-packed, so I ended up writing daily in a Moleskine Cahier and then I did watercolors from photos after we returned and summarized my notes from each day into a single page. It took two years. The third is a handmade blank booklet, about half the size of a Cahier, which I bought at a farmer's market in Charlottetown maybe the second day of our trip.

My mode of travel journaling is always to write a lot and put in sketches and ephemera in varying amounts. I really do love my past travel journals, especially seeing them laid out together like this. But I also want to up my game--more and better illustrations, more on-the-spot sketching (rather than after-the-fact), neatly lettered headings (since neat handwriting is probably too much to hope for at this point).

In preparation for a trip to Quebec City in August, I watched several online videos on travel journaling and urban sketching from Amy Stewart's newsletter It's Good to Be Here and The Piegeon Letters. I spent quite a lot of time looking for the right journal and assembling my kit.

I ended up with a very small (about 4.5 x 7 inch) book by Clairefontaine that has about 40 pages (of thin paper). I also picked up a pack of Tombow dual brush pens--and then a second pack, because I realized the first one didn't have a blue--as well as an Ivy photo printer (it makes the cutest little stickers of phone photos!). In addition, I brought many pens, two sets of colored pencils, a ruler, a glue stick, washi tape, a set of Vivia Colrosheets watercolors and water brush, two binder clips, a pencil sharpener, a kneaded eraser, two pencils, a white gel pen, and an envelope for ephemera. Plus a small shoulder bag for toting *some* of the supplies with me when we were out and about. 

​I brought *way* more stuff than I needed, and most of it stayed in the hotel room. 

The first photo shows roughly what I brought with me each day (minus the Ivy and the glue stick--those stayed back at the hotel), and the second photo shows what I brought in my backpack on our last day when we visited Montmorancy Falls.

I still did a lot of writing (that's not gonna change), and did most of my journaling in the evening when we returned to the hotel room. (It was hot as blazes the whole time we were there, so we usually declared defeat and retreated to cold showers and A/C by 6:30 p.m. This gave me plenty of time to document the day's events while C watched TV. Only once did we head back out into the inferno for dinner.)

I did manage to do *some* on-the-spot sketching: the street lights and wine glass in the second row (photos 1 and 3); the St. Laurence River from the quay on Île d'Orleans (third row, third picture), a spot in a formal garden where we stopped to rest and pretend the shade offered some respite (fourth row, middle picture), and Montmorancy Falls, which I sketched while we waited in line for a gondola ride to the top (sixth row, middle picture). 

New things I tried:

• Tombow pens: fun and more convenient than watercolors but not the color range.
• Lettering: still needs some work but much better than past efforts.
• Photo stickers: so fun! 
• Collage: also fun!

Thins I want to work on next:

• More sketching on site.
• Keep practicing 1-point perspective!
• Page layout.
• A more streamlined kit.

Is this really all I read in August? I feel sure there should be more, but I don't know what and I don't know where they are! I think I started a lot of books that were on the slow side, or not what I was really in the mood for, and set them aside. As a result, this will be quick!

Nonfiction
I'm a big fan of Lia Purpura's pregnancy/birth/early motherhood memoir Increase. I reread it this month as part of a project I'm working on, along with two of her more recent essay collections, On Looking and Rough Likenesses. I found both of these a lot more challenging. Purpura is also a poet, and her poetic sensibilities are strong in these lyric essays, and they leave me craving a lot more detail and explanation. 

Fiction
I pick up Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness books whenever I see them at used bookstores, and as a result I'm reading them wildly out of order, but it's not too hard to orient oneself in the stories, and they're always great fun, including this one, Crowned and Dangerous. Also fun was this debut mystery novel by Harini Nagendra, The Bangalore Detectives Club. I loved reading about India in the 1920s and all of the cultural turmoil and political intrigue. Turns out Nagendra's first two books were about trees and nature, and so I find in her a kindred spirit of nature writer/crime writer.

Next month's pile is going to be much taller. I've read some more books for research and I've delved back into a series that is my teddy bear/macaroni and cheese--i.e., my comfort read--and I'm already on the fifth one! I'm actually a little embarrassed about it and might not even mention it in this month's post...

Now that September's here, I'm feeling that annual back-to-school energy: an urge to get organized and get going on some writing projects, new and old. Are you feeling the same? If so, I've got a slew of in-person writing workshops coming up, just for you! Whether you want to wander in the woods and write and sketch about your experiences or you want to sit down in the classroom and plan that book you've been dying to write, I've got you covered. The first two are free but require registration; the third is a bargain. Hit the link in the class title to learn more and sign up.

Nature Writing in the Field. River Brook Preserve, Waldoboro, ME,
Saturday, September 20, 10 am - Noon
Join Maine Master Naturalist Andrea Lani as we take our notebooks outdoors and seek inspiration in the natural world. Exploring River Brook Preserve, we'll engage in exercises designed to hone our observation skills and sharpen all of our senses. We’ll then observe an element of the natural world closely, working our way from description to metaphor, from metaphor to memory, and from memory to emotion. Through this process, we'll each generate a short poem or vignette and come away with a practice for close observation and writing that can be used anywhere. We’ll be outside the whole time, so dress for the weather, be prepared for ticks and bugs, and bring snacks and water. Please bring a journal or notebook and pencil or pen. You may also want a sit pad or small, portable camp chair.

Nature Journaling: Story Mapping, Hidden Vally Nature Center, Jefferson, ME,
​Saturday, October 4, 10 a.m - Noon
Join Maine Master Naturalist Andrea Lani as we explore Hidden Valley Nature Center and create story maps that depict our journey. Our illustrated story maps will depict the route we travel, interesting features we encounter, and events that occur along the way. We'll hike from the parking lot, around Crossbill Loop, and along Warbler Way, creating our story maps as we go. By noticing and recording the sights, sounds, and moments that draw our attention, we'll sharpen our observation skills and deepen our connection to the natural world. When we arrive at the barn, we'll spend some time at the picnic tables refining our maps, adding details and color, and sharing our creations. The program will end at noon at the barn, so please factor in an extra five to ten minutes to walk back to the parking lot. We’ll be outside the whole time, so dress for the weather, be prepared for ticks and bugs, and bring snacks and water. Please bring a journal or paper and clipboard and pencil or pen. The instructor will provide colored pencils and basic watercolors.

Blueprint for a Book: Plan Your Novel or Memoir. Kennebec Neighbors Adult Education, Gardiner, Maine
Tuesdays, October 7 - 28, 6 - 8 pm, $100
Do you have a story that you’ve always wanted to turn into a novel or memoir? In this workshop, we’ll take your dreams and set them on the road to reality. Over the course of three weeks, writer and Author Accelerator-certified book coach Andrea Lani will guide you into your deep-level why of writing your book, help you articulate the point your novel will make or the question your memoir will answer, and lead you in constructing the sturdy tripod of setting, character, and plot on which to rest your narrative. You’ll complete the course with an outline that will set you on the path to writing your best book. Please bring a pen and notebook or laptop to each class.

I think I was deeply imprinted by childhood summers that involved weekly treks up the block every Friday morning to the Bookmobile to load up on as many books as I could carry back down the street. (I was lucky to live, until age 13, on a street where the roving library--which was a big red bus with the Roadrunner painted on the side, and which these days would probably be subjected to a copyright infringement lawsuit by Warner Brothers--stopped once a week). To this day, summer is reading season for me--on the beach or in the hammock or at the campsite or in bed late at night, anywhere is a good place to devour a book--as July's reading stack can attest. Beginning from the bottom:

Nonfiction
My friend Amanda K. Jaros released her memoir of hiking the Appalachian Trail, In My Boots earlier this year, and I finally sat down and read it last month. The book is really wonderful, and I'm not just saying that because she's my friend. There are two kinds of outdoor adventure books. First, there's the kind that purely relay the physical experience of a hike (or canoe trip or other expedition): I did this and I did this and I did this. These can be great, if the adventure is interesting enough and the storyteller good enough, but they can also be boring as hell in the wrong hands. Second, there's the kind in which the traveler takes an emotional journey alongside the physical one, which almost always makes for a better more interesting book--and this is what kind of book In My Boots is: the journey of a young woman growing from a self-doubting, timid, emotionally abused child into a hiking powerhouse who is not afraid to go after what she wants.

 Poetry
I finished the third in James Crews's trilogy of poetry anthologies, The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal, which I read a poem or two every few days for the last couple of months. As with the first two books in the series, the poems in this book express just the kinds of sense of goodness in the world--at least among poets--that I have needed to hear about  in this troubled, troubled times.

Fiction
Another book I picked up during my trip to Colorado in May was Sabrina and Corina, a collection of short stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. These wonderful and wide-ranging stories featuring Latina characters showed me a whole different cultural milieu that exists in Denver and Southwestern Colorado, parallel to and overlapping with but still wildly different from what I grew up with. Short stories are tough, and sometimes they leave me with a feeling of incompleteness or confusion, but all the stories in this book landed and were beautifully rendered and deeply emotional.

The Last Caretaker is a thriller about a woman who goes to work as a caretaker at a nature preserve and finds herself caught up in an underground network that spirits domestic abuse survivors out of town and into new identities. I'd heard about it on a podcast months ago, was intrigued, and then promptly forgot the title and author. But the premise stuck with me, and finally last month I dug around among the many (as my kids used to call them) "boring literary podcasts" that I listen to, found it, and ordered it. I was not disappointed. A really great story.

I think Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza was another podcast discovery, and I actually preordered it, which I am almost never organized enough to do (I usually read books about 20-40 years post-publication). It's also a thriller, about a journalist who attends an influencer convention and finds herself in the middle of an instagram tradwife's disappearance after her husband's brutal murder and has to figure out who the real killer is. So much fun! (And so weird--even though I was on instagram for a long time, and involved in the blogging world for even longer before that, I had no idea how extensive and insidious the influencer world is!)

The last three on the pile are used bookstore/library book sale finds:

• The Downeast Murders by J.S. Borthwick. Borthwick was a Maine mystery author, about whom I've found very little info (is she even still around?), but whose traditional whodunits are always a delightful read.
• Murder Your Darlings by J.J. Murphy is a cute whodunit starting Dorothy Parker as the amateur sleuth. It was a fun, cute read.
• Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. I have no idea how I missed reading this when it first came out--probably because I was busy with a baby and/or I thought it sounded frivolous. It *is* frivolous, but so what? It was a super fun and funny read, with shades of Bridge Jones, and I enjoyed it thoroughly (oh what a delightful escape from our current reality! There aren't even cell phones, let alone rampant fascism!).

Last month I got back into the swing of reading, after a bit of a lull in May, and of course I focused on escapist fiction, because reality is so awful now, who wants to face it? Here's what I read, from the top of the stack:

Fiction:
When I was in Colorado, I picked up three books by local authors at the Tattered Cover. One of these was Three Keys, by Laura Pritchett. I read Pritchett's first couple of books, way back in the early 2010s, after I briefly met her at a conference, but then kind of forgot to look for subsequent publications, so it was fun to find a book by her on the shelf. The protagonist of Three Keys heads west on a road trip from Chicago, after she loses her husband to early/sudden death, her job as a waitress to a restaurant fire, and her son to young-adult attitude. Her only plan is to visit three places to which she has keys: a vacation rental in Colorado, a trailer in the Arizona desert, and a beach hut in New Zealand. Along the way she has a bunch of different adventures and ultimately  finds a new direction for her rudderless mid-life. You have to suspend a lot of disbelief regarding the coincidences and circumstances she finds herself in (and about her repeatedly saying she's "new to middle age" when she's 55), but it's a fun book about the realities of being a woman in one's 50s, and about what possibilities life might hold if we took a chance and went out there and sought our future.

I picked up Mother Nature by Sarah Andrews, a mystery from the 90s, from the $2 shelf at the used bookstore. It features a geologist amateur sleuth, a senator involved in some unsavory dealings (which, frankly, appear rather quaint compared to our current era of sordid and downright criminal politicians), and leaking underground storage tanks (or LUST, which I got a kick out of, since, though I didn't work in that program when I was employed in environmental regulation, I knew people who did). I looked Andrews up online and found that she wrote about a dozen novels before dying in a plane crash (with her husband and son--awful!) in 2019. So write your novels now, kids, and stay out of private planes. I'll be keeping an eye on the used bookstore shelves for further volumes of these geological mysteries.

My son read The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton a while ago, and absolutely loved it, so he passed it on to me. It's a multi-point-of-view (sort of), and time-loop story, in which the main character wakes up in the body of a different guest at a house party in a moldering old estate on the same day, over and over, and has to figure out who killed the daughter of the house and why. I have to admit to having a hard time getting into it--it's very confusing at the start, and I was trying to read it on a camping trip with lots of distractions going on around me--but once I caught on to what was going on, I was swept along in the story and the clever writing, and the way the repeated events of the day, viewed from different perspectives wove together in the end to reveal the killer and motive. 

My sister passed You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego on to me. It's a bit of a takeoff on And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, only more gruesome. I think it might cross genres from mystery into horror, though I'm not really a horror reader, so I'm not sure about this. If you like a good puzzle and don't mind a bit of a blood and a jump scare, this book is a fun read.

Nonfiction
Finally, I read (or, more accurately, finished reading because it took a couple of months) Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, edited by Thomas Edwards and Elizabeth De Wolfe. I came across this book in my research into women nature writers for a long-term writing project I'm slogging through, and was surprised to find both writers are professors in Maine (and that one was provost of one my kids' colleges--unfortunately he retired and my son transferred before that knowledge could be of any use to me in terms of chatting to him about the subject matter; since the book came out nearly 25 years ago, he may not have been particularly interested in talking about it even if I had buttonholed him at some college event). The book's a collection of ecocritical essays about a wide range of women nature writers, and I read it mainly to discover writers I wasn't already familiar with, and while there weren't a ton of these, there were a few, and I found most of the essays extremely interesting, even if they didn't further my personal research.

Have you always had a secret desire to be a scientist? Now, with funding being cut for all kinds of scientific research, is a great time to get involved with community science. As a community scientist, you can evaluate stream health, help protect birds from striking windows, restore mountaintop vegetation and more. Learn all about it in my article "People-Powered Science: How Volunteers Add to Our Understanding of the Natural World" in Green & Healthy Maine Summer 2025. You can find copies at coffee shops, natural food stores, like-minded businesses, and tourist information centers or online.

Can you believe how small that book stack is? One reason for the scant pile is that I took a one-week reading hiatus early this month (as part of The Artist's Way). For the whole week, I set aside all book reading, plus limited online reading, podcast listening, and TV watching (i.e., cut way back on other people's words going into my brain). This was made much easier than it would otherwise have been because my sister was visiting for most of that week, so I was busy visiting museums and beaches and bakeries. Another reason, is that when the week ended, I didn't want to return to the book I'd started at the beginning of the month and was about halfway through with. I rarely *intentionally* quit reading a book in the middle (though I sometimes set one aside and just never pick it up again), but this one had just gotten really boring and I didn't even care what might happen next. I only paid $2 for it at a used book store, and I just might return it to them. This is kind of revolutionary for me (I usually force myself to finish books even if I don't like them). I'm actually excited. (Oh, and because I know you're now dying to know what the book is, it's Lauren Groff's Matrix. I hate to diss on another author's book, but she's pretty successful and I don't think my opinion will harm her sales--and no doubt lots of people find the book more interesting than I did.) I also spent a week in Colorado, so while I read a lot on the plane and in airports, I didn't read much while I was there. Finally, I have a big, fat nonfiction book that it's taken me more than a month to read, and ditto a long poetry collection, both of which will show up in next month's list. But what did I read this month? It was all fiction:

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I don't often read fantasy, but C had put this in a pile of books to give away, and I remembered enjoying the movie when I was a kid, so I gave it a try. It's a beautifully written story, and it felt a bit like an allegory for our times (the angry mad king alone in his castle, with his dopey son, two clueless but semi-loyal henchmen, and a raging, uncontrollable bull who has driven all of the unicorns out of the land as his only companions), although the king, the son, and even the bull possess far more intelligence, integrity, and valor than our current cast of kooks and weirdos running our national sh*tshow. The old movie (screenplay also written by Beagle, along with the old Hobbit and Lord of the Rings cartoons that used to appear on network TV annually when we were kids) is hard to come by these days, but C has ordered a DVD through his college library (because after I read it, he decided to read it again, having forgotten, apparently, that he'd put it in the discard pile), and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

The two books I read while traveling to and from Colorado are both thrillers that take place in Maine and revolve around the summer tourist season in coastal towns. The Summer Guests by Tess Gerritsen is the second in the Spy Coast thriller series, in which the disappearance of a young girl and the discovery of a skeleton in a lake lead the retired CIA gang into a tangled historical mystery. I enjoyed it a lot. In The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda, the main character, who doesn't quite fit into either the "summer people" or "townie" category races to uncover why her friend died falling from the cliffs the previous summer before she succumbs to the same fate. It was also a page turner, and perfect for a 10-hour travel day.

I started a one-week reading fast this today. While last month's book list was down considerably from March's numbers, you can see I'm still mainlining books, clearly as a way of avoiding our current reality, but also with the side effect of preventing me from getting anything else done. The reading fast is part of The Artist's Way program that I'm doing with my creativity group. I'm interpreting this fast as: no reading of books in any genre; extremely minimal news consumption; only reading emails that are important/personal (have already failed on this one today); not reading anything else online; and not listening to podcasts (I have a long-ish drive ahead of me this evening and an even longer one on Sunday, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to pull this last item off). Maybe cut back on TV. I'm hoping that by minimizing the number of other people's words coming into my head I'll perhaps start generating some of my own. In the meantime, here's what I read in April:

Poetry
The Path of Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy. This is the second volume in the trilogy of poetry anthologies edited by James Crews. (I read the first one a few years ago and am working on the third now.) It's a wonderful collection about exactly what it says it's about--connection and joy--and it hit the spot perfectly in these troubled times.

Nonfiction
How to Read Nature. This quick, entertaining ready by Tristan Gooley is a great introduction to becoming more in touch with the natural world, from being aware of direction based on the sun, moon, and other signs to predicting the weather based on cloud types. It's a great reminder to put down the technology and pay attention to the world.

Made from this Earth: American Women and Nature. This book by Vera Norwood is absolutely my catnip--a study of early American women nature writers, naturalists, scientists, scientific illustrators, specimen collectors, and gardeners. It shows that women were more prevalent in these fields than we're given to believe by the histories written by men, while also delineating the barriers they faced, and the way that (as in so many other fields) professionalization pushed women, who were pioneers in some cases, aside in favor of males. It's absolutely fascinating, and I was introduced to so many naturey women I'd never heard of.

Fiction
The Gulf is a quirky novel about a young woman whose joke about starting a Christian-based writing school becomes a reality, and she gets caught in the middle of unscrupulous founders, a wishy-washy ex, and the students, some of whom she becomes close with, all while a hurricane is bearing down on the campus.

I continue my Paul Doiron jag with The Precipice and The Widowmaker, and I continue to enjoy the escapades of loose cannon game warden Mike Bowdich, while appreciating the character arc that he's on, continuing to grow and improve from one novel to the next, while sometimes relapsing into his old ways. I might have mentioned before that I'm surprised that Doiron can show his face in Maine, for the way he portrays it as a hellscape of drug dealers, gun nuts, and pedophiles. That there are occasional "stunning" or "gorgeous" women sprinkled among the degenerates whose hard luck stories lure Bowdich into going rogue seems nothing short of miraculous in this otherwise horror show of a state. (And for the record, that is not my experience of Maine.) Still, highly entertaining and tightly written page-turners.

And I found another Her Royal Spyness mystery by Rhys Bowen, On Her Majesty's Frightfully Secret Service. I do love a mystery with a spot of humor, and these never fail to deliver. I just read them as I find them in used bookstores, except for having begun with Volume 1, and it doesn't seem to matter too much.

I discovered a $2 hardcover section at the used bookstore, and the next two come from that shelf. First, I'd been on the fence about reading Girl on the Train since it came out a few years ago--partly because I have a perverse aversion to anything popular and also it seems thrillers with "girl" in the title always end up being gratuitously violent. But I went for it, and I was hooked from page one and sped through this face-paced psychological thriller. And even though it is about violence against women, the women are not, in the end, helpless victims.

Last, speaking of hellscapes, Carl Hiassen paints a portrait of Florida that I'd think would make anyone who's not deranged want to stay away. I really enjoyed Squeeze Me, a story about a (once again) rogue former game warden turned animal control professional, a reclusive eco-warrior, the residents and hangers-on at the "Winter Whitehouse," plus various and sundry law enforcement officers and a whole lotta pythons. It fully reinforces all of my preexisting prejudices against that state. (And again, Does Hiassen require round-the-clock body guards to not be murdered by his fellow Floridians whom he paints as totally nuts?)

I'd gotten about halfway through the third book from the $2 shelf by the time this reading fast began, and while it started out pretty good, by about page 50 it got really boring and has continued so for about the next 80 or so pages, even though it's a NYT bestseller and well regarded and blah blah blah. I almost never intentionally quit reading a book, although sometimes I put one away on a shelf and forget about it. But this might be the be the one. After all, it only cost $2!