What I Like to Read, Part 1

I was looking at the stats for this blog one day and one of the searches leaped out at me.   When I saw “miss julia” “james herriot” mitford, my first thought was, “It’s somebody just like me!”

There’s no doubt my favorite reading is in mystery, science fiction, fantasy and horror.  When we decided to open a bookstore way back when,  Annie & I chose to focus on those genres because that’s what we both preferred reading and we wanted to be able to share our knowledge of and love for those.  Still, I suspect most booklovers branch out from their comfort zones and have a second or third set of favorites.  In my case, there are two categories, historical fiction and what I call “heartwarming” for lack of a better word.

Historical fiction that appeals to me can be focused on almost any place and any period in time but I lean towards American and British.  Top authors in the British arena include Jean Plaidy, Phillippa Gregory and  Norah Lofts.  It’s probably no surprise that I also love the works of Victoria Holt and Phillippa Carr since they are one and the same person as Jean Plaidy and that in itself is a pen name.  Eleanor Burford Hibbert was prolific in a variety of pseudonyms (according to one source, there are 183 titles in her bibliography) and I am quite sure I have read some books that are by her and I never knew it.

Favorites on the American scene include Eugenia Price and Frances Parkinson Keyes, on pretty much equal terms.  Keyes is probably not as well known by today’s readers and that’s a shame.  When I lived for a while in Louisiana, it was her novels that led me to explore the River Road and a lot of other areas of historical note.  Both writers concentrate on the South.  That’s no reflection on my part against other parts of the US; it’s just my preference, maybe because I’m a southerner.   Having said that, I’m also fond of Agnes Sligh Turnbull, whose work is based mostly in western Pennsylvania and Dana Fuller Ross (pen name of Noel B. Gerson) with his Wagons West and The Holts series (and Gerson wasn’t half bad either).   Then there is Elizabeth Fritch who wrote a series set in Richmond during the Civil War—no surprise I would like a Richmond series ;) Then there are all the wonderful books set in ancient times, those by such authors as Mary Renault.

I detect two patterns here.  One, I seem to be drawn to women writers when it comes to historical fiction although I don’t ignore the guys. Second, my favorites are nearly all from earlier days.  That doesn’t mean I don’t like today’s historical fiction writers—Phillippa Gregory’s The White Queen just came out last August— but the older ones are the real keepers, the ones that populate my oldest bookshelves.  I’ll have to think about why that is.

Another time—my “heartwarming” choices.

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January 14, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller

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