The Ice Storm Cometh--And Books in the House

Our entire region has ground to a halt due to an ice storm that started early last evening and is expected to last another 24 hours. Why we still have power and internet early this morning is a mystery. But I'm sure we'll lose it soon, so I may not be able to respond to comments or post for an indefinite period of time.

Over the Christmas and New Year period, I have an annual habit of hauling home loads of books from the library. It seems that borrowers return all their books before Christmas. As a result the "New Books" shelves are stacked to the hilt, and I can often find recently published books that I haven't seen at the library all year. This is especially true of audiobooks.

But today I'd like to mention some titles that are still popular written a number of years ago. I'll start with The Observations by Jane Harris (born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and raised in Glasgow), published in 2006. This is Harris's widely acclaimed debut novel.
Set outside of Edinburgh in 1863, a young Irish girl goes to work in a country manor house. She has no experience as a maid, but as it turns out, the mistress of the house hires her because she can read and write, not for her skills in the scullery. Dark secrets abound all over the house, and soon the mistress directs the girl to keep a journal of her secrets.

Another title that piqued my interest is a short novella (or a long short story [62 pages]) by the Irish writer John Connolly entitled The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository. The tale is available on its own via Amazon, but it is also included in a collected volume of tales entitled Night Music. John Connolly is also the author of the Charlie Parker mysteries, which I have never read. A man who prefers books to people is the hero of this mystery, which received a 3.95  rating on Goodreads.

The next book I'll mention is a recently published book, which I'm listening to as an audiobook. Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience is written by the English popular historian, Martyn Whittock. When I first heard about this book earlier this year, my knee-jerk impulse was to reject it, because of my absurd bias favoring American scholars when it comes to 17th century American colonial history. I reconsidered and realized it would be very interesting to read about the so-called Pilgrims' first years in America (only about half the group were Puritans and Dissenters), seeing it from the perspective of a writer of  English history. It's good for Whittock that he published this one in 2019--I suppose we must get prepared for the flood of Mayflower-inspired books that will appear in 2020, the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower Landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts. (A 4.05 rating on Goodreads.)  I don't mind the flood, actually, because in the past ten years or so, I have been continuously fascinated by the 17th century in the Americas,  and globally as well.