Tall Reader has grandchildren, grandchildren who read and love doing so with an actual book! This one came to her from one of them: The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson. It is fiction so I'll admit, I hesitated over reading it as I rarely read a straight fiction book ... to me many of them don't seem to have an actual ending. This one does, however and it proved to be a most interesting read. It deals with a lot of that is familiar: small town, good/bad memories, the closing of a familiar landmark, history ... Late one night, after the library has closed, the librarian comes across a door where no door was before. She opens it to a room filled with shelves of books, each about a member of the town, hers included. Merely opening one of them transports her (as a visitor and viewer only) to the past. (It's called magical realism). What will she learn? Will it help with something devastating that is about to happen? I'll admit, I liked it much better than I thought I would! :-)

Kate Ellis combines two mysteries in her books, usually about 400 years apart. Makes for some wonderful reading! In An Unhallowed Grave, one of the DI Wesley Peterson series a body has been found hanging from a tree. That of a young woman. Only hanging wasn't the cause of death. At a nearby dig (run by a friend of Peterson) a skeleton is found. It is of a young woman where the cause of death WAS hanging. From the same tree, records prove. Yes, records! The benefit of old castles and manor homes, and writing a record in good ink on vellum ... of course, in this case, you have to know Latin ... anyway there are records for this area for centuries, everything from making soap to crime. What could possibly be the connection here?

Reading Hermit With Dog