Gentle Reading

Life has been recently (I keep saying) full of challenges. Mourning my grandmother and then my cousin from a great distance. Struggling to write, in the wake of these griefs, sometimes terrified that my muse has deserted me, or that I’ll never write anything of significance. Missing faraway friends (though I am deeply grateful for the smaller circles that surround me here). Waiting through the long weeks of March and now April, through biting winds and chilly nights, for weather that truly feels like spring.

My growing Miss Read collection

Sarah at Pink of Perfection asked recently what we like to read in the spring, and someone mentioned the novels of Miss Read, village schoolmistress at Fairacre (England’s answer to Mitford). I first discovered Miss Read in Oxford, and had read and enjoyed four of her Fairacre tales. That very weekend, I found Summer at Fairacre on a browse through Rivendell Books. I snapped it up and savored it, then found two more at the Brattle. And now I’m planning to make my way through the whole Fairacre series, and maybe the Thrush Green novels, too.

These books are the perfect comfort reading – well written, with a bucolic setting, a witty and lovable narrator, a colorful cast of village characters, a pleasantly meandering plot. They’re a blessed escape from my daily frustrations and larger troubles. Sometimes a dose of gentle reading is just what the doctor ordered.

Breakfast with Lucy

Along the same lines, I’m enjoying the Irish Country Doctor series by Patrick Taylor – a perfect cross between Mitford and James Herriot – and the Lucinda Roberts trilogy by Jane Roberts Wood (the first book is pictured above). And, this weekend, I reread Jane of Lantern Hill for the first time in years. Now I want to live in a little cottage by the sea on Prince Edward Island.

What’s on your spring and/or gentle reading list?

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