reading

I am one of those people who read more than one book at a time, I don't know when I started it, but it just happens, I don't have my book with me, I pick up another, and pretty soon I have a book started in each room of the house and I drive my husband crazy with all my books all over. I like to read anything; magazine essays, short stories, or a chapter in a book I read two years ago. If I really like the way it is written, I'll read it over, maybe just in parts. Sometimes I'm in a mood, nostalgic is my main mood. To a gentler time, an older time in history, maybe it safe for me to go there because it is past and can't scare me with its terrors. I can sympathize with the characters, and think about what it was like, but it not my world. I don't want to read about people who commit mass murders in 2009 and their ilk, I don't want to frighten myself anymore than I already do by watching the news. I have an old book on my shelf that I am ashamed to say probably read four or five times, and still it draws me in and I like to visit the setting, the time, the winter snowy night, the blizzard feeling of closed roads and winds swirling at the windows and whistling through the grooves of the bricks or stone walls of the house. This book is "Murder at Hazelmoor" by Agatha Christie and is also known as "The Sittaford Mystery" and the date is 1931. Right smack in the middle of that wonderful time between the wars known as "the Golden age of Mystery novels" taken to be the period between 1913 and the start of World War II. Funny, I thought that it started after World War I, I stand corrected. Any way, Hazelmoor is a home I think, where murder has taken place, and it is perfect for a winter night, and I like to picture myself back in the sixties, on a chair close up to the blazing fire, in my home as a child. I loved those fires, back before we knew all the heat was going up the chimney, as the living room heated, and the back bedrooms got more chilly. My link in the title of this post is to the website Resources for School Libraries. You'll find a whole list of mystery authors.