Skip to main content

Join me!


I'm starting something new for 2019, and I hope you'll join me on upcoming Tuesdays when I stop and take some time to brew a pot of tea, take out one of my little treasures -- a lovely fine bone china teacup and saucer -- and share my thoughts with you about what I'm currently reading.  

BTW, the image of the teacup and saucer is mine --  the imprint is Limoges with a hand-painted set of initials and date -- NB '94.  Each Tuesday, I'll share my tea cup collection with you and the tea I'm drinking, too.  I have a growing collection of loose teas that I'm enjoying this winter -- another break from the daily coffee habit.  Today's tea?  Winter Chai by Tea Forte -- perfect for a cold January day! 


As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm changing my reading diet a bit this year.  For the past four or five years, I've predominantly read romance, both historical and contemporary, because it was a new uncharted territory for me.  And I truly loved it, so much so that I started writing and publishing romance.

 But romance can be somewhat of a rich diet, like existing on chocolate truffles and champagne -- quite wonderful but a bit rich.  So in an attempt to strike some balance in my readings, I'm adding in memoirs -- mostly those that have to do with cooking and travel -- and historical fiction that explores the Colonial and American Revolutionary periods, which I find sadly lacking in today's market. Of course, I'm still hooked on romance -- after all, there's always time for romance in our lives, but I want to expand my reading horizons, and I hope you'll join me in the coming weeks.

 Now that was a long introduction and thanks for sticking with me -- here's my comments on what I'm currently reading this week:

Ann Mah has led an intriguing life as a diplomat's wife and moving about the globe at a dizzying pace.  But Paris and France are what draw her and her husband time and time again, until one day he's assigned to Paris.  Amidst their delight, he's shifted to Baghdad for a year and she cannot go with him.  Desolate, she turns to food and recipes and finding out about the various regional cooking of France to fill her time and loneliness. 

 Mah has a dry sense of humor and a perceptive eye, bringing her visits around France to the reader, as well as the often delicious, mouthwatering recipes and the people who create them, always with grace and her sense of honoring the French way of cooking and eating.

 She also has two novels -- "Kitchen Chinese: a Novel about Food, Family and Finding Yourself," and a more recent publication, "The Lost Vintage" -- both of which I plan to order soon.




Happy Reading and see you
next Tuesday!   Claire H.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Secondary Characters

As promised, I'm back with some tidbits of info on another favorite secondary character who has appeared in several of my Regency romances -- the Dowager Lady Rutherford. I needed a character who would balance out Lady Caro (see last week's blog entry), someone who was smart as a whip, tough and yet hiding a soft side.  The dowager seemed to fit the bill for when she first appears in Snowbound Seductions , she's ornery, feared by all (even the duke) and willing to use her ebony cane like a Scottish claymore. So, the first British actress who visually inspired me, mostly for the dowager's physical attributes is Phyllida Law.  If you're an Acorn TV or Brit Box fan, many of you will recognize Ms. Law. Phyllida Law She's appeared in so many series and movies, and is also known as Emma Thompson's mother.  She is a wonderful actress and, to me, captures how I visualize the dowager. And in my work-in-progress, Wicked Wagers , we'll see a b...
Post a Comment
Read more

Top 25 Reads for 2018

2018 was a busy year for reading -- lots of great books, so little time, right? Although I must admit that this year I was immersed in Susan Mallery's Fools Gold series, as well as Jill Shalvis' Lucky Harbor and Heartbreaker Bay series --  and I do mean totally immersed.  These two writers can world build like no other!  But for the sake of the Top 25, I am putting Mallery and Shalvis in their own kingdom and let you decide. Also, please note that I am not driven by the NYT Bestseller List or any other "lists" -- I tend to like to find my writers in a more organic way, mainly by browsing in real brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries, so some are "newish" and some are older.  If I'm starting a new series, I like to start at the beginning, which means I'm reading past bestsellers. So, here's my top 25 titles that I heartily recommend to readers (broken down by genre / subgenre): Regency Romance: Sherry Thomas, His at Night Tessa D...
2 comments
Read more

Sources of Inspiration

I've been working on my first Regency romance novel and, although I've read most of Jane Austen and seen so many of the excellent BBC movie variations, one still needs a bit of inspiration when working through the writing. It's usually those small details, descriptive of the landscape or the manor house, that gives a work that added level of veracity, of impact for the reader.  Why else would readers want historical romance?  I have to think that it's the time period that intrigues, a bit like a time tunnel.  Go ahead, pick your period -- there's probably a romance set in each one. That's why I love Pinterest.  If you can control the time spent on the great "P" -- and that's a big "if" -- there's so much out there to help spark those imaginative ideas or get a writer over the hurdle of writer's block.  Here's a few that I chose to help keep me churning out those words: Image captured from Pinterest Wouldn't thi...
Post a Comment
Read more