Bibliofile: June 1

With the Memorial Day weekend – the unofficial beginning of summer – behind us, we thought it best to start thinking about summer reading choices. Here’s a few suggestions that we’ve come across:

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
The Salisbury Cathedral angle caught our eye on Laura Casey’s blog about this “...historically accurate [book] set at Salisbury Cathedral built around 1220 in Salisbury, England.”

An Enemy at Green Knowe by Lucy Boston
Nick Campbell posted a comment in our Bellairsia newsgroup about An Enemy at Green Knowe:

..."Enemy..." is about demons and witches and things that go bump in the night – I think it's deliberately [M.R.] Jamesian (there's a hideous white hopping thing, just like in "Casting The Runes") and it definitely gave me a shiver, whilst obviously being something very individual, a children's novel, and with a happy ending - for the goodies, that is....

The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch by Joseph Delaney
John Hornor says he has

...an unapologetic love for John Bellairs books. Bellairs was really a precursor to all these magical orphan YA novels you see coming out, the Potter books, the Lemony Snicket. Bellairs, to me, established a tone remarkable for its clarity and quirky characters decades before J.K. Rowling cobbled together Hogwarts from the stones of previous fantastic worlds.

He also discusses The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch, also known as

The Spook's Apprentice (which is the UK title - I don't understand why everybody thinks Americans need the bombastic, Hollywood titles)....

The Bone Key by Sarah Monette
Charlotte recommends The Bone Key:

In this collection, ten old-fashioned ghostly stories are connected by their unwilling and frequently-appalled narrator, the unfortunate Kyle Murchison Booth. Awkward, insomniac, painfully shy, the archivist participates in just one badly-orchestrated necromantic ceremony and now the dead won’t leave him alone.

Inspired by the antiquarian ghost stories of M.R. James, Monette’s elegant prose delivers shivers without gore, Lovecraft without the bombast.

Huh...sort of sounds like the Bellairsia archivist raising Cain at staff meetings.

Wicked Will by Bailey MacDonald
Finally, Bailey MacDonald’s debut book – Wicked Will: A Mystery of Young William Shakespeare – will be published June 23, 2009:

When some wandering actors stroll into his home town of Stratford to perform their plays, Will Shakespeare thinks that he is going to have a lot of fun. He doesn't count on someone murdering Edmund Speight, an ill-tempered old farmer. Nor is he prepared when one of the actors, young Tom Pryne, needs Will's help because Tom's uncle has been falsely accused of the murder!

MacDonald is a professional actress and playwright who lives near Atlanta, Georgia and when she is not writing, she performs under a different name in a theater group in that city.

How about you? What's your summer reading schedule looking like?