My reading goals for this year are to read and study as many as possible of the novels in mystery writer, Anne Perry‘s, William Monk series.
After reading, “The Face of a Stranger” I have become totally engrossed in not only Monk’s struggle to regain his memory as he works to solve murders that take place during the later half of the 1800’s, but also with Perry’s depth of authorial narration interwoven with her ability to deliver internal thoughts of Monk.
I fell in love with Anne’s other series, “The Charlotte and Thomas Pitt” series over a decade ago.
Married myself, I liked the idea of a woman during the last 20 years of the English Victorian Period assisting her husband, a man beneath her social class, in solving murder mysteries committed by the very wealthy and sometimes even peerage.
Now that I’ve grown older, I find myself when reading the first novel of the Monk series, mesmerized with the contradictions, both internal and those Monk faces in a society ruled by station of birth, lines of professional and social affiliations, and economics.
Sound a little bit like present-day America?
The more things change, the more they stay the same. What was old yesterday is new today.
It would seem a contradiction that I, a writer of Women’s Fiction, find so much entertaining and to learn from reading about women and men in 18th and early 19th century Britain.
Quite the opposite. Reading of this period as presented by Perry stretches not only my imagination. It also allows me to peer in the depths of the hearts of her characters who, so often work quite profoundly to hide the very thing that renders them human.
This, I find a universal quality that transcends time, culture and all strata of life and living. And inevitably at the heart of every novel or story sits a mystery, on that transforms and twists, and ideally enlivens and delivers hope, or at least a sense of it.
At the very core, I learn the most when I am thoroughly entertained in a way that takes me out of the present and transports me to world both familiar and yet with enough differences that intrigue.
Where do you go to escape?
What writers do you most enjoy?
What will you be reading this year?