July has been a fast, lazy month. I had high hopes of getting a lot done, but my eyes have not been as “back to normal” as I’d hoped after my cataract operations. Yes, I can see well, but my eyes seem to tire more easily than I remember them doing in the past. So, I don’t have the staying power on my computer. That’s slowing down progress on my novel, as well as a couple of projects I’ve taken on for others.

I did have a great few hours with my youngest and his family when they came through on their way north for a couple weeks. I hope next year they’ll have time to stay for a couple of days.

I have made small but measurable progress on my decluttering, and on getting estimates for some house maintenance. All things that need to get done.

But I feel like the month has just slipped away with little to show for it.

I didn’t even really like any of my book club reads this month. Not liking them, of course, doesn’t mean I didn’t learn from them. Mostly I learned things I wouldn’t want to do myself.

I’ve had some fun this month reading the Victoria Thompson Gaslight Mysteries. I’m almost to the end of the ones she wrote before she died, just in time, I’ve learned for the one her daughter is releasing this fall. It seems Ellen Thompson finished her mother’s last book, City of Promises, thus keeping a promise.

Friends and I have been talking about the success and failure of various franchises being kept alive after the original author’s death. Most of my friends, it turns out, don’t think the efforts have been worthwhile. Personally, as someone who didn’t know until I was an adult just how many Carolyn Keenes there were, I’m ambivalent about continuations. Apparently as many as 20 authors wrote the Nancy Drew mysteries. I didn’t read many of them, but from what I read, I could detect no significant differences.

I’ve read a few of Sophie Hannah’s Poirot stories. She was officially approved by Agatha Christie’s heirs to write new novels. I might read more, but so many books…

I have yet to try Robert Goldsborough’s additions to the Nero Wolfe series. Again, the heirs of Rex Stout approved his continuation. I had not read any Nero Wolfe stories when I met Goldsborough at the last Love is Murder conference in Chicago years ago. He was a charming man, and the conversations I had with him sent me to the original stories. I haven’t yet finished them, so I may get to the new books eventually.

But the book club novels this summer have been in genres I wouldn’t have picked in my own. Or, sadly, they’ve been poor examples of the genres I like. For the most part they’ve wound up in the “unfinished” bin.

How am I doing all this reading while my eyes are still bothering me? Ah, that’s the wonder of audiobooks. I began reading them in the car while I commuted to work years ago and I’ve almost completely converted.

I did actually read Molly MacRae’s recent Haunted Shell Shop Mystery, All Shell Breaks Loose. That was as much fun as its two predecessors. In this one, Maureen, the shell shop owner, and her personal ghost, Emrys, an 18th century pirate who died off the coast of Okracoke, North Carolina, meet another spectral visitor. The new ghost is tied metaphysically to a sword that is used in a 21st century murder. Molly’s books are generally fun cozies, good for light summer reading and for curl-up-with-cocoa winter reading. I always recommend her books.

I also read Jacqueline Winspear’s latest, The White Lady. Hers are a bit weightier, in both subject matter and length, than a cozy mystery. In this one, we range from Belgium during the first World War, to England and France during the second, and back to England in early post-WWII years. The main character is a quietly fearsome woman who finds herself connected to London mobsters in order to protect the young family who are her neighbors. I gather it’s a stand-alone although I could see room for additional stories featuring Elinor White (or Elinor De Witt or “Miss White”). It has some gruesome and dangerous war scenes, but Winspear has never shied away from the realities of war in her books.

So, that’s where my July has gone. And I haven’t even brewed a big batch of my summertime favorite iced tea. Well, there’s still August.

À bientôt!