Today’s Sip: Bewley’s Irish Breakfast
Today’s Quote: “Where there’s tea, there’s hope.” – Arthur Wing Pinero
Today’s Treat: Trenary Toast (made with sourdough since it’s all I have right now) – Found out about this Finnish-style rusk bread in A Pattern for Murder, listed below under What I Read This Week.
This post is also partly made for participation with the following blogging events that happen on Sundays and Mondays: The Sunday Post hosted by Kimberly at the Caffeinated Reviewer, It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? hosted by Kathryn at Book Date, The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz, and What’s On My (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand hosted by Reading Reality.
Sundays also just happens to be the day where I have the least time commitments and my husband and I are both usually home hanging out.
What I’ve Been Up To
This week has been a bit of good and a bit of bad. Someone in our family is in the hospital with something serious, so that’s been on all of our minds, as you’d expect. I also jammed my wrist early in the week so I spent a few days babying it (It is fine now). On a more positive note, the weather has finally cooled off enough that we are mostly comfortable again. I suspect we will get one more heat wave before Halloween, but with luck, I’ll be wrong.
I did spent a bit of time trying to design a few bookmarks. The ideas are cute (I think), but they are at the just-above-doodling stage for now. It was very relaxing and it got a few things out of my head and onto the paper. That’s always satisfying.
Under Resources, I added a list of contemporary cozy mystery authors. This is a combination of my Read and TBR list from Goodreads and a very long Word document I’ve been keeping for years. The Word doc tellms me where I am with all the series, author psudonyms, if the book is owned where I can find it (hard copy at home or digitally) and brief notes on series themselves. It is color-coded and it helps satisfy something that listing on Goodreads does not. However, I now want something easier to click through to check for new books in series, find authors names for reading challenges (like A-Z), and other games I like to play with reading. I’ll eventually expand this list to include more information I use for games/challenges, such as themes or info useful for various prompts.
Other lists and/or links to Google Docs/Sheets will be appearing here soon. Deb at Readerbuzz lists some of her goals as Perpetual Goals and links hers to Google Docs and Sheets. If you haven’t checked hers out, I highly suggest you do. So many great lists! It’s also fun just to read! At least I think so 🙂 She also gratiously allows others to make their own copy of the lists to use, which I plan to do.
In any event, Deb’s idea helped me realize there is an easier way to organize all my stuff and being able to make a master list to click through to get there is so brilliant. I’ve been building a few lists of my own over the years and I’ve been working on them this week. I’ll add the info to future posts once I get things added. One is noted below.
What I Read & Posted About This Week
This week I only made two posts here on the blog.
Favorite Series Highlight – Death on Demand – In this post, I discuss Carolyn Hart’s love and promotion of contemporary and traditional cozy mystery authors. While reading her books, I started listing books and authors she referred to in her books (usually by way of adding them to my TBR on Goodreads, if they weren’t there already). I learned at some point that she has lists on her site with this information. Sadly, and understandably, this isn’t in a checklist-type format. I don’t know if she thought someone would eventually want to read all the people she listed, but I knew I did. So, at some point I had started to create one in Excel, but I’m in the process of moving it over to Google Sheets and adding to it, so I can make it shareable to anyone who wants to use it.
My only other post this week had to do with my recent reads and how they filled in prompts on challenges.
What I Read This Week
Death on Deck by Courtny Bradley. Aka the Courtagonist, who is active on social media and online spaces promoting cozy mysteries. I thought her book was fun and her group of senior sleuths were entertaining. The mystery takes place on a cruise the ladies take. They are in their 60’s and I got the feeling Courtny spends time with older people, and enjoys that time, and it shows.* I believe this was her first novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ll be reading her other books, I’m sure. She did a great job describing people and places, so it was easy to put myself into the scene.
*[I’ve always been around older people, since my parents took us to the Elks Lodge from an early age and lived with my grandparents’ house growing up, so I’ve never understood the ageism some seem to have about older people.]
A Pattern for Murder (Bait & Stitch Cozy Mystery, #1) by Ann Yost – I read this book to fill the Y part of the A-Z Author Name challenge, but boy am I glad I did. This book was rich with descriptions about Finnish-American culture (all new to me), Finnish (and some Swedish) knitting, Finnish words and Finnish foods. It took me a few to get used to all the Finnish names, but I loved it all. The mystery was intriguing. An heir came back at the last minute to claim his inheritance which would have displaced some local seniors. It was pretty obvious he died from falling out of the lighthouse, or did he? And if he did, who did it? That was harder for Hatti Lahtinen and the other locals to figure out than I expected, and lots of fun. I also loved hearing about the Keweenaw Peninsula area in Michigan. There is a recipe in the book for an Oven-Baked Pancake (pannukakku). I plan to try this the next time my son visits.
The Squeaky Clean Skeleton (Haunted Housekeeping, #1) by R.A. Muth – This was a cute story with a less than cute beginning. When Tori Madison and her BFF Hazel find a corpse consisting of just bones during one of their cleaning jobs, they also find a black cat, which Tori takes home. She later discovers that the cat turns into a Irish man from the past. There were some funny exchanges between Tori and the cat/Irish man, Rune, dealing with changes in society/technology. Tori, Hazel and Rune work together to figure out what happened to Mrs. Livingston (the now corpse).
What I’m Currently Reading
I’ll be starting Toured to Death by Hy Conrad today. From the blurb, this the first in the Amy Travel Mystery series. Amy and Fanny Abel run a mystery tour that takes place in Monte Carlo. I chose this book because it fits this week’s prompt in our Cozy Bingo group, and it fits some other challenges as well. I am looking forward to it since I don’t know much about Monte Carlo. As a bit of prep for the book, I took a “walk” from Port Hercule to Monte Carlo via the Google map. It was interesting 🙂
What’s Coming Up This Week (and Ahead)
I haven’t gotten that far. That’ll be next on the to-do list.
Reading Challenges
I’m making progress on my 2026 reading challenges. As expected, the A-Z authors and book titles are giving me the most trouble. I semi-joked on social media that if an author is considering pseudonyms, Q, X, Y and Z are helpful 🙂 Last night, I found someone on Kindle Unlimited who seems to have understood the A-Z predicament, since their books are titled A to Z, and the harder letters are more expensive 🙂 I’m not a KU subscriber currently though.
How did your week go and what do you have planned for the week?
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