I hope everyone had a great weekend. I’ve been organizing and actually did some weeding of the shelves so what do I do afterwards? Go buy a book as a treat! I did have a coupon from Barnes & Noble that I couldn’t pass up so I had to buy The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson. It’s fantastic so far and exactly what I needed.

I think I’ve mentioned in the past that when things are a bit crazy for me, I tend to rely on mystery books a lot. Actually that’s not the only crime book I’m reading, I’ve also started The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri, and so far that’s also a good read.

So this is going to be a short & sweet post as I’m very behind on blog reading but tell me, what good mysteries are you reading lately? I have a feeling that the rest of the year I’ll be needing a lot of those. heh.

Oh goodness, can we hit pause and slow down time? It’s been crazy here at Casa Bookgirl but there are a lot of things to be happy about which I’ll tell you about soon. But, one is that I’ve received quite a few books lately which sound so very good so I have to share those with you.

First, I got The Passport by Herta Müller. As you know she recently won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. I read one of her books, The Land of Green Plums, quite a few years ago so I’m excited to try another of her books. In this story the subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the west. You can read an excerpt here.

Also from the wonderful Serpent’s Tail press I got A Brief Life by Juan Carlos Oretti. This is a novel by an Uruguayan writer and I can’t believe I’ve never read anything set in Uruguay so I’m look forward to it. The other book is The Semantics of Murder by Aifric Campbell, which is described as literary fiction with a murderous slant. You gotta love that.

The next is a novel by Deborah Copaken Kogan, Between Here and April. I remember seeing this book in the library earlier in the year and making a note of it. I really liked Kogan’s bestselling memoir, Shutterbabe, so I hope this will be a great debut novel.

The other book is the story of the first pianos, Mr. Langshaw’s Square Piano by Madeline Goold. I’m not much of a non-fiction reader but this sounds delightful. I think I’ll have to have some Chopin in the background when I settle down with this read.

Finally going back in time, The Lute Player by Norah Lofts will take me to Richard the Lionhearted as he goes onto the battlefields of the Third Crusade. I haven’t read a good historical novel in a while and this one sounds juicy.

Have you read any of these yet? Are any of these on your wishlist?

Oh, and as I was talking about Type in my last post, you can see the subject is still on my mind when I created yet another Etsy treasury. Check it out for some gorgeous typography work.

I really think all signs are pointing to me learning letterpress one of these days. Last weekend I mentioned the Artsy day and finding out about letterpress workshops, and today we went and saw the documentary Typeface.

The film traces the history of the The Hamilton Wood Type Museum in rural Two Rivers, Wisconsin. With 1.5 million pieces of wood type and more than 1,000 styles and sizes of patterns, Hamilton’s collection is one of the premier wood type collections in the world. Can you imagine running around in there opening all those little drawers and finding just the right “B” or “T” or whatever you want? How exciting.

I guess what I liked so much about the film is the idea of how important this art is. Yes, you can do so much with computers and so much faster, etc. but there is something to be said for actually getting your hands dirty to produce something.

Anyway, I highly recommend watching this film if it comes to your area. Another excellent film about typeface is Helvetica. Seriously, it will make you look at type in a new way and next time you pick up a book to read I bet you, you’ll check the colophon to see what typeface was used.

Now for something fun, did you know you have a typeface? Yes, take the quiz and see which one you are!