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.