As you may know, and as I may have mentioned at least once, I have recently been obsessed by Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache book series. This could be a good as well as a bad thing. I’ve read the series twice now and have taken a few forays into the depths of some plot points. I am immersed. One of the negative things I find in binge reading and re-reading so closely together is noticing things like continuity errors that pop up on occasion, things that would typically slip by the reader if the books were read as they were released rather than all at once, the change of a pet’s name or a grandchild’s nickname; the age of someone when their parents died. There is also the redundancy that follows a book series in order to catch-up new readers with things that series regulars know, like the physical characteristics of the characters (I’ve had some issues with a couple of the women characters’ descriptions), their phobias (heights & closed spaces) and their foibles, their likes and dislikes (like Beauvoir’s love of steak frites – why mayonnaise with fries, someone please, please explain this to me, and his dislike of Anglos), their idiosyncrasies (the poetry), their hidden agendas and pasts that play into how they act and react to others and to situations. One of the things I do love about binge reading and re-reading is discovering the Easter eggs hidden and the foreshadowing that are only visible in hindsight.
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Book Rec for Halloween
StandardI know I’m nearly a week late for Halloween. I have posted a personal update on my home page, but despite the lateness of this, I thought I would use my extra hour from the end of Daylight Saving Time to share with you my Halloween costume and a recommendation for the book that started it all.
The series of books are the Amelia Peabody Mystery books by Elizabeth Peters. The first book is Crocodile on the Sandbank, and once I finished the twenty-one books in the series, I had decided to dress as Amelia for Halloween. I’d highly recommend all of the books as well as Peters’ other books under her other pen names.

I wrote about the series here.
I enjoyed going through my clothes and accessories to come up with the epitome of the Amelia Peabody Emerson look, and managed to put together what I think is a good rendition of how I pictured her. I did try to get a pith helmet to wrap my scarf around, but I wasn’t able to find one in my price range, however, I decided instead to wear my “second best hat”.
I think I’m ready to head out on the dig. Or to find the murderer whichever one comes first.
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