\it's Monday! What are you reading?

 

It's Monday! What are you reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. For this meme, bloggers post what they finished last week, what they're currently reading, and what they plan to start this week.

My comments are not meant to be recaps of the story lines as I include a link to Goodreads for their synopsis of the book. I am merely stating how I felt about the book without giving any spoilers.

We arrived back in Toronto late Tuesday after 5 months away bypassing the ugly winter everyone suffered through.

41 COMPLETED READS TO DATE!

1 ABANDONED

1 not finished as it expired so I will have to borrow it again. The Nightmare

FINISHED:

Synopsis here.

I LOVED this book. I became totally absorbed in her story as she describes her life over a year of pursuing her "calling" in Toronto and then in England.

Religion has always intrigued me from an historical point.

 As a child of an Anglican father and a Catholic mother it is odd that she was raised as an Anglican at a time when the Catholic church "demanded" that the children of a mixed marriage be raised Catholic. Her parents were very open-minded and Jane was raised with both religions.

I didn't know that there were Anglican nuns before this book, and the fact that there is an order called the Sisters of St. John the Divine here in Toronto intrigued me. I had discovered St. John the Divine Cathedral the Episcopal Diocese of New York in Manhattan in 2011 and went back in 2013 as I developed a fascination with the church.

I enjoyed the debates on the differences between the Anglican and Catholic churches. Her insider information of the lives of nuns and monks was tantalizing. Just as in the outside life people can be kind or nasty within holy orders.

To learn that the convents are not financially funded by their churches was also something new.

I didn't really understand why as a strong headed resourceful woman, newly engaged, single mother would want to become a nun at the age of 57. 

The Anglican church has female vicars.

Given her personality she would have been better suited assisting on the outside where she could use her journalistic talents and sources.

Short-Listed for the prestigious Crime Writers Association (CWA) Debut Dagger prize, 'Natural Causes' is the first of an ongoing series featuring Edinburgh-based Detective Inspector Anthony McLean. In a world where demons are not supposed to exist, he is one of the few unlucky enough to be able to sense their presence.

As a huge Rebus fan I was a little leery about reading another Scottish procedural set in Edinburgh. I guess Oswald was too as he inserts a tongue-in-cheek police officer reading a Rebus book on duty.

It was a good read, a few too many characters that made it confusing. 

Not sure if I would read him again.

STARTED:

On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar with her boardinghouse roommate stretching three dollars as far as it will go when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a tempered smile, happens to sit at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a yearlong journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool toward the upper echelons of New York society and the executive suites of Condé Nast--rarefied environs where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. 

Wooed in turn by a shy, principled multi-millionaire and an irrepressible Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, befriended by a single-minded widow who is a ahead of her time,and challenged by an imperious mentor, Katey experiences firsthand the poise secured by wealth and station and the failed aspirations that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her life, she begins to realize how our most promising choices inevitably lay the groundwork for our regrets.