“I just finished reading ‘Winter Solstice’ by the British romance novelist Rosamunde Pilcher. I am sad to have ended it, as I loved the characters, the wonderful Scottish setting, and the peacefully meandering storyline. The book features five marginally connected characters who find themselves sharing an estate in the north of Scotland as the Christmas […]

“I recently made a foray to the upstairs library in our old family farm, where generations have left their favorite books behind. I picked up ‘The Enemies of Women’ by Vincente Blasco Ibanez, printed in 1920, just after World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. Interestingly, the latter isn’t mentioned in the book. The […]

Mark Aldridge’s ‘Agatha Christie’s Poirot’ offers clues – and evidence – to prove the case.

“My perfect pandemic book is ‘Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind,’ by Kermit Pattison. It is popular science/natural history at its finest. Cantankerous and feuding paleoanthropologists work in east Africa with the most fragile and hard-to-find evidence imaginable: ancient fossils that contain clues to human evolution. Pattinson is […]