In other news: I weeded the garden ...

and it looks really good! (Or at least half of it does. The other half was scarily weedy and I went back indoors).

When not weeding, I was reading ...

First I read Anne Perry's Christmas Secret. Yes, I know it was actually Easter but I liked the look of this one in the library. It was pretty good - a Victorian mystery, set at Christmas. There's 13 of these in the series, so I must remember them and read them in the appropriate season. They are quite short, only about 160 pages.

Next up was Miss Read's Village Affairs. This is part of the long-running series which began with Village School. They are gentle tales of a teacher's life in a country primary school. The earlier ones are the best, I think, because they are set in the 1950s (or thereabouts) and written at about that time too). In the later ones modern life is intruding too much. They are amusing too, with Miss Read's battles with the fearsome Mrs Pringle the caretaker.

Schools of the type which would have horrified Miss Read are featured in Sugar Rush, which is about a teenager's rites of passage in contemporary Brighton. Apparently this is a book for teenagers but it is really well written and funny too. These teenagers are terrifying, but our heroine learns a lot about herself and her family.

Finally I read a little book of three short stories by Agatha Christie. This author can sometimes seem very dated (see Why Didn't they Ask Evans?) but this collection was surprisingly modern, with some good twists.

Day 186; Book 184