Good Reading and the lazy day that wasn't

I like to share mysteries I've enjoyed with blog readers, for those of you who like mysteries as much as I do. I just finished Jessica Rohm's Sugar Tower in which she mixes the decline of newspapers, the New York City real estate crisis, the workings of the medical examiner’s office, and one woman reporter, single at 42, hearing her biological clock and wondering if she made the wrong choices in life. Rohm adds the murder of a prominent developer’s wife, and then crafts a whopping good mystery with a lot of depth and character development. Yes, there’s an obvious allusion to Donald Trump in Barry Sugarman’s empire but Sugarman is better looking. Mach (Marchessa Jesus Piazza, whose newspaper byline reads M. Jesus Piazza) is the self-deprecating amateur sleuth who meets not only mystery but moral dilemmas as she tries to figure out who killed Annabel Trainor Sugarman and get an exclusive story for her newspaper. You know somebody in this story is smarmy but figuring out who isn’t easy, which is as it should be. A good read.
Today was supposed to be a lazy Sunday. I had the whole day ahead of me to do with as I pleased--well, almost. I guess my work ethic got to me or something, because after lingering over the paper and coffee (one can only linger so much on our much-reduced Sunday paper) I went to the grocery for one item (but did explore a new grocery store everyone raves about--it was just a nice clean grocery but not, as Sue said tonight, Central Market). Came home to ride my bicycle five miles and then start unpacking the Christmas decorations. My house is now really really messy, a work in process. Decorating for Christmas is sort of addictive--you think you'll quit for now but then it strikes you this belongs there instead of where it is, and you keep moving things around until without realizing it you've spent an hour. And it still doesn't look quite right. I usually do this Thanksgiving weekend but won't have time this year and my memoir class is having a Christmas party on the 30th. I told them not to expect decorations, but then I thought, "Why not?" So I'm working on it.
I finally quit rearranging to go to dinner at the home of my former neighbor, Sue. Her parents are in town, and I always enjoy seeing them. Good dinner, good conversation. They're Canadians, as obviously is Sue, and we discussed Prince William's engagement--Sue's father, Bob, says we Americans get a lot more excited about it than they do in Canada. Then we had a long talk about Prince Charles--they had not seen the NBC special that so impressed me, but we talked about him as an adult almost as old as we all are. A nice way to end a pleasant day, even if it wasn't lazy.