I really have no business adding books to my reading list, but a few more won’t me, right? This week at work, I put together of books set during springtime for my book chat group. We talked about the ones we’d read and others we’d like to read. I kept my own list of books I’d like to read to five and here they are (all descriptions are from Goodreads):
Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott (AKA Agatha Christie)
Returning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq, Joan Scudamore finds herself unexpectedly alone and stranded in an isolated rest house by flooding of the railway tracks. This sudden solitude compels Joan to assess her life for the first time ever and face up to many of the truths about herself. Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her.
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, Major Pettigrew is one of the most indelible characters in contemporary fiction, and from the very first page of this remarkable novel he will steal your heart.
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel’s rich comic vein.
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone by Tennessee Williams
The story of a wealthy, fiftyish American widow, recently a famous stage beauty, but now “drifting.” The novel opens soon after her husband’s death and her retirement from the theatre, as Mrs. Stone tries to adjust to her aimless new life in Rome. She is adjusting, too, to aging (“The knowledge that her beauty was lost had come upon her recently and it was still occasionally forgotten.”) With poignant wit and his own particular brand of relish, Williams charts her drift into an affair with a cruel young gigolo: “As compelling, as fascinating, and as technically skilled as his plays.”
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?
And here’s the rest of the list!
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
Beltane: Springtime Rituals, Lore & Celebration by Raven Grimassi
The Cat Who Sang for the Birds by Lilian Jackson Braun
Catch as Cat Can by Rita Mae Brown
Come Spring by Tim LaHaye
Come the Spring by Julie Garwood
Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas
The First Day of Spring by Nancy F Tucker
I’ll Be Your Blue Sky by Marisa de los Santos
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood: New and Selected Stories by Alistair MacLeod
Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine S. White
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
See Jane Run by Joy Fielding
Snow in April by Rosamunde Pilcher
Spring by Ali Smith
Spring Collection by Judith Krantz
Spring Fancy by LaVyrleSpencer
Spring Fever by Mary Kay Andrews
Spring Forward by Catherine Anderson
The Spring Girls by Anna S Todd
The Spring at Moss Hill by Carla Neggers
Spring Remains by Mons Kallentoft
Spring Will Come by Ginny Dye
Spring’s Gentle Promise by Janette Oke
Springtime at Cherry Tree Cottage by Cathy Woodman
I’m sure this list could be miles longer. For my book chat, I only included books we have at the library. Do you have any you could add?
Thanks for visiting – come back soon!
Book Club Mom 
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