Ummm ... Back to school?

I have looked at this blog several times over the last few months. Played with the design, thought about writing something but always left the page with nothing new posted.

Today I added current reading and guilty pleasures lists as I have been reading a lot the last few months. Not that the lists reflect that :-). I have read literally piles of British Police Procedurals, all of which would have to go on the GP list as most were good not great writing. Many of them did have the sense of place that I look for in books. A real taste of the location a book is set in. There have been a few books 'set' in my area over the last few years but -- honestly?-- they could have been writing about a.n.y.w.h.e.r.e. There was no sense of the closeness of the Sound, no being awakened by seagulls or the scent of the marshes at low tide, the richness of the air. There was no attempt to bring the reader into the bedroom communities, the commuters walking the darkened streets in ones and twos, passing shops that close at 6pm 'cause almost everyone is at home.

Now. perhaps, I am more sensitive to this having loved geography enough to major in it decades ago. But it just takes a paragraph or two to set that scene and to give the reader a sense of a different setting, a different life.