Great Reads: Where would you travel just to read?

It’s been my habit to remind my students you can travel the world and never leave home when you spend time reading a book.

You can visit faraway places, crisscross the oceans, meet interesting people and gain a great deal of knowledge just from reading on a daily basis.

With that thought in mind, I do have one question that I wish to ask my readers: Have you ever had a desire to go somewhere special and just have a reading vacation?

All one has to do is pack one suitcase with the essentials, fill another with books and take flight anywhere in the world.

For me personally, two places come to mind, the Reading Room at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and the Long Library at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill located in the Oxfordshire countryside in England.

I had the opportunity to visit Blenheim Palace in August 1980 and one of my favorite rooms was the Long Library. To spend a week just reading in that beautiful room would be for me the ultimate fantasy becoming reality. The household needn’t worry about me interfering in their day and all I’d need was a cool or hot drink depending on the season and a stack of good books to while away the hours.

Now as I share with you the new great reads to dot the shelves at our Maricopa Public Library, think about your reading vacation and where your special reading retreat would be in this ever-changing world of ours.

Lee Child, Sherrilyn Kenyon and Heather Graham are members of the International Thriller Writers Inc. and along with Sandra Brown are featured in Love Is Murder, an anthology of suspense stories guaranteed to keep you up way past midnight.

The inhabitants of Corduroy Mansion in London’s Pimlico District are experiencing their fair share of life’s difficulties, but everyone is concerned when resident William French’s faithful terrier Freddie de la Hay, goes missing in the Suffolk countryside in A Conspiracy of Friends by Alexander McCall Smith.

Set in Australia and a place called Janus Rock, a lighthouse keeper finds a baby washed ashore accompanied by a dead body. Despite his objections, his wife takes the child and raises it as her own as she has had two failed pregnancies. The consequences of that decision is felt two years later with devastating results in The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman.

If you’ve enjoyed reading the adventures of Odd Thomas, a new adventure awaits in Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz. Odd Thomas and his companion Anna Maria visit a mansion known as Roseland that is now home to a reclusive billionaire. Strange occurrences make Odd Thomas very uncomfortable.

Psychic investigator Jessie Rayburn heads back to her hometown Baron Hollow and she receives a less than warm welcome when no one speaks to her in Kay Hooper’s Haven.  She’s been estranged from her sister Emma and she must revisit a terrifying incident from her past to move forward in her career.