A man with a broken leg notices a neighbor's wife seems to have gone missing. Is she in the hospital, out of town, or dead?

When a man ain’t got nothing to do but just sit all day, he sure can think up the blamest things—

Most of us know the basic plot of Rear Window (aka It Had to be Murder), even if we haven't seen the Alfred Hitchcock movie. The plot has been parodied on The Simpsons, ALF, Family Guy, and probably a hundred other places. Some peeping Tom sees something and jumps to all sorts of conclusions.

Hal Jeffries can't seem to keep his nose out of his neighbors' business and things start to unravel. Why won't anyone believe him? Is he going crazy? Woolrich keeps you guessing right up until the end.

It's a quick read and pretty suspenseful, if a little dated. 3.5 out of five stars. It can be read for free here: http://www.miettecast.com/woolrich.pdf

This post is a bit late because I went to the beach with my family last week, but July was been an exceptionally good reading month for me! I think it's partially because the wedding's over and I'm not currently working, so I've really been able to sit down and read a lot, but also I've just gotten lucky with my reading choices - so many of the books I read this month have been amazing! 

 

I read 11 books this month (not shown is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I re-read with my book club). Well, 2 were plays and 1 was a short story, but anyway - 10 pieces of literature. I didn't finish one of the books on my list, Anna Karenina, but I'm re-reading that in preparation for my book club's read of that (they're actually currently reading it, but it's on our longer reads list so I'm reading it a bit ahead of them as I prep their reading guide questionnaires), so I wasn't too upset about not finishing that. I also missed reading The Maze Runner, which disappointed me, but I've requested it from my library so I'll read it eventually. I did read Blood and Chocolate and To Kill a Mockingbird, which were not on my list, so that's a good thing! 

 

Favorite Book in July: 
It is SO hard for me to pick an absolute favorite this month, because I read SO many great books! Out of the books that I haven't read before, Outlander by Diana Gabaldon is definitely my favorite, but To Kill a Mockingbird is also fantastic. 

 

Least Favorite Book in July:

Again, these books are all so good that it's hard for me to really say which was my least favorite... but I'm going to go with Where Angels Fear to Tread, because I'd actually completely forgotten about it until I went back through my records to write this post. Whoops, haha. If it's forgettable, then it's definitely not as good as the others! 

 

Have you read any of the books that I read last month? What were your favorite books for July?

Mystery aficionado Ellery Queen said of Cornell Woolrich that he can "distill more terror, more excitement, more downright nail-biting suspense out of even the most commonplace happenings than nearly all his competitors".Woolrich's work continues to fascinate readers all around the world, and this trilogy should become a staple in all noir collections. It contains two full length novels (I Married a Dead Man and Waltz into Darkness) and five short stories, including "Rear Window" -- works in which one of the genre's consumate "poets of terror" explores all the classic noir themes of loneliness, despair, futility, and occasionally redemption. (source)

Currently reading -- "Rear Window" (originally titled: "It Had to be Murder") by Cornell Woolrich 

 

[Note: My copy of the story comes from The Cornell Woolrich Omnibus. It is the only story from this collection that I will be reading for the time being.]

My July reading list is quite extensive, but I actually expect that I should be able to make pretty good headway with it, as I'm not currently working and I don't have a wedding to plan. Grad school doesn't start til the end of August, and while I am putting out part-time job applications, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have a lot of free time - which means a lot of reading time! 

 

Read on to see what my picks are for July.