> Alison Woof Case #72 - Peace and Healing

My bedside table

April 29, 2025

My bedside table

To give our readers the opportunity to get to know the CASE Team better, we’re asking one member of the team each edition to share (some of) the books they’re currently reading. First off the block is our long term copy editor, Alison Woof, who has also written reviews and articles for CQ over the years.

My first two books are ‘comfort reads’—books or authors I’ve read before that I turn to when I’m sick, or too tired to concentrate on something new and challenging, or overwhelmed by the state of the world out there. My top comfort read authors are Jane Austen, Eva Ibbotson, Georgette Heyer, Dick Francis, Ellis Peters and Alexander McCall Smith. They’re cosily familiar, but also reassuring in the way all these writers value positive character traits like kindness, loyalty, humility, generosity, compassion, and the ability to laugh at oneself.

1. Cotillion by Georgette Heyer

Regency romances by Georgette Heyer are pure delight!

2. The Grass Widow’s Tale by Ellis Peters

This week I had the pleasure of meeting an old friend (Bunty Felse, wife of Ellis Peters’ police detective George Felse) in a new (for me) and quite different (for her) role—quite literally caught up in a murder while her husband is out of town. The Grass Widow’s Tale brings Bunty, at a moment of crisis brought on by a milestone birthday, into a situation where her empathy, emotional intelligence and determination to uncover the truth are essential to redeeming a seemingly impossible and life-threatening predicament. (I also have another Ellis Peters on the go—The Rose Rent—one of her wonderful Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries.)

3. The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel

This is a biography I’ve just finished, a fascinating and a moving account of the life and work of the discoverer of polonium and radium, who was the first person to win two Nobel prizes and coined the term radioactivity. As someone with only a very rudimentary understanding of physics and chemistry, I appreciated Sobel’s ability to explain the science simply and clearly. But it is the insight into Marie’s family life and relationships, and the extremities of the environment she and her colleagues worked in, that make this compelling reading. As the subtitle—How the glow of radium lit a path for women in science—indicates, this is not just the story of Madame Curie, but of many of the women scientists she mentored and trained, at a time when even access to a university education, let alone to work in science, was almost unattainable for women.

4. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

This novel has stayed with me since I finished it because of the setting—Oxford, at the time of the compiling of the first Oxford English Dictionary—and the imaginative life of the narrator Esme, a child whose life is shaped by words, particularly words relating to women’s experiences, which were often unrecorded.

5. The Bible

You don’t see it in the pile because I use a daily reading app on my iPad (called Reading Plan). You can choose one of the plans each year and it connects to Bible Gateway for the readings. I use it to read through the whole Bible every year, and generally choose one of the ‘Thematic’ options (rather than chronological), because I like to see connections between different parts of God’s Word. I’m currently in Deuteronomy and Matthew, and today was struck by how immediately after the glory of the transfiguration, Jesus talks about how he must suffer, echoing the blessings/curses of Deuteronomy 28—except of course that he would suffer for our sins, not his!