Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
It’s feeling properly autumnal here, with cooler weather and – after a disastrously dry summer – lots of rain. So much rain. In fact, more rain in one day last week than we’d usually have in an entire summer. All of which means…even more excuses to stay inside and read! My hiking boots were getting worn out anyways after a very active summer.
The Young Mrs Meigs by Elizabeth Corbett – very circuitous path to this. Years ago, Bree at the now seemingly defunct (and tragically inaccessible) blog Another Look Book wrote about her enjoyment of Professor Preston at Home by Elizabeth Corbett. I’ve not had luck tracking that down yet but was able to find this other popular title by Corbett about a youthful octogenarian.
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera – Hard to avoid the press this book received when released earlier in the year. I urged the library to buy it after reading this passage in the Financial Times review:
We got rid of our empire with little bloodshed or recrimination, so the story goes. We were not demoralised or torn apart like Spain and France after their colonial disasters. In fact, we are led to believe that the experience of empire left scarcely a mark upon our souls. This is not a nonchalance that can survive a reading of Empireland, the scorching polemic on the afterburn of empire…
Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders by Jane Robinson – Hurrah, another women-focused social history from Robinson! Here she turns to examine the first British women to enter professions and their experiences.
My Own Master by Adrian Bell – I have loved reading Bell’s farming memoirs (reissued by Slightly Foxed) and am intrigued by this much later memoir. It appears to cover more of his youth, though also overlaps with the periods covered in his trilogy of earlier memoirs.
Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore – the third and most recent entry in a historical romance series about “new” women during the Victorian era. I’m finding this series doesn’t quite work for me (was indifferent to both the first book and this one) so will probably give up from here.
It All Comes Back to You by Farah Naz Rishi – a new YA release about two exes who are reunited when their siblings announce they are dating.
Park Bagger by Marlis Butchet – There have been many books over the last few years about adventures in America’s national parks so I’m delighted to see there is finally an account of visits to the Canadian parks!
A Castle in the Backyard by Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden – we have family currently galivanting around the Dordogne so to distract from my jealously, I have naturally chosen to read all about life in the Dordogne.
A Lot Like Adios by Alexis Daria – I loved romance writer Daria’s You Had Me at Hola when it was released last year and am very excited to read more by her.
What did you pick up this week?
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Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
Vacation time! I am taking this week off and, not having any grand travel plans, I am stocked up on some great books to help pass the time.
Pastoral Song by James Rebanks – published as English Pastoral in the UK, Rebanks looks at the ways farming has changed and the ways it needs to change again to be more sustainable.
Battle Royal by Lucy Parker – Parker’s London Celebrities series got me through the scariest bits of my health issues at the start of summer (discovery: the time it takes to read one relates exactly to the average emergency room waiting period) and I am SO excited to read this new release, the first of a new series. The perfect book to start my vacation with!
Bibliostyle by Nina Freudenberger and Sadie Stein – an entire book dedicated to beautiful pictures of people and their books, at home and at work. Guaranteed to induce unhelpful amounts of envy.
Miss Mackenzie by Anthony Trollope – I felt like a bit of Trollope and have never read this one (though I’ve loved the radio play with Hattie Morahan). Tragically, my library has culled a lot of its Trollope collection so this had to come via inter-library loan.
MacBride of Tordarroch and No Legacy for Lindsay by Essie Summers – Speaking of inter-library loans, I’ve been making them work hard this summer to track down Essie Summers’ books. We’re reaching the end of the (too short) list of readily available ones so the true sleuthing will begin as we head into the fall. I may not be heading off to New Zealand for my holiday but it’s nice to escape there in Summers’ books.
What did you pick up this week?
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Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
Spies, Lies, and Exile by Simon Kuper – Kuper is one of my favourite FT columnists but, until I read this article in January, I had never heard of the double agent George Blake, the focus of this book. The Dutch-born British citizen had a fascinating life and this slim biography is proving to be an absorbing read. It was published in the UK under the far better title of The Happy Traitor.
The South Horizon Man by Essie Summers – my passion for Summers continues and there are more to come in my inter-library loan queue.
The Last Amateurs by Mark de Rond – An inside look at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, this has been on my to-read list ever since coming across it ages ago in Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust. Watching the rowing events during the Olympics was the kick to finally track it down.
In the Garden – one of Daunt’s themed collections of essays.
Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny – I’ve heard a lot of praise for Heiny’s newest release but it was this NPR review that actually pushed me to add it to my hold queue. I love the idea of the story of a relationship that is realistic enough to expand and consider “the outcome of those colossal romantic bargains, not only about what they decided to put up with, but also who — all those other people, family and friends, bound to the beloved.”
Racing Odysseus by Roger H. Martin – it’s almost back to school time here, which seems an appropriate season to pick up this memoir by a college president who enrolled as an undergrad at St. John’s College in his sixties.
What did you pick up this week?
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Ages ago, I used to make an annual habit of rereading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. While long Victorian novels are associated more with long cold nights by the fire, for me it always made ideal reading for the long hot summer days, its slow pace forcing me to slow down and escape the heat.
It’s a tradition that had slipped away from me over the past few years – not consciously but somehow it never seemed to fit. I would still pick it up regularly, read a few hundred pages perhaps, and then, having enjoyed my visit with old friends, move on to something new.
This year there was no moving on. I read it at a leisurely pace last week (during another heatwave here), delighted to be reunited with Molly Gibson whose life is upended when, on the verge of womanhood, her long widowed father remarries and she gains not just a new mother but a new sister. I’ve written about my love for Wives and Daughters before and my reasons for loving it have not changed. Every character is wonderful and terribly real, full of both loveable and frustrating traits. The small society in which they move is perfectly drawn, with both affection and exasperation. And somehow for a book that is 700 pages long the story never lags. Indeed, it’s only frustration is that the end comes too soon, Mrs Gaskell having died just before she could bring her masterpiece to a skillful conclusion.
It reminded me of what I knew all along: there is no better choice for a summer read than this. It forced me to slow down and savour what I was reading, a hard task during this anxiety-ridden summer and all the more pleasurable because I’d been challenged to do it by other means. And now I can move onto another equally pleasurable task: a rewatch of the wonderful television adaptation, in which Michael Gambon is the most perfect personification of Squire Hamley that could ever be imagined.
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