The Captive Reader

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader 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.

Oh yes, my consumption of D.E. Stevenson’s novels continues.  Only three came in this weekend (of which I have, miraculously, only read one so far – such restraint!) but there are more on the way.  What would I do without interlibrary loans?

Sarah Morris Remembers and Sarah’s Cottage are companion books about, you might have guessed, Sarah Morris.  I have already read and loved Sarah Morris Remembers, which follows Sarah through her childhood during the 1920s and 1930s and into young adulthood during the war – I think it is probably my favourite D.E. Stevenson book to date – so am eager to start on Sarah’s Cottage!

I don’t know much about Young Mrs Savage but I am looking forward to reading it nonetheless!

Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie – it has been a fiction-heavy year for me and I am definitely feeling the lack of non-fiction in my reading diet now.  Two or three memoirs or biographies a month is not enough – I need more!  Hopefully, Massie’s massive biography of Catherine the Great will go some way to feeding my need.  I know Audrey enjoyed it when she read it last spring and I’ve been looking forward to trying it for myself since then.

I am always on the lookout for good chicklit – the kind that isn’t obsessed with the heroine’s weight or fixated entirely on unobtainable males – and Hester Browne impressed me with both The Finishing Touches (about a woman attempting to revitalise her family’s London finishing school in the 21^st Century) and Swept Off Her Feet (in which an antiques appraiser visits a Scottish castle, uncovers a secret, befriends the forward-thinking heir and struggles to learn to dance reels).  I picked these up over the weekend and have already read both.  In many ways, they reminded me of Katie Fforde’s books, with their competent heroines and focus on work and non-romantic relationships, though suitable love interests are definitely also there (and, what’s more, they are actually reasonably appealing human beings as opposed to the standard flat and overly-idealised chicklit heroes).

What did you pick up this week?