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.

I’m still out of town so all my picks this week are e-books from the library’s digital catalogue.  I have to say, I’ve been really impressed by the variety of titles available this way (the catalogue is expanding daily), especially since many of the books available digitally aren’t available from the library in hard copy.  It will be nice to be home next week and have access to the real library again but I certainly don’t feel hard done by without it!

Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby – I’ve lamented for years how limited my library’s collection of travel writer Eric Newby’s books is.  Wonderfully, they now have his books available through the e-book catalogue so I can finally read Love and War in the Apennines, about Newby’s experiences during the Second World War.

Round Ireland in Low Gear by Eric Newby – another chance to enjoy the digital library’s Newby collection!

Snow and Roses by Lettice Cooper – I’m intrigued by this and excited to sample another Bloomsbury Reader book but the first few pages haven’t convinced me.  Still, it sounds like it could be very good:

Flora is a young Oxford lecturer, whose love affair with a married man has ended in tragedy. She faces a bleak, empty world. Following an ill-fated flight to a villa in Tuscany, and the collapse of her warm friendship with Lalage, an Oxford colleague, Flora is close to breakdown. She is rescued by her understanding family and by her return to Oxford, where she finds release from her own emotional problems in those of her most brilliant student, Nan, who seems about to sacrifice her career on the alter of revolutionary politics. Lettice Cooper explores and illuminates the varied contrasts of generations, classes and beliefs, and is equally absorbing in the smaller world of university rivalries and gossip, or the hot-house jealousies and intrigues in an Italian villa. Above all, this book illuminates the personality of a young woman at a crisis in her life.

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff – I just found out that a film adaptation of this book is set to be released later this year and that seemed like reason enough to pull it out for a reread.

Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani – It’s 1978, and Ave Maria Mulligan is the thirty-five-year-old self-proclaimed spinster of Big Stone Gap, a sleepy hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She’s also the local pharmacist, the co-captain of the Rescue Squad, and the director of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the town’s long-running Outdoor Drama. Ave Maria is content with her life of doing errands and negotiating small details-until she discovers a skeleton in her family’s formerly tidy closet that completely unravels her quiet, conventional life. Suddenly, she finds herself juggling two marriage proposals, conducting a no-holds-barred family feud, planning a life-changing journey to the Old Country, and helping her best friend, the high-school band director, design a halftime show to dazzle Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed Hollywood movie star who’s coming through town on a campaign stump with her husband, senatorial candidate John Warner.

Summer’s Lease by John Mortimer – The villa near a small Tuscan town is everything the Pargeter family could want for three weeks. But when the idyll turns sour, Molly Pargeter begins to wonder about their mysterious absentee landlord.

What did you pick up this week?