The Captive Reader

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief 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.

Sorry for the late post but computers will be computers and, being computers, will give you trouble just when you need them to behave.  All the more reason to love books!

Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy  – Jane read this as part of her Century of Books last year and I am determined to make it part of mine this year.

Here Be Dragons by Stella Gibbons – Hayley read and reviewed this two years ago (which makes me feel really old if time is flying by that quickly) and I’ve been wanting to read it since then.  Also, it is another title to add to my list of books about young women opening tea shops (an usual but real niche).

An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon – I am kicking myself for having cleared out all my “Outlander” books during last year’s big book purge.  Once I started rereading this, I remembered how much I love all of the books and, more importantly, how I love being able to read them one after the other without having to wait for library holds to come in (I’ve skim-read Drums of Autumn and Dragonfly in Amber since reading this over the weekend).   Also, it turns out they are awful books to read on my Kobo.  Convenient, yes, not to have to lug 1000 pages around in my bag but less convenient if you want to quickly skip ahead a hundred pages or so to your favourite parts.

More Jane Gardam!  Yes, I still owe you a review of A Long Way From Verona and I might even throw in a review of Old Filth (so good) but until then I am just going to keep working my way through her back catalogue, starting with these two books:

Faith Fox by Jane Gardam – When sweet, healthy hearty Holly Fox dies suddenly in childbirth, the Surrey village whose pearl she was reverberates with shock. She leaves behind her a helpless, silent husband, and a tiny daughter, Faith. Everyone assumes Holly’s loving and capable mother Thomasina will look after Faith, but when she unaccountably deserts her newborn grandchild, the baby must be packed off to her father’s peculiar family in the North – ‘the very strangest people you ever saw my dear’.

The Summer After the Funeral by Jane Gardam – The summer following the death of their father, an elderly clergyman, the three Price children are farmed out to various acquaintances while their maddening, energetic mother searches for a new home.  Sebastian takes off for a “Buddhist Monastery,” Beams (brilliant, ugly and indecently frank) suffers through the holidays with a boisterous, boat-crazed family, and 16-year –old Athene faces the most unsettling arrangements of all as she drifts, as if in a trance, through a vagabond summer filled with disturbing people and bizarre experiences.

What did you pick up this week?