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.

Every Frenchman Has One by Olivia de Havilland – Memoirs by American expats who move to Paris are always popular – you just don’t expect them to also be written by famous movie stars.  Originally published in the early 1960s, this was reissued in 2016 in celebration of de Havilland’s 100th birthday so is readily available.

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman – I adored Rachman’s first book, The Imperfectionists, about the staff of an English-language newspaper in Rome, and also loved his second, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.  Now he’s back with a new novel focused on a man trying to make peace with his famous father’s legacy.

The Times Great Letters – the internet is good for many things but it is bad for those of us who like nothing better than over-educated people writing letters to newspaper editors.  Or, best of all, people who carry on complicated feuds via the newspaper’s letters to the editor section.  To see us through this new, dark age there is this new-ish collection of notable letters from the last 100 years.  And, thank god, the always reliable letters to the editor section of The Economist.

A garden-themed trio!

Natural Selection by Dan Pearson – a selection of gardening articles Pearson wrote over ten years for The Observer.  Also, inexplicably, the heaviest book I have held in quite some time.

Rhapsody in Green by Charlotte Mendelson – this is the gazillionth time I’ve borrowed this BUT I am actually reading it for the first time (go me!!!!).  And it’s wonderful.  Mendelson’s pieces on life as a passionate, vegetable-obsessed, urban gardener are just right for me this week (as I struggle with my own small city garden and vegetable seeds).

Orchard House by Tara Austen Weaver – a memoir of a mother and daughter rebuilding their relationship while reviving an abandoned garden in Seattle.

Life without a Recipe by Diana Abu-Jaber – I loved Abu-Jaber’s food-focused memoir of her childhood, The Language of Baklava, last year (it almost made my best books of 2017 list) and am looking forward to this sequel, which continues her story into adulthood.

End of the Rope by Jan Redford – a memoir from a local author earning comparisons to Wild, about climbing mountains and finding herself.

Hiddensee by Gregory Maguire – It’s been a long time since I read any of Maguire’s books but, feeling in the mood for something fairy tale-inspired (and still months away from the release of the last book in Katherine Arden’s Russian fairy tale-inspired trilogy) I’ve picked up this tale based on the Nutcracker.

What did you pick up this week?

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