The Captive Reader

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.

How are you doing?  For most of us, this week marks a year since Covid restrictions first entered our lives and everything got very quiet very quickly.  I remember dashing around stocking up on library items in the days before the lockdown started, sensing that it would be coming and being very thankful in the months that followed that I had!  Of all the things I had to worry about, running out of reading material was not one of them.

A year later, hope is in sight – especially for those of you in the US and the UK where the vaccine rollout has been so miraculously fast.  What a thing to already have already given the first dose to a quarter and a third of your eligible populations!  We are administering whatever vaccine supply arrives (we cannot produce it domestically) but it will be a much longer wait – in my province the hope is for everyone to have their first dose by the end of July.  Until then, at least there are books!

No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi – I’ve had this tale of Italian POWs’ escape on my list for a few years but it was reading Eric Newby’s memoir Love and War in the Apennines last month that made me seek it out.  After reading about Brits escaping Italian captors, what better foil than Italians slipping past their British guards?

The Man Who Was Greenmantle by Margaret FitzHerbert – I feel rather guilty about this one.  Herbert has been on my periphery for a while but it was reading A Rage for Rock Gardening, an elegantly slim biography of his friend Reginald Farrer, that proved the tipping point for seeking this out.  Farrer, a plant hunter and gardener, had considerable achievements of his own but made extraordinary friends at Oxford whose achievements and exploits would outclass his.  I took away many things from the Farrer biography but chief among them was the determination to read about his friends, Herbert especially.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes – The Trojan War as seen through women’s eyes.  Jane was enthusiastic when she read it last year and included it in her Box of Books for 2020.

Lost Children by Edith Pargeter – It’s hard too find too much about this but it appears that mystery-writer Pargeter (who wrote primarily as Ellis Peters) wrote “a love story set in post war Britain about the relationship that grows between an upper-class girl living in a grand house and a young national serviceman stationed nearby” (thank you Google Books).  I’m intrigued.

The Jewel Garden by Monty and Sarah Don – The Jewel Garden is the story of the garden that bloomed from the muddy fields around the Dons’ Tudor farmhouse, a perfect metaphor for the Monty and Sarah’s own rise from the ashes of a spectacular commercial failure in the late ’80s . At the same time The Jewel Garden is the story of a creative partnership that has weathered the greatest storm, and a testament to the healing powers of the soil. 

Kiftsgate Court Gardens by Vanessa Berridge – Gorgeous book about the family-run Cotswolds garden and the three generations of women who have created and cared for it.

A completely unintentional trio of WWI-themed books:

No Man’s Land by Wendy Moore – the story of pioneering female doctors and the life-saving military hospital they ran.  Published as Endell Street in the UK.

Band of Sisters by Lauren Willig – I read this as soon as I picked it up on Saturday and thoroughly enjoyed Willig’s newest release, a novel about a group of Smith College alumnae who leave America in 1917 to provide aid to devastated French villages near the front lines.

Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter – I was looking for books about walking and came across this history-cum-travel-memoir in which Winter travels through the battlefields of the First World War while telling the devastating story of the Newfoundland Regiment and the battle of Beaumont-Hamel.

What did you pick up this week?