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.

Sharlene has the Mr Linky this week.

After starting and abandoning several books last week, I seem finally to be back on stride – so much so that I’ve already read three of this week’s books! It feels so satisfying to finish a book again. Work life has been tiring lately – not from any specifically trying situation, just the usual exhaustion of perfectionists who can’t quite grasp the fact that we are all too overcommitted and burnt out to do all of the things we feel we should do, even when our excellent employer is telling us to go easy on ourselves – and that is bleeding over into everything. Being able to gain a sense of completion even from something as simple as a book feels like a victory right now – one I’ll happily take!

The Ivington Diaries by Monty Don – I can hardly believe I finally have this in my hands! Copies are bizarrely expensive and there are none available in the BC library system but the stellar inter-library loan team was able to source this from out of province.

Agent Sonya by Ben MacIntyre – spy stories are always fun, especially when they’re true.

The Book Collectors by Delphine Minoui – a slim book about the Syrian rebels who built an underground library in the midst of war.

Pine Island Home by Polly Horvath – I found this when looking at the list of Governor General’s Awards finalists, in the children’s fiction category. It’s the story of four orphaned sisters who, when they arrive on a small island in British Columbia, discover that their new guardian has also died. In the grand tradition of literary orphans, they then concoct a plan to take care of themselves.

Just Last Night by Mhairi McFarlane – The newest from McFarlane (published as Last Night in the UK), this just came out last week and I sped through it as soon as my e-book hold came through on Monday. One night changes everything for a group of close knit friends and soon secrets are emerging and they are seeing each other in a new light. My favourite of McFarlane’s books to date.

A Wedding in the Country by Katie Fforde – after being disappointed by most of Fforde’s recent books, I was pleasantly surprised by this new release which gets around Fforde’s awkward grasp of modern sexual politics by being set in the early 1960s. The second half is useless but the first half, about young women who meet on a cookery/domestic arts course and then become housemates, was just the right level of frivolity for me this weekend.

What did you pick up this week?