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.
It’s feeling properly autumnal here, with cooler weather and – after a disastrously dry summer – lots of rain. So much rain. In fact, more rain in one day last week than we’d usually have in an entire summer. All of which means…even more excuses to stay inside and read! My hiking boots were getting worn out anyways after a very active summer.
The Young Mrs Meigs by Elizabeth Corbett – very circuitous path to this. Years ago, Bree at the now seemingly defunct (and tragically inaccessible) blog Another Look Book wrote about her enjoyment of Professor Preston at Home by Elizabeth Corbett. I’ve not had luck tracking that down yet but was able to find this other popular title by Corbett about a youthful octogenarian.
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera – Hard to avoid the press this book received when released earlier in the year. I urged the library to buy it after reading this passage in the Financial Times review:
We got rid of our empire with little bloodshed or recrimination, so the story goes. We were not demoralised or torn apart like Spain and France after their colonial disasters. In fact, we are led to believe that the experience of empire left scarcely a mark upon our souls. This is not a nonchalance that can survive a reading of Empireland, the scorching polemic on the afterburn of empire…
Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders by Jane Robinson – Hurrah, another women-focused social history from Robinson! Here she turns to examine the first British women to enter professions and their experiences.
My Own Master by Adrian Bell – I have loved reading Bell’s farming memoirs (reissued by Slightly Foxed) and am intrigued by this much later memoir. It appears to cover more of his youth, though also overlaps with the periods covered in his trilogy of earlier memoirs.
Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore – the third and most recent entry in a historical romance series about “new” women during the Victorian era. I’m finding this series doesn’t quite work for me (was indifferent to both the first book and this one) so will probably give up from here.
It All Comes Back to You by Farah Naz Rishi – a new YA release about two exes who are reunited when their siblings announce they are dating.
Park Bagger by Marlis Butchet – There have been many books over the last few years about adventures in America’s national parks so I’m delighted to see there is finally an account of visits to the Canadian parks!
A Castle in the Backyard by Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden – we have family currently galivanting around the Dordogne so to distract from my jealously, I have naturally chosen to read all about life in the Dordogne.
A Lot Like Adios by Alexis Daria – I loved romance writer Daria’s You Had Me at Hola when it was released last year and am very excited to read more by her.
What did you pick up this week?
I mentioned getting Essie Summers books from Internet Archive. If you aren’t familiar with the service, they also offer the Wayback Machine which crawls and captures screenshots of webpages. It helps if you have an old URL (I think this might be the only way (I searched for AnotherLookBook, didn’t know whether it was .com or .org or something else and honestly, and while the crawler does front pages of websites, you can also make it capture (I’ve done this for many webpages I am afraid will cease to exist, as well as one I’m working on updating which saved me pangs of worry that I had completely lost bits I had intended to save) pages oneself, so there is the possibility that there were more pages crawled–the colored circle showing the crawl will be bigger). To be honest though, I couldn’t make myself scroll through any of it once I had seen the lurid home page!! Something in me that working with really old books (like background of this defunct website) just doesn’t like seeing those beautiful things next to the, for me, queasy-making luridness–a truly weird experience for me, as I am a librarian and truly open to people reading whatever the heck they want to. I think it must just be the juxtaposition.
Empireland looks great! I might have to read it.
You Had Me At Hola was a fun read! Hope A Lot Like Adios is good too.
You caught my interest with The Young Mrs. Meigs and I was able to get it from ILL but I was disappointed. There were a few amusing moments and I suppose she got her way about the important things – staying in her home, preventing her daughter’s divorce and her granddaughter’s marriage to someone too old/inappropriate but I found little charm. It reminded me of another old-fashioned author, Emilie Loring, but I found her books dated but her characters jaunty and full of humor.
I’m not sure I was disappointed but I certainly wasn’t impressed by it.