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.
Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman – Cheating a bit by getting this pick in early for the 1954 Club in April.
Losing Eden by Lucy Jones – a look at how important access to nature is for well-being.
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard – Hazzard’s The Great Fire was my favourite book of 2021 but I’ve heard from others that this novel about two Australian sisters, published in 1980, is their favourite so my expectations are raised!
In Kiltumper by Niall Williams with Christine Breen – a chronicle of a year in Williams and Breen’s Irish garden. I know Williams is a wonderful writer (if you haven’t read This is Happiness yet, get on it!) and I do love anything about gardens.
The Sea Gulls Woke Me by Mary Stolz – I was flipping through Nancy Pearl’s Book Crush a few months ago and couldn’t resist the section on nostalgic teen novels from the 1950s and 1960s. There are a few Stolz titles mentioned and I was able to easily track down this one about timid Jean who blossoms during a summer in Maine.
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz – this adventure tale, about a Polish officer’s escape from a Soviet gulag during WWII and journey on foot from Siberia to India, has been on my TBR list for years. The truth of it has been contested but a gripping adventure is just as fun if fictional.
Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung – Sharlene just reviewed this and I’m taking her advice to read it slowly. The author went to my school and the story, told in vignettes, is about a young woman who grew up in Vancouver with an “astronaut” father who remained in Hong Kong (a very common arrangement here).
Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks – I’m a sucker for any book about swimming.
All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir – extraordinarily good (in the running for my top books of the year) YA novel about two Pakistani-American teens struggling in a dead-end Californian town.
What did you pick up this week?
The Captive Reader 
I loved The Transit of Venus and The Long Walk. I hope you enjoy them! I’m going to try my first Sir Walter Scott novel, Waverley.
Glad to hear they are favourites – I’m looking forward to them both!
Banner in the Sky is one that’s been in the back of my mind for years- someday I feel I ought to read it. I did read The Long Walk back when I was a teenager- I found the story really gripping, but then was so disgruntled when I found out long after, that it might be fake. I’d like to read it again and see if it just works for me as a good story.
I’m really looking forward to Banner in the Sky. The 1954 Club would be a great excuse to get it off your TBR list, too 🙂
I once tried to read Shirley Hazzard but never quite got into the book. Can’t remember which one it is now! Maybe I should try her books again.
I think you definitely need to be in the right mood for her writing. With The Great Fire, I was ready to read slowly and thoughtfully and it fitted me perfectly but even as I was reading I thought how differently I would have felt about it if I’d picked it up in a different mood.
I get the Mary Stolz books mixed up but from the cover I think this is the one about the teen who gets the job at the Inn, which I liked very much. Unless that is The Day and the Way We Met!
I like most of her books but many people’s favorite is The Organdy Cupcakes which I did not like at all.
Yep, that’s the one – Jean is in Maine to spend the summer working at her uncle’s inn. I really enjoyed the opening bit of the novel, which sensitively looks at Jean’s life at home and the disappointments felt by both her and her parents, but the rest felt loose and overlong. I’m still intrigued to read more by Stolz but with lowered expectations.