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.
Happy almost Christmas! We have been walloped with snow here and I am deeply unimpressed. Long-time readers may remember that back when I started the blog I was living in Calgary, horrified by how long and cold the winters were (having not learned my lesson about the evils of winter after four years at university in snowy Ontario). I moved home to escape winter so whenever our lovely rainy winters turn to snowy ones I feel personally betrayed.
But all is not lost! There is glorious rain in the forecast to melt all of this and, until then, I have the pleasure of working from home, going for snowy walks in the forest, and coming home to excellent books. I’m stocking up for the holidays (I’m off between Christmas and New Years) and have lots of delightful titles to choose from:

Fifty Forgotten Books by R.B. Russell – Simon recently wrote about this and I have high hopes given how much he loved it.
Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas – I’ve only just started reading Hazzard in the last two years (The Great Fire was my favourite book of 2021) but am so impressed by her work. This newly published biography has been getting excellent reviews and I’m excited to learn more about Hazzard’s life.
Girl Friends (aka When We Were Friends) by Holly Bourne – Bourne’s two earlier adult books have both stayed with me so I’m excited about this most recent release about a long friendship that fell apart.
Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy – I loved this when I first read it in 2014 and declared “I could easily see it becoming one of my favourite comfort reads in years to come”. Of course I haven’t picked it up in eight years (it’s not easy to track down and I had to pop out to the university to get it) but I stand by that statement and am excited to curl up with it over the holidays.
An American Girl in London by Sara Jeannette Duncan – while I was out at the library grabbing Lucy Carmichael, I also picked this up, remembering Barb’s long-ago review of it.
The Citadel by A.J. Cronin – another university find, I figured it was time to finally read the novel after having seen the film so many times.
The Winter Guest by W.C. Ryan – I saw Jane Casey (whose books I discovered and devoured early this year) name this as one of the best crime novels of the year. It sounds excellent:
January 1921. Though the Great War is over, in Ireland a new civil war is raging. The once-grand Kilcolgan House, a crumbling bastion shrouded in sea mist, lies half empty and filled with ghosts, both real and imagined, while it shelters the surviving members of the Prendeville family. Then, when an IRA ambush goes terribly wrong, Maud Prendeville, Lord Kilcolgan’s eldest daughter, is killed, leaving the family reeling. Yet the IRA column behind the attack insists they left her alive, that someone else must be responsible for her terrible fate. Captain Tom Harkin, an IRA intelligence officer and Maud’s former fiancé, is sent to investigate. He becomes an unwelcome guest in this strange, gloomy household.
Working undercover, Harkin must delve into the house’s secrets—and discover where, in this fractured, embattled town, allegiances truly lie. But Harkin too is haunted by the ghosts of the past and by his terrible experiences on the battlefields. Can he find the truth about Maud’s death before the past—and his strange, unnerving surroundings—overwhelm him?
The Glass Wall by Max Egremont – Egremont looks at the often forgotten (though less this year, thanks to the war in Ukraine and increased consciousness of the vulnerability of the nations that border Russia) and often disputed Baltic region.
The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary – Slightly Foxed reissued this wartime memoir by a very young pilot several years ago and it’s been on my to-read list ever since.
What did you pick up this week?
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