A Work in Progress

A New Roof!

My weekend has turned out a little different than planned.  I've not been able to putter around as much as I would have liked to.  If you recall this very destructive event, this weekend has turned out to be the perfect time to replace our roof.  I'm lucky as I have family members who used to work in roofing or currently work for roofing companies, so once we got the materials it was just a matter of getting everyone together to get the work done.  I'm a proud owner of a brand new roof and am pleased with how it turned out. 

I'd share a photo, but 1, I'm way too tired and lazy to take one and 2, surely this can only be an exciting event for me, so I won't bore you.  I don't know how people can get up on roofs and ours is pretty tall.  The most I could manage was climbing the ladder to see the porch roof when the old layers were coming off (my house is more than 100 years old and the shingles were original, so I wanted to see what they looked like).  To see someone standing up there on the slope like it was no problem made me just a little dizzy!  I did help, though.  I consider cooking for all those people (twice yesterday) work, particularly since cooking is one of my least favorite chores.  I also helped clean up the trash--all those old shingles that didn't make the dumpster on the first throw.  To say nothing of little scraps of black paper and many, many nails!  We have now replaced our broken windows, replaced dented screens, and now pretty much repaired the roof.  There are a few more things we need to fix, but then the house will finally be set to rights.

So, all this to say I have no short story to share with you today.  Perhaps tomorrow or later in the week.  I'd still like to give one of the collections I brought home from the library a try.  I did finish reading Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone on Friday (much puttering was accomplished that day at least).  I've started reading Beth Gutcheon's Good-Bye Amen, but I'm not sure I am going to click with it.  I really enjoyed Leeway Cottage, which was a "sprawling family epic".  Good-Bye Amen takes up at the death of Sydney and Laurus Moss, the main characters in her last novel.  The story begins with the children and grandchildren coming together to divide up the spoils after the funeral.  It seems to be told from multiple vantage points, moving from character to character, each getting a short passage to share his or her part of the story.  The book is also unusual in that there are actual family photos (I'm curious who these people really are) in the middle of the book.  I've seen this done before, but this is the first time I've read a novel with this sort of set up.  I'll give it a little more time and see how it goes. 

I am getting on well with the R.I.P. book I finally choose, Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree.  I'm having a little deja vu, though.  I'm sure I've not read it before, but it seems oddly familiar.  I'm about two chapters in.  The story is about a young Canadian woman who travels to England, to Northumberland, where she believes her family is from some generations back.  As it turns out she is a doppelganger, or she has a twin, whichever way you want to look at it.  She's told by more than one person she looks exactly like a woman who left the village years back and then died.  Can you see where this is leading?  It reminds me of Brat Farrar, which has a similar storyline (no doubt where my deja vu is coming from).  In any case, it is definitely the right book at the right time as I am having a hard time putting it aside!   

Library Notes

Last Saturday I returned a stack of books to the library, keeping only the few I thought I had a chance of getting to and that I was really in the mood to read.  It's never that easy is it?  Two visits later, I am once again staring at a nice big pile of library books.  Sometimes I think I just bring them home so they can mingle and chat with my own books.  A little outing for the library books, as it were.  As usual they all look good and I wish I could start reading all of them now.  This is what I have to choose from now.

Train to Trieste, Domnica Radulescu - "An incandescent love story that moves from Romania to America, from the Carpathian Mountains to Chicago, from totalitarianism to freedom, and from passionate infatuation to profound understanding."

Yesterday's Weather, Anne Enright - I've not yet read anything by Anne Enright, but this is her newest book of short stories.  Hopefully I'll read one or two from this collection or the one below this weekend.

Young Irelanders: Stories, Gerard Donovan - This is a collection of interrelated stories.  He's been compared writers ranging from Kafka to Remarque to Jim Thompson and Stephen King.  That sounds pretty intriguing!

The King's Gold: An Old World Novel of Adventure, Yxta Maya Murray - "A spellbinding tale of lost treasure, legendary evil, and inescapable peril--the second in the remarkable Red Lion series."  I wonder if it matters that I've not read the first book.  It sounds like a fun adventure story.

The Road Home, Rose Tremain - This is this year's Orange Prize winner.  Even before it won I had added it to my list of books I'd like to read.  I've read very good things about her work in general, though I have yet to give her a try.

Good-Bye and Amen, Beth Gutcheon - This continues the story that began with Leeway Cottage, which I read last year.  I will probably start with this one.

Deception's Daughter: A Martha Beale Mystery, Cordelia Frances Biddle - I've already started reading this one.  It's the second mystery featuring Martha Beale.  The first book was pretty good--enough so that I've been watching for this new mystery.  The books are set in mid-nineteenth century Philadelphia.

Weekend Reading Plans

I decided to make this holiday weekend a bit longer by taking today off in addition to having Monday off as well.  I'm really looking forward to this long weekend even if I am not going anywhere and will mostly just be puttering around the house.  I'm sure I'll easily fill in my free time.

I have a gift certificate to spend here.  It's only enough to cover the price of one paperback, but a free book is a free book.  I will no doubt choose one or two more to get free shipping.

My book journal is nearly full, so I think it's time to shop for a new one.  They are all so gorgeous, I'm not sure which to choose.  Every time Iliana shared one of her journals I was hoping that someday she would eventually decide to sell them!

I hope to finish reading this and perhaps this.  I've been spending time the past few days reading both and I'm totally involved in both stories.  For something completely different I hope to perhaps make some headway reading this.  Typepad keeps track of the date you add a book to your sidebar lists, and this is the oldest book I've got on my night stand.  I'm trying not to let anything languish too long on the reading pile.

And I need to decide which of these to start reading.  I think I'll choose a shorter novel first.  It's nice to finish something quickly and have a little sense of accomplishment right off the bat.  I'm eying several at the moment so will probably give them the first page test--see which one grabs my attention and fits my mood. 

I hope to also get caught up on blog reading.  I think I must have close to 60 posts saved on Bloglines (yes, I know, I still haven't switched). 

Even though it's going to be pretty warm here this weekend, it has been cool in the evenings, so this really does feel like the end of summer.  It's been a crazy season for me, so I am happy to move on to the cooler weather of fall!  Have a nice weekend everyone!

A Little about Emily Post

The thing I love about biographies is not just learning about whoever is the subject of the book, but about the period and place they lived in.  I found that especially to be the case with the last biography I read, and and Laura Claridge's Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners appears to be filled with all sorts of interesting facts about America's Gilded Age along with Emily Post's history.  This is a pretty hefty biography, weighing in at nearly 500 pages, so I think it may take me a little time to work my way through it.  I love nonfiction, but generally there is so much to take in, I can only read them in small chunks.  I have been reading this during my lunch hour and am really enjoying it so far.

It seems most biographies start from the very beginning, going back to the subject's parents, and this book is no different.  Emily Post came from a wealthy and somewhat influential family.  She was an only child and much closer to her father than her mother.  She was a very independent child, and while the Posts were not really of that higher strata of American aristocracy, they did float around in those higher social circles.  Still, Emily's parents instilled in her the kind of "quality" that had nothing to do with money or birth.

Introductions always give great overviews, so here's a little of what I've been reading about and what I have to look forward to:

"Emily Post entered the world only seven years after America's Civil War end.  Though most of her family sided with the Union, a few renegade relatives fought with the South, the staunch loyalists who survived spinning heroic stories of General Lee and his horse Traveller throughout their lives.  At the time of Emily's birth in Baltimore, women were being jailed for promoting birth control for married couples; when she died in New York City, women and men, married or not, were campaigning for legalized abortion.  A few years before her funeral, befuddled but fascinated, even now, by the latest technology that celebrated the ingenuity of the age, she would watch, on television, the launch of Sputnik."

Isn't it amazing to think her life spanned so many changes--cultural, political and social.  Many of them were hugely sweeping changes.  I know things are constantly changing and shifting, but the times don't seem to vary so much to me now.  Or maybe it's only because we're living them?  She was a child in the Victorian era, a young woman in the Gilded Age.  She lived through two world wars and the Great Depression.  By the time she died in the 1960s the world must have seemed completely alien to where she began.  From long dresses to miniskirts!

Since this is such a long book, I may post on it several times as I'm reading.  I've had a great run of biographies this year, and I have several more lined up after I finish reading about Emily.  Nonfiction can really be addicting after a while, though I can still only manage one book at a time! 

Star Gazing

I'm very envious of Linda Gillard.  Although she now lives in Glasgow, she spent seven years living here (scroll down to the middle of the page, and you'll see what I mean) on the Isle of Skye.  If you're a regular reader here you'll know I have a fascination with islands and coastlines, so I'm drawn to Linda's books and they are a bit escapist for me.  Two of the three novels she's published that I've read are set partially or wholly on the Isle of Skye.

Emotional Geology is an "offbeat love story" between an older woman and a younger man both dealing with emotional or mental illness issues.  I wrote about it here.  I was especially appreciative of this novel as the heroine is a textile artist, and it's not often you find a needleworker making an appearance in fiction.  Linda is not afraid to deal with sensitive issues in her books, which I think sets her work apart from so much else that's being written these days.  Or maybe its the manner in which she deals with those issues--in a straightforward unapologetic way.

Star Gazing was a unique reading experience for me.  Marianne, on the wrong side of forty, is blind.  She's a rather prickly character, but I liked her.  Imagine setting a story on the gorgeous Isle of Skye and then plunking down a blind character amidst all that beauty.  Strangely it works.  Actually the book is set in Edinburgh as well, which I imagine to be equally as lovely in its own stately and historical way.  This is the first time I can remember where I've read a novel from the perspective of someone who's been blind her entire life.  She has no frame of reference for all the things, big or small, that most of us take for granted every day.  Until Keir came along.  But I'll get to him in a minute.

Many years earlier Marianne was married and expecting a baby when tragedy struck.  Her husband, an oil man, was killed in an explosion during an accident on an offshore oil rig.  Dealing with the turmoil and anguish of her husband's death, made worse as the last words they spoke were angry words, caused her to miscarry.  So she lives with her sister, a writer who's made her name and a reasonably decent income producing a series of vampire romance novels.  It sounds a bit quirky, but Louisa was a great character and a nice foil to Marianne.  Marianne lives as independently as she can, and it was interesting to see what sort of coping mechanisms she used to get by in a seeing world.  She must rely almost entirely on her other senses, which are heightened due to her blindness, to navigate life.

One cold, wintry night she meets handsome and rugged Keir quite literally on her doorstep.  They meet again by chance at the opera, and though neither is quite sure, the reader knows they're meant for each other.  Really this story seemed to me to be about second chances.  Sometimes first love isn't the only or best kind of love.  Sometimes its what comes later in life that's the most fulfilling and real, only sometimes life wears you down so you might not know it right away.  You only need to be willing to take the chance.  Marianne and Keir click, their mutual love of music drawing them together. For Marianne music is how she can "see" things.

"Music gives some inkling of landscape.  The sheer scale of orchestral music, the volume and the detail, can put me in touch with something much bigger than myself, take me beyond my personal boundaries, the world that I experience with my fingertips or my cane.  Music tells me there is a wider world and what it might be like."

I'm hopeless when it comes to music, but had I planned better I would have looked for the works mentioned in the book and listened along.  Keir helps Marianne "see" the beauty of his home on Skye, night stars included, and so many other things as well with the aid of music.  Even my own imagination of what Skye must be like was broadened by the descriptions.  Now I just need to go there myself.

Star Gazing was a wonderfully entertaining novel.  The Isle of Skye might have been a bit of an enticement for me, but once again Linda won me over with a sensitive story of two very real and appealing characters.  I became so wrapped up in Marianne's life that I admit I even peeked at the last few pages in anticipation of the outcome.  And it doesn't hurt that there is a lovely romance, though  perhaps not always a perfect romance at the center of things.  Happily I've read that a fourth book has been written--"It's a mystery about an eccentric family with secrets. It may owe something to my admiration for Daphne du Maurier."  I can see already that it's going to be another must-read (I wonder when it's due to be published?...).  While I'm waiting though, I can see it's time to tackle A Lifetime Burning.  I've heard many good things about it, but I suspect the subject matter is far more heavy than her more recent novels.  In any case Linda Gillard is a writer I can heartily recommend.          

It's Here! R.I.P. III

Sheesh, where does the time go?  Although I had been anticipating Carl's R.I.P. Challenge and had even been setting books aside for it, it came as a surprise to see the announcement.  Where has the year gone?  Is it really almost September.  Fall is my favorite time of year and I love the sorts of books that fall into Carl's various categories, so I can't pass this challenge up. 

I am going to attempt Peril #1, mostly because I have so many books in my reading pool!  If I can manage four books I'll be very pleased, but even if I can just read one or two from the list I'll consider the challenge a success.  I also plan on reading lots of ghost stories in August and September.  I've been collecting lots of fun anthologies and now I look forward to pulling them out and putting them to good use.  These are the books I plan on drawing from:

• The Murdered House, Pierre Magnan
• The Law and the Lady, Wilkie Collins
• The Rest Falls Away, Colleen Gleason
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
• Ghost Story, Peter Straub
• Uncle Silas, J. Sheridan Le Fanu
• The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole
• Beasts, Joyce Carol Oates
• The Ivy Tree, Mary Stewart

I tried to mix things up, mysteries, Gothic tales, and even a ghost story.  A few books are on the long side, but most are either very short or average in length.  We'll see what I can manage. This should be fun and I can't wait to start reading!  Now, which to read first...

BBC 100

There's nothing like a 'how many of these have you read' list to make me feel like I'll never really be very well read.  But I keep trying.  I nabbed this from Sherry at Semicolon. 

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

I'm going to cheat a little and just bold those that I've read and assume I'm likely to want to read the rest.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - I've read parts, does that count?
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - I read this when I was younger but I think I totally missed the point...deserving of a reread I think.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - Someday.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - If I was going to cross out one, it would probably be this one, but never say never.
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I read something by Dostoevsky in high school, sadly I don't remember which one.
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - Am contemplating starting this one soon.
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - I have this one on my MP3 player and will be listening soon.  Does that count? 
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Am still planning on reading this one this year.
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma- Jane Austen - Hoping to get through all of Austen's books this year, too.
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Isn't this part of the Chronicles of Narnia?
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - A favorite!
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - I've seen the movie, but still want to read the book!
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - Started this one when it came out...
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - Another favorite!
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce - Okay, so I probably won't read this one either.
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - I even read this in French, aren't you impressed?
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables– Victor Hugo - Can I count this even if I'm not finished.  I promise to get to the end very soon (I hope anyway).

Two More War Stories

After enjoying The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society so much, my mind has been lingering still in the WWII era.  Nothing else I am reading at the moment touches upon the subject so I thought I'd pull out Wave Me Goodbye and read a few more stories.  I've been very slow working my way through the anthology, so it's time to spend some time with it and try and make a little more progress anyway.  As a matter of fact I haven't been picking up any of the collections of short stories 'that I should be reading'.  I seem to have fallen into my old pattern of not picking up books of short stories, but at least I manage one or two a week anyway. 

Although I'd heard the name Anna Kavan before, I was not at all familiar with her or her work.  Anna Kavan was actually born Helen Ferguson, but she changed her name later in life.  Her early work is fairly conventional, but after a breakdown and a stint in a mental hospital her work took a turn became more experimental and "disturbing".  For most of her adult life she was a heroine addict unbeknownst to most of her associates.  "Face of My People", which I read, along with many of her other writings reveals a "rich, strange, visionary quality".

Not surprisingly the story is set in a big house that has been taken over and turned into a psychiatric hospital.  Dr. Pope and his trustworthy nurse keep everything neat, orderly and efficient.  Morale among the patients has improved with the exception of one ward.  One patient in particular has been giving the staff trouble.  Kling, as he's known since no one can pronounce his full name, has been getting more "depersonalized and generally inaccessible."  Heaven only knows what horrific things Kling has seen.  He has these horrible dreamlike (nightmarish more likely) visions concerning his father.  Kling does everything he can to avoid the probing of the doctors, his neuroses getting the better of him.  This story was quite different than the others in the collection I've read.  Quite harrowing in its own way.  "They've taken everything; let them not take my silence", he says at one point.  You can't help but feel his anguish.  I wonder how much of this was Anna Kavan coming through?

Olivia Manning is an author I hope to read sometime soon.  Her Balkan Trilogy (followed by The Levant Trilogy) is on my TBR pile.  Her husband was a British Council Lecturer and she went with him to Bucharest just before war was declared.  They moved on to Greece and had to be evacuated to Egypt when the Nazis invaded.  This is another case where it seems she relied heavily on her own experiences in her writings.  She is quoted as saying, "My subject is simply life as I have experienced it, and I am happiest when I am writing of things I know."

"A Journey" starts out with Mary Martin traveling to Cluj in Transylvania to report on the Hungarian Occupation.  The Germans demanded that Romania cede territory to the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Hungary.  Mary believed that "journalists were magically immune from danger", but she soon finds out that is anything but the case.  Manning describes the hot and crushing traing journey to Cluj vividly.  Even worse is the madness of Cluj when Mary arrives and everyone else is trying to get out.  The old animosities between Romanians and Hungarians are ripe.  And the frenzied attempts by the inhabitants to vacate the city made me wonder how people managed to survive the war in one piece. 

"Suddenly, amazingly, a train came in.  It was a wooden, third-class local train.  The peasantsflung themselves to their feet and ran madly, from carriage to carriage.  The doors were locked.  They climbed in through the glassless windows, hauling one another up by arms and legs until the carriages were choked.  Then they climbed on to the roof.  While some were still only half in and half on, the train suddenly moved out.  Bunches of people fell off like lice.  Others ran along the line yelling madly.  From one of the bridges came the crackle of rifle fire.  The peasants panicked back to the platform and huddled against the wall."

I have to say again what a wonderful book this anthology is.  It's probably better that I am taking the stories in small doses.  I also appreciate the fact that the stories are all written by women.  All too often I've discovered in most generic collections, the majority of stories are written by men.  I try and balance out my reading, but it seems there are always more stories by men to choose from.  I'm also trying to read more famous stories alongside the lesser known (though just as satisfying) stories.  Here's my list of stories read so far, which famous stories by women authors am I missing?  Suggestions welcome.     

A (very) Few Reading Notes

I've just finished reading Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  It's absolutely deserving of its own post, but I feel like it has already been written about so much by other book bloggers, I'm not sure I have much more to add to the discussion.  You are probably already familiar with the plot?  The novel is made up of a series of letters written primarily between author Juliet Ashton and a group of Guernsey Islanders shortly after World War II.  The correspondence is initiated by Dawsey Adams who came by a used copy of Charles Lamb's essays that once belonged to Juliet.  Dawsey writes in search of a London Bookshop where he can find a biography of Lamb and hopes that Juliet can assist him in his search.  Thus begins a long and happy friendship between not just Dawsey, but some of his fellow islanders.

Guernsey Island (I didn't realize it was so close to France--closer it seems than it is to Britain) was occupied by the German Army during World War II.  They were entirely cut off from mainland Britain during the War and suffered many privations.  The Guernsey Literary (and potato peel) Society was formed by accident after an illegal dinner party that included a contraband (and therefore very dangerous) pig.  When some of the diners were caught returning to their homes after curfew, the excuse was a literary gathering had kept them out late and would the soldiers like to join them in the future?  That's to whet your appetite, as there is a lot more to this story.

I enjoyed it immensely and was sorry to finally turn the last page.  It's garnered all sort of accolades from other readers, and I have to join them in their praise.  It is an utterly charming novel.  Delightful even, and I don't bestow these adjectives on just any book.  Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road usually comes to mind first when I'm flinging those words about.  Of course this is not to say that the story is not without it's sad moments.  There are plenty of those too.  There's just so much in the book to like, it's hard not to fall in love with it--the people, the island, the story.  If you've not yet read it but are considering it, nudge it up your pile.  It's a clever premise and the author pulls the story off wonderfully.  Now I'll be looking for more books about Guernsey Island and the Occupation (of course).

For something entirely different I've already decided that The Seamstress by Frances de Pontes Peebles is next.  Although it's set in a period not too far off from the Shaffer book, the 1930s, in many other ways it is a world away (or half a world as the case may be)--Brazil to be specific.  It's supposed to be "an incandescent saga of family and loyalty."

And then do you ever have an overwhelming urge to read something completely out of the blue?  I've pulled out Jo Nesbo's Nemesis.  Suddenly I'm very much in the mood to read about Harry Hole.  I really enjoyed The Redbreast earlier this year and snagged the other books by Nesbo translated into English so far (he's quite popular in Norway).  I've pulled the next book in the series out of my stacks as well.  I have this bad habit...finish one book...start two new ones...Can you see why my book pile never seems to dwindle down to a respectable few?      

New and Noteworthy

I've received a few review copies in the mail recently that I thought are worth mentioning and that I'll be reading in the upcoming weeks.  I lucked out and won two via Library Thing's Early Reviewer Program.  I don't always throw my name in the hat, but lately they've had some really good choices, so I feel fortunate that I've won a couple. 

I've already started reading Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners by Laura Claridge.  Did you know Emily Post was divorced?  She was born shortly after the Civil War, lived through the Gilded Age, two World Wars and died in the 1960s.  I always had this idea that Emily Post was a proper spinster-ish sort of lady, so it will be interesting to see how this biography challenges my ideas and perceptions. 

From Library Thing I also received a copy of Irene Dische's The Empress of Weehawken.  I think I'm going to have a running theme with my books as the main character in this book is recounting her memoirs of her "narrow escape with her Jewish husband from the Nazis, and the perilous voyage to the New World of New Jersey".  This sounds like a mother-daughter tale as much as anything else.

Today I came home to a package with two books.  One is yet another biography, Lily Tuck's Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante.  This time Italian author Elsa Morante is the subject.  She's an important figure in Italian literature.  I've long wanted to read her work and have had a couple of her novels on my shelves for ages.  The biography starts out:

"Elsa Morante was not amiable, she was not genial, she was not sweet or always nice.  She was not a woman with whom one could have a casual conversation or speak about mundane things.  She took offense easily, she made quick and final judgments, she constantly tested her friends.  A truth teller, she tended to say hurtful things,  She was immensely talented, passionate, often impossible, courageous, quarrelsome, witty, ambitious, generous.  She loved Mozart, she loved children, animals--especially cats, Siamese cats.  She detested any sort of artifice, posturing, falsehood, she detested misuse of power.  She once admitted that she detested biography.  The biographer, she claimed, always divulged what one is not."

That one paragraph has already reeled me in, though Elsa is going to have to wait on the pile until I finish a few other books first.

And one of the books is a novel.  I was tempted first by the cover of Frances de Pontes Peebles's The Seamstress, but it sounded unusual as well.  It is set in 1930s Brazil about two sisters who follow widely divergent paths.  And of course anything about needlework (the sisters are seamstresses) will always catch my eye.

I've already got a few other review copies that I need to catch up on.  I told myself I wouldn't take anymore until they were read, but sometimes the temptation is too much to bear.