The library books are starting to stack up now. I guess I had better consider reading some of them before bring home yet more. Books I check out from the library where I work rarely have a line of people waiting for them, so I know I'll be able to renew those and possibly even have them over the holidays. Public library books are a different story. And interlibrary loan is becoming a small addiction--I now have two ILL books, but I've decided not to request anymore until at least one goes back (that would be the collection of short stories I mentioned yesterday by Mollie Panter-Downes, which I have a feeling I will finish all too soon.
This week's choices:
There is a new English professor where I work who will be teaching rhetoric. She's been ordering books to support the classes she will be teaching and she's going to be teaching a class called The Rhetoric of Food, which sounds like fun actually. So I've been ordering all sorts of interesting-sounding books and films on the topic. M.F.K. Fisher's The Gastronomical Me is one that caught my eye (one of many actually, but as I said I better pace myself). I have another book by Fisher that has long sat on my shelves, but this one is made up of very short essays/writings on her life in France before the war. Not sure if you can see it, but there is the sweetest little cat sitting next to her on the table, too.
I find all sorts of little gems up in the stacks. My library has some great older novels that have likely not been outside the building in years and years and I hope to liberate a few of them (if only temporarily!). Last week it was Ann Bridge's Illyrian Spring (the library book I finally settled on to start reading now), and this week it's Elizabeth Jenkins's Honey. I really enjoyed The Tortoise and the Hare, so was happy to find a book close by that I didn't have to request via ILL (though I'll be looking for her autobiography soon I think). I'm not entirely sure what it's about, but I'm willing to give it a try.
A book I did ILL is Maxim Chattam's Cairo Diary. When I was looking for a book that was really gripping, a good thriller, I came across a list in a newspaper of just this sort of book. Chattam's novel was listed, and it sounded like it might be what I was in the mood for. It's set in British occupied Cairo of 1928 and also in contemporary Mont-Saint-Michel (the author is French by the way). Per the jacket "the two stories intertwine and culminate in an absolutely baffling climax in this cinematic bestseller from France."
Sallie Day's The Palace of Strange Girls was on the public library's new book list. The title caught my eye, and when I read it was set in the seaside resort of Blackpool in the summer of 1959 I knew I would at least have to check it out. It sounds like a good post-WWII family drama.
When Cath posted on Chris Priestley's Tales of Terror from the Black Ship I knew I had to find a copy myself. This is a YA novel (with a great cover and inside illustrations) two young children who are ill and are waiting for their father to find a doctor. They don't remain alone long...a sailor comes knocking on their door. Ghost stories to follow. The big catch is their house sits atop a windy cliff, dangling over a stormy sea!
Rosemary Aitken's A Cornish Maid is a historical romance/novel set in Cornwall in 1909. It's about a house maid and the daughter of the family living in a great house who become unlikely friends. The story takes the two through the war years.
And last but not least is Gratitude by Joseph Kertes, which is a rather hefty book, but it sounds so good! Yet another war story set in Budapest. "Gratitude is a remarkable, lovingly conjured portrait of that rich, flourishing society at the moment of its dismantling."
I seem to be reading a lot of war books lately--or books set between the wars. I'll have to look for something a little different next time around.