Oh, is this open window for me? Excuse me, pardon me, passing through. Oh, were you doing something with this stack of books? Let me get out of the way.
Have you noticed that anything you might be doing, you are actually doing for the cat? Open the window to take advantage of the sun...it's all for the cat.
Sorry about that little intrusion, I just wanted to share my most recent library finds, and Dulce wanted to get a better look at what's going on in the neighborhood. Now that we've gotten ourselves sorted out...
I've already mentioned that I'm reading Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing. I'd been in the mood for something set in the Victorian world, so this came around at just the right time. I'd read several very positive reviews of the book, which is based in part on the real-life Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon and her experiences in Egypt, though the story is told by her lady's maid, Sally. I've only just started reading this past weekend, but she has me hooked. First person narratives, when done well, are so enticing to me. I love being in the mind of the person telling the story.
Jillian Lauren's Some Girls: My Life in a Harem happened to come in a book shipment at work last week. It sounds a little bit salacious, doesn't it? Maybe not my usual sort of read, but I bet it's a page turner. Lauren was a theater school dropout when she went on a casting call. A rich business man working in Singapore was looking for pretty girls to jazz up his parties and Lauren was promised a large sum of money for a two week stint, which turned out to be an entirely different sort of work.
Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar is another book that I first heard about when Darlene read it and wrote about it earlier this fall. It looks like it was also a popular reading choice for the recent NYRB reading week hosted by The Literary Stew. "In Wish Her Safe at Home, Stephen Benatar finds humor and horror in the shifting region between elation and mania. His heroine could be the next-door neighbor of the Beales of Grey Gardens or a sister of Jane Gardam's oddball protagonists, but she has an ebullient charm all her own." Sounds a bit like Annie in A Kind of Intimacy as well!
And I can't wait to start Julia Franck's The Blindness of the Heart, which won the German Book Prize. It took some time for my library to find a copy to borrow and I had almost given up hope. A.S. Byatt gave it a thumbs up, and it seems to have gotten a number of very good reviews. It is a multigenerational family saga that begins in 1945 when a mother abandons her son in a train station. The question of why is answered by looking back into the woman's WWI childhood. There are a few books in line before this one, but I hope to start reading it soon.
I know this is a totally undignified photo, and Dulce would be aghast if she knew I shared it, but it expresses how I feel on Monday mornings so well...Don't worry, immediately after snapping this shot, she wandered off to her comfy (and warm) kitty bed to catch up on her sleep. If only we couldn't all be so lucky.