It's been a while since I've shared any library books, though I assure you there is always a steady flow of them coming into and leaving my house. I look longingly at them, read a few, add the rest to my endless 'want to read list' and then switch them out for new ones. Between scouting the shelves of my library for forgotten treasures, seeing all the new materials come in (I work in Acquisitions so many, many new books cross my desk weekly--oh the temptations...) and requesting new books from the public library (that I read about in my blog hopping) I am never at a loss for something to bring home. Most of my recent finds are from the library where I work as we've had an influx of really good new books lately.
And I have a very serendipitous find, which I didn't actually spot until I took this photo. The silver cover was enough to draw my eye to Jane Brindle's Scarlet even though it was on the lowest shelf--a mass market paperback amongst the more dignified austere hardcovers. Scarlet is set in 1937 when a young American woman boards the Queen Mary, sets sail for England to find her mother who abandoned her many years earlier. There's a curse, there's a forbidding house called Greystone, a family tragedy--all sorts of good stuff. Jane Brindle I learn from the back cover is the pseudonym of Josephine Cox.
Let your eyes travel down the stack and who do we find, but Josephine Cox herself and her recent book Blood Brothers. More suspense and maybe even a few thrills. This story is about two very different brothers who fall for the same woman. She chooses duty over love and this means 'violent repercussions for them all'.
Both Caroline and Litlove have tempted me with Kafka's Dearest Father. My edition is a slim 100-ish pages, which is an open letter to his father. To say they didn't get on well seems to be an understatement. I've always thought Kafka was an interesting man. I saw his tiny house in Prague and I sat in a train station in Austria, which is one he also passed through. I've read some of his diaries and a book about his lover, Milena Jesenska, but I have only read one short story by Kafka and none of his other works. I want to rectify this at some point. This seems like a good place to start.
I've been slowly making my way through the Peirene novels and now I have Matthias Politycki's Next World Novella. A while back I read Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friederick Delius, but it's one of those books I've just not gotten around to writing about and now I'm afraid I left it too long. I liked it, particularly the style--one long sentence, which sounds a little odd, but it has a wonderful rhythm which makes you forget about the lack of punctuation. Next World Novella is about marriage and death, but it's a story treated 'in an impressively light manner' according to the description.
I've yet to read anything by Sebastian Barry, but I've heard good things about On Canaan's Side. The story is about Lilly Bere who leaves Ireland after WWI for America. It's a story that is both 'epic and intimate'.
Although I eyed Louise Doughty's Whatever You Love when it came in after it was longlisted for the Orange Prize, I thought I'd take a pass due to the bleak-sounding subject matter. After reading what Caroline had to say about it, though, I've changed my mind. So the story still does sound a little bleak--it deals with the death of a young girl in a car accident--but it sounds like compulsive reading anyway.
So many lovely books. Who needs to be wealthy when you have a library card in your pocket, right?