I loved this book. I am going to write about it tomorrow. I am very behind in writing about books that I've finished reading. I am not sure why I am finding it so hard to write about them, but I keep pushing the task off and now they are piling up. So if I tell you this now, I must hold myself to it. Tomorrow. Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Gift from the Sea. Perfect timing maybe since the weather has overnight turned hot and humid. Just like summer. Beach weather.
The kind people at Viking (Penguin) have sent along to me Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England to read and review. It's due out later this month, so it's time to get cracking on it. I love these sorts of books--it looks like an Elizabethan social history. Mortimer drew from a variety of sources in writing it--diaries, books, letters and other writings of the day.
"Organized as a travel guide for the time-hopping tourist, Mortimer recreates the sights, sounds, and smells of the streets and homes of sixteenth century England. He details what both peasants and royals wore and ate and how they would have been punished for crimes or treated for diseases, while simultaneously illuminating the complex and contradictory Elizabethan attitudes towards violence, class, sex, and religion."
Sounds good, don't you think? There will be much underlining, note making and dog earing of pages with this one I can tell already.
Have you heard of Joan Silber (National Book Award finalist)? Or Joan Silber's book Household Words (Winner of the Hemingway Foundation Award)? I hadn't on either count. I came across it in a display at the library where I work and boy does it sound good. Here's what the NYT says about it: "Examines an entire life with such shimmering detail that we sense the texture of the protagonists as deeply as we feel our own . . . A novel full of dignity and humanity." In her introduction Mona Simpson says that when she began reading she fell into the story, gave up everything else and when she emerged into the sunlight was dazed. I love books like that--it sounds like a "wow" sort of book. I want to read it, but I won't get to it right away. This is library find #1.
Here's library find #2 and I have Betty to thank for this one. Who Killed the Curate by Joan Coggin was published in 1944 and set at Christmas in 1937. Ooh, a lovely vintage mystery featuring Lady Lupin (or Loops as she is known), a vicar's wife, lovely but scatterbrained. One of the book blurb reads "Coggin writes in the spirit of Nancy Mitford and E.M. Delafield. But the books are mysteries, so that makes them perfect." Sounds extremely promising and will make a nice addition to my month of mystery reading (which as June is speeding by is most likely going to bleed into July, I think).
Library find #3, A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams, falls into the Beach read category. While I just finished Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (will hopefully be writing about it after Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Friday), which was thoroughly satisfying, I am not against continuing on with my "beach" reading. See the blurb there on the cover? Smart and engrossing? Sounds quite appealing, though it was the Kirkus review quote that sold me, "This year's big beach read . . . Elegant, old-fashioned delayed-gratification seaside romance with a flavor of Daphne du Maurier." That's quite a tall order in my opinion, but it's worth a go, I think.
I was going to extend this list by a couple more books--mysteries I am reading (or have lined up to read), but I think I'll save them for another day. I've got lots of good mysteries underway and am so enjoying them that I do feel like I am having a mini-vacation of sorts. I only wish I could really go to the beach and be free of cares and worries and just read, relax and enjoy my books. As always, though, I am squeezing them in whenever and wherever I can. More to follow.
Anyway, this is where my reading is taking me. What about you? Are your books taking you anywhere exciting?