I've been busy as you can see. I've got a nice hodge podge of books to share. Between getting books in the mail, finding a few new books at my favorite used bookstore and my usual library visits, I have had a stead influx of books all during January and into February. These are going to have to last me for a while, though, as I have to return to frugal ways for a while (I still have a few book gift cards but I like to drawn them out as long as I can so there will be new books to look forward to later).
These are my most recent 'finds". The bottom four I found used last weekend and the top three came in the mail this week.
The TLS calls From the Alleghenies to the Hebrides: An Autobiography by Margaret Fay Shaw "a miniature masterpiece". I can't remember now where I came across the book (either by browsing or from some mention in another book perhaps), but it does indeed look really interesting. Shaw studied music in New York and Paris and then returned to South Uist (am thinking now this must have been inspired by Peter May). The book is made up of memories and photos. It is a "remarkable testaement of a remarkable woman as well as a powerful plea in the defense of a Gaelic culture and world under threat." Her life spanned the twentieth century, so it should be quite revealing.
I told you how much I loved the Caspary story I read last week and wasted no time to order something else by her. Now I have Bedelia to look forward to. How's this for a teaser "Before the Stepford Wives, there was Bedelia: a picture perfect spouse who lives to please her wealthy if insecure new husband, Charlie Horst. But then a detective unsettles the picket-fence Connecticut town, looking for 'a kitten with claws' who has left a trail of dead husbands behind her." If I didn't already have so many books in progress I would dive into this one right now.
Anton Chekhov is one of my 'collecting everything' authors. I am truly going to make a project of reading him. Soon, I hope! To add to the collection is Dear Writer . . . Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov & Olga Knipper. Maybe I will just dip into this for Valentine's Day.
I loved reading Bess Streeter Aldrich and decided I needed to own The Rim of the Prairie, which is another Nebraska story. The heroine is said to be "gay, tantalizing" and "made all the more attractive by a hint of mystery". Sounds good, don't you think?
I don't know quite when, but I am going to read some Japanese fiction this year. To that end I have Junichiro Tanizaki's Naomi. It's been called a "literary classic" and is both hilarious and brilliant. I think I'll need a good, humorous story at some point (to get me through the winter!).
I'd never heard of Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska & Colorado Territories, 1857-1866, but it sounds interesting and will be a perfect addition to my Nebraska reading this year. I spotted it in the Nebraska section and will be a good social history of the region.
And American Writers at Home edited by J.D. McClatchy was quite a find. It is a nice hardcover book that even came with a protective plastic cover and is in nearly mint condition and at a nice, inexpensive--used book price. I have seen it before and drooled over it. Included are Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton and others. It's a gorgeous coffee table book that I am sure I will enjoy perusing--will share more of it later, too.
My library book pile is much shorter now since over the weekend I did a serious swapping out of books. I'm back in line for A Star for Mrs. Blake and feel much better not to have the added pressure of an overdue book on my reading pile.
I forgot to add it to this pile, but I am now reading Nancy Horan's Under the Wide and Starry Sky about the love affair between American Fanny Van de Grift and Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. The line for it is very long, but I have three weeks to read it--hopefully much more manageable than my last stack. I've only barely started reading but I have heard lots of good things about it and it seems like a very promising story.
Living the Simple Life by Elaine St. James was recommended to me by my friend Cath. I'm interested in books on spirituality and religion and am always looking for ways to simplify things. This looks like a perfect book to keep by my bedside and dip into.
Melissa Pritchard's Palmerino is about the British enclave of the same name in rural Italy. The novel is about Violet Paget known as Vernon Lee, her male persona. I'm not sure I had ever heard of her before, but she was a writer of "chilling supernatural stories". Lots of good reviews of this one.
I wanted to read Julia Franck before, but I had read so many tepid reviews of her first book I never got around to it. Back to Back is set in 1950s and 60s Communist East Berlin, a place I have been long intrigued by. It is about a "single family tragedy that reflects the greater tragedies of totalitarianism". Could be bleak reading, but I will give it a go.
A book about or set in Paris is hugely appealing to me at the moment. Lunch in Paris: A Love story, with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard looks like a light easy read. "In Paris for a weekend visit, Elizabeth Bard sat down to lunch with a handsome Frenchman--and never went home again." Green with envy am I! If I can't live it, at least I can read about it, right?
And one more Nebraska book. Local author Timothy Schaffert has written about the 1898 Omaha World's Fair in The Swan Gondola. There is a very, very long line of people waiting for this one, like the Horan novel, so it is next in line. The question is whether I can get both books (both fairly longish) read before their due dates (this is an endless cycle when it comes to popular new fiction borrowed from the public library!). I can always get back in line . . . But I hope I won't have to.
As you can see I have lots and lots of good reading to look forward to. What are your good recent finds?