Would you be shocked if I said I didn't have a single library book at home? Well, I don't want to shock anyone, so let me show you a selection of my current temptations. How far off is another long weekend? November? That sounds so very far away. Maybe a planned day off sometime this month is on order.
Because as you can see I have a pile of really interesting looking books that I want to read--all of them, right now. But I have just started (reading properly that is--I have been dipping into others here and there) with one. Because I am all about control when it comes to books.
You're not buying any of that are you? [Can you tell, I really do need a vacation?]. In all seriousness, I do have a pile of books that all sound good and are beckoning me. Just a page, just one page, and you won't want to set me down. Isn't that what your library books say to you?
Because there are simply not enough books out on WWI this year, and because I haven't a single one at hand, I brought home John Baxter's Paris at the End of the World: The City of Light During the Great War, 1914-1918. No, it's more like I can't stop picking up books about this era. I have to admit that part of the attraction was one of the blurbs on the back cover that says Paris was " . . . also the Heaven of sex and food and hedonism . . . Paris at the twilight of its golden era." Lots of illustrations, and very easy to read text.
This is How I'd Love You by Hazel Woods is another WWI book, but this time a novel. This is how you can tell when a person works in a library. When I picked up the book to look at it, I checked out the CIP data that lists the subject headings and saw "Correspondence" as one of them--along with Loneliness, Impersonation, Chess players. Intriguing, don't you think. I've been dipping into this one.
Total impulse choice. From a Distance by Raffaella Barker. Gosh, I really didn't plan it this way, but this is set after WWII in Cornwall in a Bohemian art colony. It's one of those duel storyline novels. The second story is set fifty years later. I've never read Barker, but I have a few of her books. Maybe this will be the one I start with.
The book I have started in earnest but I'm not sure how I feel about it . . . but I am still compelled to keep picking it up, is Julia Dahl's Invisible City. It's about a tabloid reporter, a young woman, who is assigned to cover the murder of a Hasidic Jewish woman. She herself is Jewish but has never practiced. I find the subject really interesting, but I am not sure how much I like reading about a tabloid journalist. The jury's out on this but I keep going back to it.
Okay, WWI, Harvard-Radcliffe in Cambridge. A love triangle. One of the men is German-born and is called up to serve his country at the same time his American cousin is called to serve his. At the center a young woman trying to make her way in her studies. The End of Innocence by Allegra Jordan. It's based on a true story. Now that I am looking at it again, I want to go right this very minute and open the book and start reading.
And something a little different. Gail Sheehy's memoir, Daring: My Passages. I have been meaning to look at her book, Passages. Her memoir sounds really fascinating. She began her career as a journalist (alas not a tabloid journalist, at least I don't think so) in the 1960s. Her work has taken her from the streets of New York City to Northern Ireland. Now I want to start this one right now, too.
I think I definitely need to take a day (or three . . . wishful thinking on that one) to read. So does every book you pick up sound so good you want to start it now, too. Do your books beckon? Do you heartlessly say no to them, not now, soon, but not right now? Or are you, like me, a complete pushover? Shhh!