European Holiday Reading – A (Temporary) Farewell
Tomorrow we’re off to continental Europe for two weeks of train travel, making stops in Brussels, Freiburg (Germany), two towns in Switzerland, and Salzburg and Vienna in Austria. This will be some of the most extensive travel I’ve done in Europe in the 11 or so years that I’ve lived here – and the first time I’ve been to Switzerland or Austria – so I’m excited. I’ve been working like a fiend recently to catch up and/or get ahead on reviews and blogs, so it will be particularly good to spend two weeks away from a computer. It’s also nice that our adventure doesn’t have to start with going to an airport.
Here’s what I’ve packed:
- Setting Free the Bears by John Irving (his first novel; set in Vienna)
- Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome (about a train journey from England to Germany)
- Me and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann (the author is Austrian)
- A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler (a novella set in the Austrian Alps)
+ Enchanting Alpine Flowers & the Rough Guide to Vienna
Also on the e-readers, downloaded from Project Gutenberg:
- Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome (further humorous antics in Germany)
- Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig (a novella; the author is Austrian)
+ another 250+ Kindle books from a wide variety of genres and topics – I’ll certainly have no shortage of reading material!
(Looking back now, it occurs to me that this all skews rather towards Austria! Oh well. Vienna is one of our longer stops.)
I’m supposed to be making my way through the books we already own, but on Saturday I was overcome with temptation at our local charity shop when I saw that all paperbacks were on sale – 5 for £1. I’m in the middle of one of the novels I bought that day, June by Gerbrand Bakker, along with The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, and need to decide whether to put them on hold while I’m away or take one or both with me. Either way I’ll try to finish June this month; it’s just too appropriate not to!
I was also overcome with temptation at the thought of a new Eowyn Ivey novel coming out in August, so requested a copy for review.
It’s an odd time here in the UK. Readers from North America or elsewhere might be unaware that we’re gearing up for a referendum to decide whether to remain in the European Union. By the time we pass back through Brussels (‘capital’ of the European Union) on the 24th, there’s every chance the UK might no longer be an official member of Europe. I haven’t taken British citizenship so am ineligible to cast a vote; I won’t court debate by elaborating on a comparison of “Brexit” with the specter of Trump in the States. My husband has sent in his postal vote, so collectively we’ve done all we can do and now just have to wait and see.
We’re not back until late on the 24th, but I’ve scheduled a few posts for while we’re away. I will only have sporadic Internet access during these weeks, so won’t be replying to blog comments or reading fellow bloggers’ posts, but I promise to catch up when we get back.
Happy June reading!
Library Checkout: May 2016
The next week and a half will be my last chance to read library books before we head off on our European vacation. Apart from the Rough Guide to Vienna and one novella I plan on taking with us, everything else needs to go back to the library before we leave on June 9th. Luckily several of the books I have out at the moment are quite thin.
I’ve vowed not to borrow any library books for the rest of the summer so I can concentrate on books I actually own and cull some before our move in mid-August. Depending on where we move, I may be using a different library system come autumn.
So, much as I enjoy putting these together, I will be taking a break from Library Checkout posts until September.
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
- The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
- But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens
LIBRARY BOOKS CURRENTLY READING
- Sweet Home (short stories) by Carys Bray
- Parfums: A Catalogue of Remembered Smells by Philippe Claudel
- Summer Requiem (poems) by Vikram Seth
- Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland by John Lewis-Stempel
- A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler (for reading on our European holiday)
RETURNED UNREAD
- In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
- The Great Soul of Siberia by Sooyong Park
(Thanks, as always, to Shannon of River City Reading for the great blog idea and template!)
Four Books Abandoned Recently (+ One I SHOULD Have)
I’d like to think I’ve gotten better at choosing books that are sure to suit me, but sometimes it’s still a matter of ditching the duds when it becomes clear they’re not working. Here’s the small (digital) pile of abandoned novels I’ve amassed over the last couple of months. I’d be interested to hear if you’ve read any of them and thought they were worth persisting with.
Mrs. Houdini by Victoria Kelly
Perfectly serviceable historical fiction, but with no spark. I felt like I was just being given a lot of information about the two major time periods (1894 and 1929). Alas, scenes set at a séance, a circus, and an insane asylum are not nearly as exciting as they promise to be. And, as is often the case with these famous wives books – a genre I generally love but can also find oddly disappointing from time to time – the protagonist tries but fails to explain why she finds her husband so fascinating. “His eyes danced. There was a madness to his passion, but he was not insane. There was something real and familiar about him. … Harry was promising her a life of possibility, of magic, and it was unlike anything she had ever imagined for herself.” [Read the first 40%.]
My rating: 
Terrible Virtue by Ellen Feldman
Another case of expectations too high and payoff too little. Fictionalized biographies can be among my favorite historical fiction, but the key is that they have to do something that a biography doesn’t do. They have to shape a story that goes beyond the chronology of what happened to whom and when. This novel about contraception activist Margaret Sanger failed to tell me anything I didn’t already know from The Birth of the Pill, a more engaging book all round. If anything this left me more confused about why Sanger consented to marriage and motherhood. These cringe-worthy lines try to explain it: “His [Bill’s] sex upended the world. His love filled the hole my childhood had carved out of me. Maybe that was the reason I married him.” [Read the first 26%.]
My rating: 
Vexation Lullaby by Justin Tussing
This started off very promising, with Pete Silver, a doctor in Rochester, New York, being summoned by ageing rock star Jimmy Cross for a consult. Jimmy knows Pete’s mother from way back and wants to know if he’ll accompany him on the airplane during this comeback tour as his personal physician. However, after that there was a lot of downtime filling in Pete’s backstory and introducing a first-person voice that didn’t feel relevant. This is Arthur Pennyman, a fan who’s seen every Jimmy Cross show and writes them up on his website. I didn’t care for Arthur’s sections and thought they pulled attention away from Pete’s story. That’s a shame, as the plot reminded me of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. [Read the first nearly 100 pages.]
My rating:
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks
Entirely decent historical fiction with a flavor of Ron Rash or Virginia Reeves (Work Like Any Other), but it felt so slow and aimless. Irenie Lambey is married to a harsh fundamentalist preacher named Brodis. She longs for their son to get a good education and hopes that the appearance of a USDA agent may be the chance, but Brodis cares about the boy’s soul rather than his mind. On night-time walks, Irenie stores up artifacts and memories in a cave – desperately trying to have a life larger than what her husband controls. It could well just be my lack of patience, but the believable dialect and solid characters weren’t quite enough to keep me reading. [Read the first 16%.]
My rating:
And now for the one I should have stopped reading at about the 25% point. I have an expanded version of this review on Goodreads; click on the title to read more.
The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 by Lionel Shriver
Shriver does a good line in biting social commentary. Here she aims at Atwood-style near-future speculative fiction and takes as her topic the world economy. I had big problems with this one. Worst is the sheer information overload: tons of economic detail crammed into frequent, wearisome conversations. Instead of making America’s total financial collapse a vague backdrop for her novel, she takes readers through it event by agonizing event. This means the first third or more of the novel feels like prologue, setting the scene. When she finally gets around to the crux of the matter – the entire extended Mandible family descending on Florence’s small New York City house – it feels like too little plot, too late. Everything Shriver imagines for the near future, except perhaps the annoying slang (e.g. “boomerpoop”), is more or less believable. But boy is it tedious in the telling.
My rating: 
Summer Reading Plans
In June my husband and I will be off to Europe for two weeks of train travel, making stops in Brussels, Freiburg (Germany), two towns in Switzerland and another two in Austria. I like picking appropriate reading material for my vacations whenever possible (even though I’ll never forget Jan Morris’s account of reading the works of Jane Austen on a houseboat in Sri Lanka – a case of the context being so wrong it’s right), so I’ve been thinking about what to take with me and what to read ahead of time.
Back in October I picked up a lovely little secondhand hardback of Jerome K. Jerome’s Diary of a Pilgrimage for £1. Given that it’s a novel about a journey by train and boat from England to Germany to see the Oberammergau Passion Play and that Jerome is a safe bet for a funny read, this one is definitely going in my luggage. I also plan to take along a library paperback of A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, a novella set in the Austrian Alps at the time of the Second World War.
Last year I discovered Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann through the brilliant F: A Novel, and now have two more of his waiting: Me and Kaminski and Measuring the World, which sound completely different from each other but equally appealing (see Naomi’s review of the latter). What I might do is read one just before the trip and the other soon after we get back.
There are a few thin classics I have on my shelves and might be tempted to slip into a backpack, but for the most part I’ll plan to save space by taking a well-loaded Kindle. (It currently houses 300 books, so there’s no risk of running out of reading material!) I think I’ll treat myself to a few July/August books from my priority advanced reads list, like (fiction) The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris and The Book that Matters Most by Ann Hood, and (nonfiction) Playing Dead by Elizabeth Greenwood and On Trails by Robert Moor.
Once we get back to England, my self-imposed restriction for the rest of the summer will be reading only my own books. That means no library books, NetGalley/Edelweiss ARCs, or unpaid review books. This should work out well because it looks like we’ll be moving on August 18th, so I’ll be able to cull some books after reading them to reduce the packing load.
In any case, it will be a good chance to reassess my collection and get through some doorstoppers like A Suitable Boy, City on Fire, and This Thing of Darkness. During moving week itself I may have to stick to Kindle books while the print ones are inaccessible, but then as I rediscover them through unpacking I can try to push myself through a few more.
What are your summer and/or vacation reading strategies?
Library Checkout: April 2016
You’ll notice a lot of familiar titles: some I’ve reviewed here recently; others have been hanging around since last month. It’s high time I actually read some of these – especially the Elizabeth Gilbert, for which I have high hopes. It’s a long Bank Holiday weekend coming up here in the UK, so maybe I’ll use that as the excuse to sink into a nice long library book…
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman
- The Zimzum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage by Rob and Kristen Bell
- To the River by Olivia Laing
- The Observances by Kate Miller (poetry)
- Dream Work by Mary Oliver (poetry)
- One of Us: The Story of a Massacre and Its Aftermath by Åsne Seierstad
- Golden Age by Jane Smiley
Skimmed only:
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
- The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
LIBRARY BOOKS CURRENTLY READING
- Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano [It’s over 800 pages, so I’ll probably be reading it all year!]
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
- The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
- The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
- The Great Soul of Siberia by Sooyong Park (about tigers)
RETURNED UNREAD
- The Land Ballot by Fleur Adcock
- Song of the Sea Maid by Rebecca Mascull
(Thanks, as always, to Shannon of River City Reading for the great blog idea and template!)
Mixed Feelings about Elena Ferrante
I paid my 40 pence and waited in what felt like an endless holds queue to get my hands on a public library copy of My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels. For months I’d been eager to try out this literary phenomenon in translation. I read about the first 100 pages and then my interest started to tail off. Aware of the impending due date, I skimmed the rest – so this doesn’t count towards my year’s reading list.
What went wrong? I didn’t dislike the book; in fact, I found it to be an accomplished psychological study of a female friendship and how it changes over time. Yet there were some factors that kept me at a distance. I’ll give a quick synopsis before listing pros and cons.
The Story:
Elena, in her sixties, gets a call from the son of her childhood best friend, Lila. His mother and all her possessions have vanished from her home. Elena recalls Lila’s longtime desire to disappear without a trace, and decides she won’t let her: she sits down to her computer to write the story of their friendship, a bulwark against failing memory and deliberate sabotage.
From here Elena, a novelist in her own right (often assumed to be an autobiographical stand-in for Ferrante), returns to the girls’ childhood in 1940s and 1950s Naples, a place of organized crime, domestic violence, and what seems like surprising social backwardness. Neapolitan dialect contrasts with educated Italian. Lila and Elena have a low-key academic rivalry until Lila has to quit school to help her father, a shoemaker. Even then Lila finds ways to show her friend up, maxing out her whole family’s library cards and learning Latin and Greek on her own time. Lila is always one step ahead of Elena, whether in her studies or in attracting boys’ attention. This volume concludes with Lila’s wedding at the age of 16.
What I Loved:
- The psychological acuity Ferrante brings to the relationship between Elena and Lila. Their friendship has a shifting dynamic, vacillating between jealousy and support as they move from childhood through puberty. The novel powerfully captures Elena’s hesitation and Lila’s brazenness, often in piercing one-liners:
she did her best to make me understand that I was superfluous in her life.
In general I was the pretty one, while she was skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness
Lila acted … on me like a demanding ghost
only what Lila touched became important.
- The choice between education and a trade. Money and class have a lot to do with it, but both girls long for a Woolfian “room of one’s own” and even talk of writing novels together one day. Although Lila finds fulfillment designing shoes, it’s plain she envies Elena’s chance to complete high school. “My brilliant friend” is what Lila calls Elena late on in the novel, but it’s what Elena has always thought of Lila too.
- The Naples setting: Don Achille’s murder; setting off fireworks on New Year’s; the sense that the community is on the up and up when someone they know publishes a book. A few of my favorite lines describe the girls’ neighborhood:
We didn’t know the origin of that fear-rancor-hatred-meekness that our parents displayed toward the Carraccis and transmitted to us, but it was there, it was a fact, like the neighborhood, its dirty-white houses, the fetid odor of the landings, the dust of the streets.
What I Struggled with:
- A lack of context. Footnotes would have been intrusive, but perhaps a short introduction from the translator or an English-language critic could have helped set the scene and given some sociological details that would aid in my understanding of mid-twentieth-century Italy. Even just within the first chapter of Only in Naples by Katherine Wilson, a memoir I’m currently reading, there’s more basic information about Italy to help orient foreigners.
- The confusing names. The central characters are known by multiple names – for example, Lila’s full name is Raffaella Cerullo – and nicknames aren’t always intuitive; it reminded me of the variations in War & Peace. Thank goodness for the three-page index of characters.
- Short shrift given to Elena’s odd relationship with her mother. I felt there was a lot more that could have been explored. Perhaps that is a matter for another volume.
- Repetition in the day to day, especially regarding Elena’s schooling. I wondered whether all four, or at least two, of the books might have been condensed into one 400-page novel.
- Minor punctuation and translation issues. I only marked out one passage that sounded false to my ear (“I’ve kept a place for you.” / “Go away, my mother has understood everything.”), but the punctuation drove me a little nutty. I dislike lots of phrases being strung together with commas – as in the anchovy sentence above; I always look for a semicolon!
In general, I avoid series fiction. I hate being saddled with a sense of obligation, and I don’t like feeling that a story is unfinished. That doesn’t mean a book’s last pages can’t be open-ended, but I’d prefer to imagine my own future for the characters rather than have to read about it in another book or three or 14. While I seriously doubt I will pick up another of the Neapolitan novels, I could possibly be persuaded to pick up one of her stand-alone novellas. Naomi at Consumed by Ink wrote a very appealing review of The Lost Daughter, for instance. Although this long-awaited literary experiment was a touch disappointing, I’m still eager to try another model of “autofiction” in translation, Karl Ove Knausgaard.
My rating:
Further reading: Meghan O’Rourke’s 2014 Guardian article about Elena Ferrante’s growing popularity and mysterious persona.
Have I given Elena Ferrante a fair shake? If not, what should I try next?
Library Checkout: March 2016
I went a little overboard on library books this month because we visited a great branch we don’t often get to. Luckily I get four renewals! April will finally be the month when I try Elena Ferrante, after being on the waiting list for the first of the Neapolitan novels for ages.
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- The Remains by Annie Freud (poetry)
- History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
- Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra (poetry)
- The Blind Roadmaker by Ian Duhig (poetry)
- Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden
Skimmed only:
- Daring Greatly by Brené Brown (mostly repeats what I’d already read in her latest book, Rising Strong)
LIBRARY BOOKS CURRENTLY READING
- The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman
- The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
- One of Us: The Story of a Massacre and Its Aftermath, by Åsne Seierstad
- Golden Age by Jane Smiley
- Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- The Land Ballot by Fleur Adcock (poetry)
- In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
- The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
- The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
- To the River by Olivia Laing
- Song of the Sea Maid by Rebecca Mascull
- The Observances by Kate Miller (poetry)
- Dream Work by Mary Oliver (poetry)
- The Great Soul of Siberia by Sooyong Park (about tigers)
RETURNED UNREAD
- Of Love and Desire by Louis de Bernières (unfinished)
- A Lesson in Love by Gervase Phinn
- The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard (unfinished)
(Thanks to Shannon at River City Reading for the great blog idea and template! Check out her blog for other link-ups.)
Six Books I Abandoned Recently
Are they not criminals, books that have wasted our time and sympathy, are they not the most insidious enemies of society, corrupters, defilers, the writers of false books, faked books, books that fill the air with decay and disease?
Strong words there, from Virginia Woolf in “How Should One Read a Book?” I’m not quite so fervently opposed to these six books I abandoned recently, but I do share Woolf’s feeling of having had my time wasted. Particularly since I started as a freelance book reviewer, I’ve noticed that I am not very patient with my leisure reading: if a book doesn’t totally grab me and keep me turning the pages with rapt interest, I’m more likely to leave it unfinished. Better if I can do that before spending too much time with a book, but sometimes I approach the halfway point before finally giving up.
Below I give brief write-ups of the abandonees. I’d be interested to hear if you’ve read any of them and thought they were worth persisting with.
Of Love and Desire by Louis de Bernières
Like so many, I enjoyed Captain Corelli’s Mandolin but haven’t tried much else from de Bernières. These are love poems: many of them Greek-influenced; most of them sentimental and not very interesting. I marked out one passage I liked, but even it then turns into a clichéd relationship poem: “I looked behind and saw the long straight line of my mistakes, / Faithful as hounds, their eyes alert, trailing in my wake. But / They weren’t dogs, they were women, some fair, some dark …” (from “Mistakes”). [Read the first 25 pages.]
My rating:
Yuki Chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson
The premise for this one – young Japanese woman visits the Brontë sites in Yorkshire as a way of reconnecting with her departed mother – sounded so interesting, but the third-person narration is very flat and detached. It makes Yuki and all the other characters seem like stereotypes: the fashion-obsessed Asian girl, the horde of Japanese tourists. I also noticed that far too many sentences and paragraphs start with “She.” I couldn’t be bothered to see how it would turn out. [Read the first 26%.]
My rating:
Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson
I’d read Jacobson’s three most recent novels and liked them all well enough. He’s certainly your go-to author if you want a witty discussion of the modern Jewish “persecution complex.” I think the problem with this one was that I wasn’t sure what it wanted to be: a contemporary Jewish novel, or a Hebrew fable, or some mixture thereof. Shylock is pretty much dropped in as is from The Merchant of Venice, so it’s unclear whether he’s Strulovitch’s hallucination or a time traveler or what. The exasperated father characters are well drawn, but their flighty daughters less so. I just got to a point where I didn’t care at all what happened next, which to me was the sign to give up and move on to something else. [Read the first 43%.]
My rating:
As Close to Us as Breathing by Elizabeth Poliner
The writing is measured and lovely, and I appreciated the picture of late-1940s life for a Jewish family, but the pace was killing me: this is set in one summer, but with constant flashbacks and flash-forwards to other family stories, such that although we learn on page 1 that a character has died, even by the 60% mark I still had not learned how. Also, the narrator is telling everything in retrospect from 1999, but there is too little about her life at that present moment. I would direct readers to Elizabeth Graver’s The End of the Point instead. [Read the first 60%.]
My rating:
The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard
I’d read such rave reviews of this novel set in the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War, and I’ve always meant to try something by Jim Shepard, so this seemed an ideal place to start. I decided to stop because although this is a fairly believable child’s voice, it is only being used to convey information. To me the spark of personality and the pull of storytelling are lacking. I felt like I was reading a history book about the Holocaust, subtly tweaked (i.e. dumbed down and flattened) to sound like it could be a child’s observations. [Read the first 53 pages.]
My rating:
Georgia by Dawn Tripp
Who doesn’t love Georgia O’Keeffe’s dreamy paintings of flowers and southwestern scenes? Initially I loved her tough-as-nails voice in this fictionalized autobiography, too, but as the story wore on it felt like she was withholding herself to some degree, only giving the bare facts of (dry, repetitive) everyday life and (wet, repetitive) sex scenes with 24-years-her-elder photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Call me impatient, but I couldn’t be bothered to stick around to see if something actually happened in this novel. I think I’d be interested in glancing through O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s correspondence, though, just to see how the voices compare to what Tripp has created here. [Read the first 48%.]
My rating:
Library Checkout: February 2016
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- Early Warning by Jane Smiley
- The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
- Walking Away by Simon Armitage
Skimmed only:
- Bibliotherapy with Bereaved Children by Eileen H. Jones
- The Black Mirror: Fragments of an Obituary for Life by Raymond Tallis
LIBRARY BOOKS CURRENTLY READING
- History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
- Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden
Consulting for travel planning purposes:
- Lonely Planet guides to Germany and Switzerland
- Time Out guide to Vienna
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman
- The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
- The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard
- Golden Age by Jane Smiley
ON REQUEST
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante [I’m now first in the queue – my library system wisely ordered several more copies!]
(Thanks to Shannon at River City Reading for the great blog idea and template! Check out her blog for other link-ups.)
Library Checkout: January 2016
I’ve been back in the UK for a few weeks now and in my leisure reading have been trying to focus on the books I already own (especially giveaway books I feel obligated to review) plus a priority list of library reads.
(Thanks to Shannon at River City Reading for the great blog idea and template! Check out her blog for other link-ups.)
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast [one-week loan from University of Reading library; already returned]
- Glitter and Glue: A memoir by Kelly Corrigan
- How to Connect with Nature by Tristan Gooley [from the School of Life series]
- Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig
- Swithering by Robin Robertson [poetry]
LIBRARY BOOKS CURRENTLY READING
- The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman
- Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi [graphic novel]
- Early Warning by Jane Smiley
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman
- Walking Away by Simon Armitage
- History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
- Bibliotherapy with Bereaved Children by Eileen H. Jones [will probably only skim]
- Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden
- The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard
Plus, it’s time to redouble our efforts at planning a Europe trip for early summer:
- Travellers Sweden
- Lonely Planet guide to Germany
ON REQUEST
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante [I’m 8th in the queue, so I’ll be waiting a while!]
Have you been taking advantage of your local libraries? What were some of your best recent reads?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 