Thanks to Eleanor for posting about her recent library reading, including for 20 Books of Summer (here and here). Thanks also to Skai for joining in again!

Further to last month: My library system’s reclassification seems all the stranger the more I look at it, especially in the children’s section. Yellow stickers will have: one black stripe (Beginner Reads), two black stripes (Short Chapter Books), three black stripes (Picture Books for Older Readers) or a T (Teen). Okay, that last one makes sense, but taking in the number of stripes at a quick glance when organising a trolley or shelving? Seems like a recipe for misfiling.

Also, as a member of senior staff astutely observed, surely the length of a book is the one thing you can tell just by looking at it! So why make that its own designation? Especially when those double-stripe books will be mixed in with the rest of the chapter books, which from now on will not be given a very helpful label on the spine with the first letter of the author’s surname.

It’s having the two systems on the go at the same time that is most confusing. Apparently, these changes were handed down from on high, to keep us in line with other libraries, but no one consulted with the people who actually handle the books on a day-to-day basis. As in, the staff and volunteers. Ahem. We shall see how it goes.

My library use over the last month:

(links are to books not already reviewed on the blog)

I’ve been borrowing some Booker and Wainwright Prize list reads, as well as looking ahead to our mid-September trip to Berlin and Novellas in November.

READ

• Good Night, Little Bookshop by Amy Cherrix
• Bothered by Bugs by Emily Gravett
• More Katie Morag Island Stories by Mairi Hedderwick
• The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce
• The Dig by John Preston

Last month we joined my in-laws for a few days at the holiday cottage they’d rented in Suffolk. We crammed in loads: Orford Ness, a former military site with a very unusual shingle landscape where hares live and the wind howls; Minsmere RSPB reserve; and Sutton Hoo, the site of a famous Anglo-Saxon ship burial, discovered there during an archaeological dig of the mounds in 1939; and Woodbridge, the nearest town to the cottage, whose museum has a project underway to build a full-size replica of the ship. I didn’t put two and two together to realize that The Dig, adapted into a 2021 Netflix film starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan (there was a big on-site exhibit about the filming), is about Sutton Hoo or I would have gotten it out of the library to take with us. Instead, I caught up afterward.

Preston focuses on the few spring and summer months of Basil Brown’s amateur excavation, which was then co-opted by museum professionals. Edith Pretty, the landowner, was a widow in her fifties, raising her plucky son Robert on her own and struggling with ill health (she had Robert at age 47, almost unheard of in those days, and would die after a stroke in 1942). The day to day of the excavation was engrossing and I enjoyed the interactions between Brown and Pretty. I didn’t need the third narrator, Peggy Piggott, wife of one of the archaeologists and excavation staff in her own right, nor the extra background about characters’ marriages and museum bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the epilogue from Robert returning to the site in the 1960s made me wish that there had been more of that retrospective viewpoint. This was enjoyable in a minor way but I wouldn’t have read it had I not been to Sutton Hoo. I wonder if the film would be, on the whole, more successful.

SKIMMED

• I Think I Like Girls by Rosie Day – I took a desultory look but the content seemed pretty lite and the writing style iffy. (Hadn’t heard of Day but I guess she’s a celebrity?)

SKIMMING

• Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (for book club; I also skimmed it when it first came out)

CURRENTLY READING

• The Most by Jessica Anthony
• The Honesty Box by Luzy Brazier
• Bellies by Nicola Dinan
• The Wedding People by Alison Espach
• The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han
• An Eye on the Hebrides by Mairi Hedderwick
• The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
• Of Thorn & Briar: A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer by Paul Lamb
• The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
• The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading by James Patterson & Matt Eversmann

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

It’s nearly time for Novellas in November planning! Thus I borrowed a quartet of books from the university library (the bottom stack below), two of which were recommended by blog friends: the Barker (Blow Your House Down) by Margaret and the Hesse by Kaggsy. The Kertesz is on my radar thanks to C’s bandmate Jo. And I’ve enjoyed the two Sagan novellas I’ve read so far so thought I’d source another.

ON HOLD, TO BE COLLECTED

• Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri
• The Names by Florence Knapp
• Love in Five Acts by Daniela Krien
• Red Pockets: An Offering by Alice Mah
• Birding by Rose Ruane
• Opt Out by Carolina Setterwall
• Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth
• Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

• The Two Roberts by Damian Barr
• All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Helm by Sarah Hall
• The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith
• What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
• The Eights by Joanna Miller
• Endling by Maria Reva
• Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
• Flesh by David Szalay

RETURNED UNREAD

• Fragile Minds by Bella Jackson
• Enchanted Ground: Growing Roots in a Broken World by Steven Lovatt
• Wife by Charlotte Mendelson
• The Forgotten Sense: The Nose and the Perception of Smell by Jonas Olofsson

I lost immediate interest in all of these but would be willing to try them again another time.

What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?

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