Since I last posted I’ve:
- caught up with the Thursday Next series (fingers crossed there is more coming),
- confirmed my good opinion of Alice Munro with her second and third published books (Lives of girls and women and The beggar maid: stories of Flo and Rose respectively),
- succumbed to the predictable pleasures of chicklit with Sophie Kinsella’s latest, Remember Me?
- raced through Reginald Hill’s A cure for all diseases, a Dalziel and Pascoe novel up to his usual high standard although sadly not featuring Ellie and Rosie Pascoe,
- continued with my annual Austen re-read/ love-in,
- and laughed my way through Kate Atkinson’s One good turn, a superb follow up to Case Histories which lives up to its subtitle A Jolly Murder Mystery.
Amidst all the Easter festivities, I spent one afternoon book buying (or binging!) and came home with:
Second-hand, from the top:
1. Pistache: a collection of fanciful, satirical and surprising parodies, squibs and pastiches by Sebastian Faulks- for a literary laugh.
2. Seducers in Ecuador and The Heir by Vita Sackville-West- two novellas, the first about an Englishman’s holiday in Egyt, the second an insurance salesman who inherits a Tudor house. I’ve long meant to read something by Vita Sackville-West and I find the green Viragos hard to resist.
3. Love letters chosen by Antonia Fraser- 135 letters from the famous and not-so-famous, covering beginnings and endings, ecstasies to jealousies, declarations to rejections. I hope this book will encourage me to read some other letter collections languishing on my shelves (by Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Conan Doyle and the Mitfords, to name a few).
4. Imagined London: A tour of the world’s greatest fictional city by Anna Quindlen- how could a literary Anglophile resist?
5. The essential Carmel Bird- a short story collection by one of my favourite Australian authors.
6. Difficulties with girls by Kingsley Amis- I’m looking forward to re-visiting Patrick Standish, Jenny Bunn and co in this sequel to the hilarious Girls like you.
9 Comments
25 March, 2008 at 8:12 am
Well, The Gathering certainly is an Irish misery memoir — if you don’t want one of those, then best avoid it. I had mixed feelings about it, certainly.
27 March, 2008 at 8:38 am
I have to echo Dorothy’s comments on The Gathering…not one of my favorites, even amongst the Irish misery memoir.
I did enjoy Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories. And I love Munroe, too.
27 March, 2008 at 10:29 am
Pistache is so funny! Every one of them spot on (at least the authors I’d read anything of – I assume the rest also accurate…) The Woolf is hilarious, even though I love Woolf.
And the Vita S-W book sounds great. I loved All Passion Spent, which I read last year, but wasn’t so fond of No Signposts in the Sea.
28 March, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Love Letters looks really interesting! Let me know what you think of it, when you’re finished.
30 March, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Sounds like you’ve picked up some great books! I’d be interested in the Jhumpa Lahiri stories. I enjoyed her novel, The Namesake.
4 April, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I love the photos Sarah. Saves writing the titles doesn’t it?
4 April, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I’ll be interested in what you have to say about The Portable Virgin. I loved The Gathering but didn’t much enjoy (or understand) Enright’s The Wig My Father Wore.
11 April, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I have the latest Reginald Hill as well and looking forward to it very much. I thought the earlier books in this series were not incredibly good but from the Jester’s Death Book they have been wonderful and very very well written. In fact, sometimes I have to have dictionary handy to check out a word
28 April, 2008 at 11:14 pm
I haven’t read all the stories in Interpreter of Maladies, but of the ones I’ve read, my favorites so far have been A Temporary Matter and Sexy.