This week has seen lots of discussion and decisions about all sorts of things in my life so there has been little time for reading. I managed to catch up on reviewing some of the books I’ve read so far this year but little fresh reading has been done, I’m looking forward to the week after next when I am ‘on holiday’ (though here at home still) and can read every day for *hours*. Such is my definition of relaxing bliss.
Onto this week’s reading:
12) The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee
13) The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
+) H V Morton’s London
+) A History Of The Anglo-Saxons Vol I by Hodgkin
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop was a memoir of a bookshop lover and worker about the joys of reading, stacking shelves and understanding readers. The Elegance of the Hedgehog went unfinished but is a French novel in translation about a Parisian concierge who is subversively well-read and the tenants in the block of luxury apartments she works in. I couldn’t finish it because I just didn’t enjoy the premise of anyone going to such lengths to pretend to be dumb because they would be unemployable otherwise. I’m still reading the 3-in-1 Morton collection about London and I started reading a two volume 1930s work about the Anglo-Saxons, it’s my last two books on the period before I move onto the Normans and I am greatly enjoying the enthusiasm and intelligence of this older book. It assumes no prior knowledge of the period but it does me the courtesy of expecting intelligence, which is a courtesy not often found in modern books.
Reviews posted this week:
+ Blood Red Roses ed. by Fiorato, Boylston and Knusel
Analysis of a medieval mass grave in Yorkshire where the burials can be dated exactly to the Battle of Towton, 29MAR1461.
+ The Anglo-Saxon Kings by Timothy Venning
Clear, readable chronology of rulers, kingdom by kingdom, broken into roughly 50 year sections.
+ Just My Type by Simon Garfield
The history of typeface and the people who have made it a career as well as an artform.
Reviews from 2004 moved across to this site:
+ Knowledge of Angels by Jill Paton Walsh
A heretic and an uneducated wolfgirl do battle with the Inquisition on a fifteenth century island.
+ Seven Strategies for Wealth and Happiness by Jim Rohn
Self improvement book with a very bookish slant.
+ Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
A first wife who haunts the second.
+ Clear Your Clutter by Karen Kingston
Genuinely useful… except the bit about colonic irrigation. Ick.
+ How Walmart is Destroying America (and the World) by Bill Quinn
Dogmatic and preachy but the points Quinn made are valid and worrying.
