Now, where were we?

    Bit of an unplanned absence there - I was away for a few days (including a second literary pilgrimage here), and recent reads haven't felt terribly post-worthy, so the blog has been becalmed, but let's see if we can get some wind back in the sails.

    I popped into Topping & Co. yesterday to buy Andrew Whitley's book on sourdough (having made a loaf, following instructions in a general cookbook, which would not have looked out of place in the Ashmolean's Last Supper in Pompeii exhibit), and I picked up a copy of 4th Estate's free booklet The World of Wolf Hall: a reading guide to Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, to prime us for The Mirror and the Light (out in March and a wrist-breaking 864 pages, apparently). 

    A browse round Blackwell's Broad Street shop when I was in the south resulted in a couple of additions to my Christmas wish list: DJ Taylor's Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 and Christina Hardyment's Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings, meanwhile the Persephone Biannually arrived and caused the placing of an order: a DE Stevenson, Stella Martin Currey's One Woman's Year (which I shall keep for January), and Milton Place by Elisabeth de Waal which has started very promisingly. 

    Elsewhere in the family, daughters have been reading Oscar Wilde and Donna Tartt, and Mr. C. is deep in the Mick Herron canon and promises a post "soon". It was Adèle who put him on to MH, and the baton has been duly passed to the Hussar who sped through the Jackson Lamb series in no time. Incidentally, I sent him this picture of the George Macdonald Fraser novels taken in Toppings, 

saying these shelves ought to have a warning affixed: "reads these books at your peril - a career in the military awaits". He replied, "excellent preparation for a life of adventure!"; he read them as a teenager and has ended up in the modern incarnation of Flashman's regiment, which says something, does it not, about the power of literature!

    Anyway, I'm glad to be back and I hope you are all well and thriving and finding good things to read.

Comments

[Jane from Dorset]

Good to see you back, I had been wondering if all was well with your world.

[Cornflower]

All fine, thank you Jane, just a busy time, and it's surprising how easy it is to get out of the habit of regular posting.

[Fran H-B]

Like the sound of Christina Hardyment's latest book. Its been awile since I have seen anything new by her,

[Margaret Powling]

I love Stella Martin Currey's book One Woman's Year, I have an original copy published in 1953. Indeed long before we had the internet, I wrote to our local library and they found out for me that she had written several other works, mainly plays. This is one of those books I re-read (as you intend to read) in the January of each year.

[Dark Puss]

Reading (viewing?) a fantastic and thoughtful book, Camera Atomica, edited by John O'Brian and published by "Black Dog" (which you may remember went bust early in 2018 with very significant debts for a small independent). The book encompasses nuclear photography (not just weapons)from Hiroshima & Nagasaki through the Cold War era to the Daiichi accident and also N Korea and Iran. Stunning, disturbing photographs with thoughtful and provoking essays.

[Claire]

You must be delighted to have a Toppings now in Edinburgh. I haven't been into it yet but go to the St Andrews one fairly regularly and never emerge empty handed. How could you?

[Dark Puss]

Easily :-)