It’s so dark, guys. It gets dark while I’m sat in the office, and I’ll be driving home in the dark until February or March or something. But – on the plus side – that does mean evenings curled up in front of my log burner electric heater made to look like a log burner.
I’m still intending to give a proper overview of my trip to Canada, and talk about the many books I got my birthday earlier in the week, but those things will wait til next week. For now, I’ll give you a book, a blog post, and a link.
1.) The book – is What Might Have Been by Ernest Bramah, which I’ve picked to represent Handheld Press. It’s a new publishing house started by my fellow book fox Kate, and they’ve published a couple of classics so far (with new fiction also on the horizon). Bramah’s novel was published in the early 20th century and is a political satire often said to have influenced Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
2.) The blog post – you might know that I loved Diary of a Bookseller. Well, let the review at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat further convince you.
3.) The link – my friend Kirsty recommended the Radio 4 programme The Adoption (available as podcast download). Each episode is about 10-20 minutes – currently 16 of them – and it follows the adoption process from more or less the beginning, interviewing birth parents, birth grandparents, adoptive parents, social workers, etc. It’s non-fiction, very moving, and a sensitive insight to a complex process.
Thank you so much for the link and for mentioning my post. I feel honored.
It’s such an excellent book and certainly lightened up my days. The time change and earlier darkness gets to me every year.
I have recently purchased Diary of a Bookseller. Looking forward to it. Your darkness is the new light in the evenings we are now enjoying. We’ll send it back to you when we’re finished.
I liked Pam’s comment (“Your darkness is the new light in the evenings we are now enjoying.”).
I share your lack of enthusiasm for the long dark nights. I try to ignore the shortening days for as long as possible after midsummer’s day, whereas as soon as the shortest day has passed (21 December in our hemisphere this year) I look out for every sign of daylight lasting longer. It would be impossible to have one without the other, although given the choice I would probably prefer all year to be like early May. Of course, there are those, like Rachel (https://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2017/11/05/autumnal-ambles-2/), who say autumn is their favourite season. The red and gold leaves are a lovely sight, when we get them, but for me they are inextricably associated with the dying of the year and the dying of the light.
On another note, I know you have lots of followers who are big Jane Austen fans. If any of them speak Flemish, then they may be interested in this programme from Belgian radio:
https://klara.be/looking-jane-1
Loving the sound of Handheld Press, and that title very much appeals. I am very much looking forward to reading Diary of a Bookseller but after a tiring and very slow reading week I’m reading Barbara Comyns’ Who was Changed and Who was Dead.
It’s darl *and* cold!!! But more reading time I hope. I was trying to remember where I’d heard of Bramah and then realised he was the author of the Golden Age Max Carrados mysteries. But this one sounds rather up my street so I must track it down!
*dark* even…
After listening to your podcast, I’ve had it in mind for a while to recommend a book: A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. I suspect you would enjoy it; I know I loved it, which came as a complete surprise to me. I would not have expected to fall in love so thoroughly with a book about a man under house arrest in Stalinist Russia. It sounds bleak, but Count Alexander Rostov is so beautifully whimsical and always a man of purpose, so the book is actually quite moving without ever being cloying.