Thanks for playing along – do keep your sentences coming! Just thought I’d let you know the answers – and point out my bit of trickery, which nobody spotted!
1.) is a rather lovely sentence from The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner.
2.) is in fact not Emma, but Mrs. Elton in America by Diana Birchall. Sneaky, no?
3.) was correctly identified by several people as The Bible.
I spotted a fun and familiar idea on Facebook, to celebrate National Book Week, courtesy of my friend Katie. It comes with an unrelated picture of a horseshoe-horse, from Town Tree Nature Garden, which I visited yesterday.
The idea is to grab the nearest book (I wonder if any of us are more than arm’s-length away from a book?), turn to p.56, and copy out the fifth sentence without identifying the book. Fairly pointless, but also fairly fun. I’ll do three – and probably edit to add the book info in after a while. Guesses are welcome! And then, of course, have a go yourself.
1.) ‘It is like turning such a brilliant light onto a tangle of wool that one doesn’t see the woollen tangle at all, only some peculiar rhythm of curves.’
2.) ‘This Miss Woodhouse was intolerable!’
3.) ‘”Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us.”‘
Thanks for all your views on One Day – the general consensus seems to be in favour, so I might well give it a read – especially if I want to see the film when that comes out.
My week in Somerset comes to an end tomorrow – it has been great fun, although I read rather less than I thought I would. I’m back to Oxford for a couple of days, and then off to Shropshire & Wales – where I won’t have internet access, so I’ll either schedule posts or I’ll be quite for a few days.
The song this week is ‘You Already Know’ by Bombay Bicycle Club. Which makes the second male vocalist to have a Sunday Song!
For all previous Sunday Songs, click here.
So… everyone (including my bro) seems to be reading One Day by David Nicholls – but the 3-for-2 tables and newspaper musings don’t give me the views I rely upon. I’m throwing this open to my ready-made decision-makers. One Day… thoughts? (I’m setting aside the fact that I totally had the idea for this sort of book years ago… except mine was going to cover eighty years… yeah, probably why that didn’t get written.)
I’ve got surprisingly little reading done down in Somerset so far – still on my first book, Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley, which seemed to get the most enthusiasm when I mentioned it the other day. And, indeed, I am really enjoying it. Here it is, in situ, on the beach at Lyme Regis.
More on that another time. Today I’m going to tell you about the various books I’ve bought down here in Somerset so far – I’ve been to two secondhand bookshop in Crewkerne, two in Bridport, and two in Lyme Regis. Alongside a few books I bought for other people, not pictured, I have bought eight for myself…
The Pursuit of Laughter – Diana Mosley
The Making of a Muckraker – Jessica Mitford
Two non-fic books to fuel my love of all things Mitford.
This Real Night – Rebecca West
The Gipsy’s Baby – Rosamond Lehmann
The Victorian Chaise-Longue – Marghanita Laski
And my love of Virago and Persephone! I have read the last, but didn’t have a Persephone copy.
The Foolish Immortals – Paul Gallico
The House That Wouldn’t Go Away – Paul Gallico
Bridport and Lyme Regis seem full of Gallico books! These seem like they’d be up my street – one about a conman who claims to sell immortality, ‘but [to quote the blurb] is he being conned by someone else?’ – cue Simon whipping it off the shelf and into his hot little hands. The second is about a previous house haunting the house built in its place. I love books about houses with bizarre powers (yes, what an odd taste to have, but… I do!)
The Book of Indoor Games – Hubert Phillips & B.C. Westall
I’d have bought this for the cover alone, but inside seems fun too. Lots on cards, chess etc. but – more to my liking – lots on parlour games! Interesting to see the precedents of games like Scrabble, Boggle, Scattergories etc. all included there. Will probably write more about this later…
A couple of photographs to finish with. This is one of the bookshops I went to in Bridport (the other, called Bridport Old Books, was being run by a woman reading A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor, so we had a nice little chat about that)
and here is the little lady who has brought me to Somerset, looking her adorable self:
Quick blog post, for Wikio blog rankings – always a bit of fun. Tomorrow – expect some Somerset photos, and a list of the books I’ve been buying… although, so far, I’ve bought almost as many for other people as I’ve bought for myself. Almost.
I’m joining lots of folk across the blogosphere today in wishing Verity a very happy wedding!
You’ll probably see quite a lot of these greetings appear – it was the brainchild of the blogger we all know as Joan Hunter Dunn.
To make this a bit more collaborative, why not put forward your ideas for the best married couple in fiction? I’m always drawn to Jane and Bingley, even though we don’t hear much about their married life together. Ian and Felicity in Greenery Street is another good’un. Thoughts?
I’m sitting in lovely Somerset at the moment, cat… well, somewhere, she’s off exploring. And I’m musing over reading plans for my holiday. I don’t normally plan my ahead for my fun-reading (since university and book group reading are scheduled as it is) but I did think I might get on board with ‘All Virago/All August’. Not to be confused with Virago Reading Week, which I’m hoping will come back next year, AV/AA is run by the Virago Modern Classics group on LibraryThing. It seems to be pretty informal – just a way of encouraging people to read the VMCs they’ve got waiting.
Well, most of the books I want to read soon are in Oxford, so I’m basically going to pick at whim down here in Somerset. Not that I’m short on books here – most of my collection is housed in my Chiselborough room – but the ones which I *really know* I want to read soon aren’t here. Which means there are shelves and shelves of things with exciting potential…
Sprinkled through this post are my Virago shelves in Chiselborough. I have another 20 or so in Oxford – not a huge collection, compared to many members of the LibraryThing group, but enough unread to keep me going for August (and, indeed, probably most of 2012). Sorry the pictures are a bit blurry – however often I took pics, I couldn’t get them any crisper than that. Hopefully you can make out the titles!
Of the ones I’ve not read, here are six which caught my eye. Any thoughts? (Oh, and I already love Ivy C-B, so no need to try and warn me off her! I know she’s an acquired taste…)
And if you’re a member of LT and not yet in the VMC group, I encourage you to join! I signed up months and months ago, but only recently started posting – they’re very friendly, knowledgable, and even share out duplicate copies, when they turn up.
I’ll let you know how I get on with All Virago/All August. I doubt I’ll only read Virago novels during the month (indeed, I’m having something of a reader’s block at the moment, and just started the most unlikely book – will tell you about it later) – but I’m hoping to read at least two or three that have been waiting for my attention.
I remember when I first heard Amy Winehouse sing – it was on some Saturday morning music show, and she had yet to release her first album. She sang something from it – I don’t remember which song, and at the time I didn’t even like the song itself all that much. But her voice. I couldn’t believe it was coming out of her – that rich, soulful, jazzy voice. I think it is best shown-off in this beautiful rendition of ‘Love is a Losing Game’.
Hey folks! Hope you’ve had a good week. Mine involved making the ridiculous cake below, with my lovely friend Lorna. I’m off on holiday tonight, cat-sitting at home for a week, then off to Shropshire and Wales with my bro for a bit. I was going to have proper posts ready to pop up, and who knows, maybe I still will – but… Well, something will appear, but it might be on a somewhat rationed basis. Still time for a Weekend Miscellany before I board the train, though…
1.) The blog post – is a lovely photo post by Diana, being Part 1 of a multipart series documenting her recent trip to the UK. I’ll come into it somewhere towards the end, but the first part is delightful – more general, about her 29 trips to these shores, with a great group of photos taken over the years. I swear, she knows Britain much better than I do.
2.) The link – so, the Man Booker longlist is out. I have read none; I own the Julian Barnes. This is the last time I shall mention anything to do with it…
3.) The book – had gone into a pile to go home: interesting enough to keep, but not to read for a while. It’s Let Not The Waves of the Sea by Simon Stephenson, and I kept my review copy from John Murray mostly because I love the cover. And then I read this article from the Guardian, wept over it, and want to read it. Let Not The Waves of the Sea is non-fiction, about Stephenson’s relationship with his brother Dominic, who died in the 2004 tsunami. My brother is the most important person in my life, and I love any book which cherishes the importance of siblings – even if this has a terribly tragic element, the blurb writes that it is ‘more than a book about what it means to lose a brother: it is a book about what it means to have one in the first place.’