I read about this over at Imani’s blog – I miss Imani! Where did she go?? – and today curled up in my comfy old papasan chair to read it. The Shooting Party is set shortly before the start of World War I, with a large group of British aristocrats and their spouses getting all together to shoot at Lord Randolph Nettleby’s estate. With World War I looming on the horizon, the reader is all too aware that they are gathering together to participate in a way of life that is passing and will soon be dying away entirely. At…
4 CommentsTag: World Wars
I read about Baltimore on Jenclair’s blog untold ages ago, and I put it on my list, but I didn’t leave myself a little note explaining what it was about. This is something I do now, but I didn’t always, and so when I would be at the library looking at my list of books, I never checked out Baltimore because I had forgotten anything I ever read about its plot. Fortunately I was incredibly bored recently and took the time to go back through my book list, look up the reviews, and leave myself teeny little plot synopses. Baltimore…
5 CommentsJust finished reading three books I’d been looking forward to, and none of them wholly pleased me. What I Was, Meg Rosoff – All about a boy called Hilary (bless) who goes to a British boarding school and becomes a bit obsessed with another young boy called Finn, who lives by himself in a little hut that can only be reached during low tide. I thought the revelation about Finn at the end was a bit of a let-down, since the rest of the book didn’t at all seem a revelation-type book. Besides which I do not appreciate stories in…
4 CommentsThe Fire Fighter is about a guy who is good at putting out fires, so good in fact that he gets taken away from the front in Africa, and has to come back to London and protect these five buildings in London, during the Blitz. He is not best pleased about this as it’s not clear to him what’s so good about these five buildings, and the mysterious Military Intelligence people are extremely vague and un-forthcoming. He has a painful past, worries about his mother and brother, and falls in love with a German woman who works as a translator…
Leave a CommentHoly God, how have I lived my life without Joan Wyndham? I’m reading the first volume of her diaries that she kept during World War II, Love Lessons, and I am seriously thinking about stealing this book from the library and keeping it forever. (I won’t though of course.) She charms me. Poor darling Jo, I don’t love him a bit but I am divinely happy playing the fool with him. I know I shouldn’t, because he keeps saying, ‘Oh what an absolute bugger, oh you little bitch!’ We do sometimes reach the farthest point of passion after which coition…
Leave a CommentI love reading other people’s letters. It is probably the fault of the Jolly Postman. (Incidentally, Allan and Janet Ahlberg rocked my world as a little kid, and I only wish I’d known their names so I could have investigated their other books that were not Jolly Postman or Each Peach Pear Plum.) I think it’s fascinating when two people correspond regularly over a long period of time – much more fascinating than just reading collected letters of a single person, although that can be really really interesting too. Joy Street is the collected letters of the editor’s mother, Mirren,…
Leave a CommentWhat a lovely book. I didn’t know Edward Murrow had had anything to do with Britain in the War at all, but evidently he and his wife moved there before the war started and stayed after it began. The Murrows came home to America in 1941, just in time for Pearl Harbor, and then they went back to England again, because Edward Murrow wanted to explain America to Britain and the other way around. When I was reading this book, I discovered lots of nice things about Edward Murrow and his lovely wife Janet. For instance, they moved to London…
3 CommentsI feel rather smug that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. Nobody suggested it to me, I just got it on my own. Then I liked it. The Children’s War is all about two kids in Europe during the second World War – Ilse, living in Germany and Morocco and France, whose father is Jewish and who really just wants to get back to her mother; and Nicolai, who doesn’t like the Hitler Youth and becomes friends with his nursemaid who is Ilse’s mother. Though both stories were interesting, I found Ilse’s to be the more compelling,…
2 CommentsThis is more like it. I read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go when I was in England. I don’t remember why – maybe it was that phase in my life where I was getting book recommendations from book prize lists. Book prize books are often not good books for me (see Darkmans). However, I really liked Never Let Me Go, and I really liked this one too. The beginning: The Remains of the Day (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is all about a butler called Stevens who has been in service for many years, and has gone on…
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