I confess, at the moment I'm in the middle of reading all too many books! But it's fun! :) The only negative thing was that I did not finish rereading Mrs. Dalloway in time to participate in the first leg of the Woolf in Winter group read. I could have written about the book based on the previous times I have read it, but I rather reread it first and share what I think of it this time around. I promise to post about Mrs. Dalloway later. It is, after all, one of my all time favorite books.
I'm still reading the Amnesty International short story anthology Freedom. I first borrowed it from the library, but these are hard stories to read in a row, so after maybe 4-5 stories I just had to take a break from the book. I absolutely wanted to read all the stories, though, so I ended buing the anthology in December. Now I'm slowly working my way through it. As I'm also working through The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and Four Short Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell. Both books I like, Atwood has once again spun an intriguing tale set in the future and Gaskell's short stories are very interesting portraits of women and women's life in the mid 19th century, but somehow there has all the time been some book I want to read even more then these two!
Another book I've been reading is the final part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. I own the whole trilogy, but took kind of a shortcut with the two first parts: the books have been made into movies in Scandinavia, and I have the first two movies on DVD (the third film has not been released yet) and after watching them (Noomi Rapache is just perfect as Lisbeth!:)) I'm yearning to find out how the story ends! Actually, I have all the time thought that the books might be just a bit too much for me and I must say that I do find the third book sometimes hard to read because of the violent things happening. Somehow for me it's more difficult to read about violence than watch a DVD (and when watching a DVD, it is very easy to fast forward if the going gets too tough ;)).
Danielle over at A Work in Progress posted about The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden a fortnight ago, and reading her review made me think that I would really like to read more Godden. Also, I had during the holidays ordered the movie version of In This House of Brede and got it just the day before Danielle posted about The Greengege Summer. I read both In This House of Brede and Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy quite a few years ago. I'm actually sort of collecting novels about nuns and religious sisters and those both fall into that category. Funny thing is that In This House of Brede is, in my opinion, one of the best novels about nuns and religious life ever written, but I do not own a copy myself. (I'm going to remedy that very soon, though! :)) Well, after reading Danielle's post & watching the In This House of Brede -movie I absolutely wanted not only to read more Godden, but to reread In This House of Brede. I got both The Greengage Summer and In This House of Brede, and also a third novel of hers called The River from the National Repository Library through ILL. The NRL is just great! And their service is very quick! Often you get your books in 1-2 working days. When I got my books I was busy reading Mrs. Dalloway for Woolf in Winter and a novel (not available in English) by the Norwegian writer Jan Kjaerstad for one of my two reading groups, so on my way home from work that day I thought just to take a little peek into In this House of Brede during the metro ride. Well, I got totally hooked! I simply could not put the book down! Yesterday I finished the Kjaerstad novel, and now I'm free to transport myself to the Benedictine Abbey of Brede again! It's been such a long time since I read the book for the first time that I had totally forgotten the wonderful way Godden's story moves backwards and forwards in time. I'm really, really loving the way she writes and the way she portrays the lives of the nuns.
Mailbox Monday is a weekly event hosted by Marcia of The Printed Page.
Last week sales began in the bookstores over here. I went to the my favorite bookstore "just to take a look" and ended up buying these three books, two novels and a nonficion book:
- Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski. My first ever Persephone book! It is a story set in post WWII France. Hilary Wainwright returns to France in order to find a child lost five years ago in 1943. Is the child really his? Does he want him? The novel was first published in 1949 and it's said to paint a brilliant picture of a country deeply divided after the war.
- Girl in a Bule Dress by Gaynor Arnold. A famous Victorian novelist Alfred Gibson (who resembles Dickens) is dead and his wife has not been invited to the funeral. This is the story of the wife, Dorothea, who is "not content to be remembered as a mere footnote when the official Life of the great man comes to be written." The novel was longlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 2008.
- The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants by Anna Pavord. I bought this book mainly because it was so cheap and so beautiful, the illustrations are really lovely! It's about botanical history, how plants came to be called and grouped the way they are today.
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