#CurrentlyReading “The Christmas Wish List” by N R Walker, the second in a four book series.
M ❤️ M
🇦🇺❤️🇺🇸
🎄🎄🎄
👨🍳
Jayden, an Australian chef, takes on a temporary cooking job in a B&B. Cass is opening his B&B just before Christmas and is coming to terms with a lot of changes in his life.
"We could recognize her in an instant, even though we’ve never seen her up close. She’s always with us, a whisper on the wind, a shadow passing over our eyes when we’re looking away." - from the story Last Tour Into the Hungering Moonlight by Gwendolyn Kiste in the anthology of Baba Yaga stories, Into the Forest
#FridayReads
There are three books I'm reading at the moment and all have drawn me in in their different ways:
Botticelli's Secret by Joseph Luzzi - an account of the commission the artist Sandro Botticelli was given by a member of Florence's powerful Medici family to illustrate all hundred cantos of Dante's Divine Comedy
The Housekeepers by Alex Hay - a terrific revenge heist story pitting downstairs vs upstairs masterminded by a former housekeeper of a grand London Mayfair house who has a hidden agenda
Into the Forest - an anthology of retellings of Baba Yaga stories by a wide range of horror and fantasy writers
#CurrentlyReading Sarah Denzil's One for Sorrow. Diving into this psychological thriller before moving on to my planned holiday read: Legends and Lattes.
What book are you planning to immerse yourself in this holiday season? I'd love to know so I can also add them to my TBR list. 😊
It was winter, near freezing,
I'd walked through a forest of firs
when I saw issue out of the waterfall
a solitary bird.
It lit on a damp rock,
and, as water swept stupidly on,
wrung from its own throat
supple, undammable song.
It isn't mine to give.
I can't coax this bird to my hand
that knows the depth of the river
yet sings of it on land.
-- The Dipper by Kathleen Jamie from 'Selected Poems'
#Currentlyreading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I’ve been meaning to read this for a while now. The motion picture is on Netflix, and I told myself I wouldn’t watch it until /after/ I read the book.
Borrowed Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein from the library. This copy has a big misprint - about 50 pages are randomly repeated in place of 50 that should be there.
At first I thought wow, these #BookerPrize books really are getting impenetrable 😂 but fortunately I got my hands on a complete copy
"People have been living on earth for thousands of years, and yet they’ve still not learned to be good. How strange." - from The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated by Douglas Smith
I’m #currentlyreading Fallout, the third book in the Crank series by Ellen Hopkins. This book is from the perspectives of three of Kristina Snow’s five children, Hunter, Autumn, and Summer. They all have different fathers and live with different guardians.
I’m also reading A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson. Pippa (Pip) Fitza-Amobi is working on her senior capstone project. Her topic of choice? To research the roles of print, televised, and social media in police investigations using the case of Andie Bell as a case study.
Five years ago, Andie Bell went missing and then was presumed to be dead when her body was not located. Her boyfriend, Sal Singh, is believed to be the murderer but this could not be confirmed because he was found dead in the woods, presumably from suicide. The police and practically the whole town believe he murdered Andie. Pip does not.
"We lived on this earth. Don’t entrust it into the hands of the destroyers, the barbarians and the ignoramuses." - from a note that was found in Konstantin Paustovsky's writing desk after his death in 1968
I've just started reading Paustovsky's The Story of a Life, which is a collection of the first three of six books of the Ukrainian/Russian writer's memoirs published by NYRB earlier this year. It's kind of a doorstopper, but I already don't want it to end.
I'm always adding more newly published books to my to-read piles, yet my recent reading choices seem to be primarily long-term residents of the TBR. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you.
This has happened before when the shorter, chillier days set in.
I’m #CurrentlyReading Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers and enjoying it. Was pleasantly surprised that the main character grew up in the area I did though the book isn’t set there. Only halfway through so fingers crossed I enjoy it to the end. @bookstodon
Well, thanks to the library I did end up giving everything shortlisted for #BookerPrize a go. #Currentlyreading Study for Obedience. Have heard a lot of criticism of the writing style, but so far I'm enjoying this quiet, eerie book. #bookstodon@bookstodon
I borrow a lot of books from the library after placing a hold, so even though I pick them up at my home library, they’re originally from other branch libraries in the @sfpl system.
so going forward, I’m going to start returning them to their branch libraries of origin until I’ve visited all the different locations.
today: returning Hernán Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust to the Excelsior branch. It’s the best thing I’ve read this year.
Instead, the library is operating out of a borrowed storefront around the corner on Valencia. After returning this book, the really excellent Time’s Mouth by Edun #Lepucki, I walked around. The library is tiny but charming. There’s a big collection of media offerings, and a laptop-lending machine. in the main room, book displays cater to the neighborhood’s Spanish-speaking population and English-language books focus topics relevant to the Spanish-speaking population of the Americas as well.