Category: Personal

Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

tssbadge1Earlier this morning I was reading Danielle’s blog A Work in Progress. She wrote about books she’s recently borrowed from the library. One of them is a biography of Louisa May Alcott by Harriet Reisen which looks very interesting. You can see more information on this website. Little Women, Good Wives, Jo’s Boys and Little Men were among my favourite books when I was younger but I didn’t know she wrote books for adults as well.

It reminded me that I have Eden’s Outcasts: the Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. As I’ve just finished reading one book and thought that I’d read this and went to find it.

I bought it some time ago and thought it was on the bookcase with the to-be-read books, but it wasn’t there. We’re sorting out what to pack to move house, but haven’t touched the books yet. My bookshelves are in rough a-z order but in different sequences in different rooms and I looked through all them several times with no success. I was about to give up when I remembered that we had bought some clear plastic boxes and had filled one with books to see if it would be suitable. This box was at the bottom of a pile of boxes and there at the bottom of it was Eden’s Outcasts. I’ve rescued it and started to read it.

I can see that moving house is going to mean lots of books are going to be inaccessible for some time, especially if we have to put our stuff in storage for a while. Although there’s not going to be much time for reading I really need to sort out some books to keep out to see me through until we’re settled in the new house. It’s difficult to be patient, whilst we wait to see if the solicitors can sort out the contracts in time for us leaving this house on 27 November! I hope we’ll have some definite news in the next few days, otherwise we’ll be looking for somewhere to rent. After these next two weeks I probably won’t be able to blog – either reading others’ or writing my own. I’m going to miss it!

Teaser Tuesday – City of the Mind by Penelope Lively

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

I’ve been away for the weekend celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary. We took the family to Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest. It was a wonderful weekend, if rather exhausting too. I’ll be writing about it and posting some photos later. In the meantime this is just a short post to get back me into the swing of blog writing.

teaser-tuesday

My teaser today is from City of the Mind by Penelope Lively. I’m about to start reading this book and this quote is from page 2. I think it captures my amazement at the nature of time, and of the power of thought to transport me to different places and different times. It’s also significant now thinking back over the last 40 years, so many people, so many places, so many happy and sad events, so much to celebrate.

And thus, driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then. He carries yesterday with him, but pushes forward into today and tomorrow, skipping as he will from one to the other. He is in London, on a May morning of the late twentieth century, but is also in many other places, and at other times.

City of the Mind

The Sunday Salon – My Desk

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Not much reading being done today – it’s our wedding anniversary!

Here’s a little look at my desk. Actually I share this desk with my husband. It’s an incredibly messy desk so I can only show part of it. It’s in the smallest bedroom surrounded by books and piles of paper. Above the desk there are shelves going up to the ceiling full of books, magazines, CDs, files and lots and lots of paperwork.

 At the moment it’s even worse than usual as behind me the bunk beds have been dismantled and laid flat on the floor with towers of boxes stacked up on top of them. We’ve emptied the loft in readiness for our move and there’s nowhere else for the boxes to go. tssbadge1

When we have moved and got sorted I hope to post a photo of the new and tidy (some hopes!) new office/library.

Northumbria

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

It’s looking likely that we’ll be settling in the north-east and as we don’t know much about it we bought an AA Leisure Guide to Northumbria and Coast. It’s a beautiful part of England with a National Park, the Cheviot Hills, golden sands, castles and dramatic ruins, Holy Island and the Farne Islands, nature reserves, historic towns, Hadrian’s Wall and the cathedral cities of Newcastle-upon Tyne and Durham – so much to see and explore.

We’ve also been pouring over Ordnance Survey maps of the area:

  • Berwick-upon-Tweed (incl Eymouth, Duns, St Abb’s Head & Cockburnspath)
  • Holy Island & Bamburgh (incl Wooler, Belford & Seahouses)
  • Kelso, Coldstream & Lower Tweed Valley (incl Jedburgh & Duns)

    • I’m always interested in the history of the places I’ve lived in. I know very little about the history of Northumberland and the Borders, so I’ve been looking in some of my own books and found very little. I can see that I’ll be visiting the local library for some local history information.

    I’m also interested in the literary connections. One author that immediately springs to mind connected with the North East is Catherine Cookson. I’m not a great fan of her books but I haven’t read many of them, so I really shouldn’t comment. But I have read her autobiography Our Kate which I thought was very good. I also have her book Let Me Make Myself Plain, an anthology of her poems and essays, including some her paintings. Both books are very open and honest, and very down to earth.

    If anyone has any suggestions of books either about the area, its history or North Eastern authors please let me know.

    Sunday Salon

    Published on by Margaret12 Comments

    tssbadge1

    It’s been a busy time here this week as we now have a date for moving house. In six week’s time we don’t know where we’ll be living, but it definitely won’t  be in this house. We may be in our new house (a bungalow) but as we haven’t exchanged contracts yet we don’t have a date for moving in. Until we have I don’t want to write anything about it – but it looks as though there may even be a room that could be called a “book room”,  or even a “library”!

    So this week has seen a transformation in this house – we’re now surrounded by boxes everywhere. Even though the removal company will be packing our stuff we’ve had to empty the lofts – why do we store so many things? – so the contents are now filling up the rest of the house. There are tons of old videos (not personal ones!), old computers and microwaves, tennis, badminton and squash rackets, a cricket bat, rucksacks, ropes and other climbing gear, an old breadbin (why?) even a box of coathangers as well as the usual Christmas decorations (three Christmas trees of varying sizes) and so on and so forth. I got excited when D said he’d found a box of books, thinking he’d found some I’d forgotten about. Sadly it was a box of his HNC notebooks! We’ve been sidetracked looking through old photos and old videos of the family and reminiscing.

    D has been clearing out one of the sheds as well. We couldn’t find Lucy one night and eventually found her curled up on some old sheets in the shed. She was nearly locked in for the night:

    Lucy in shed1

     

    There’s still so much to do but I have been managing to read in between sorting out stuff and trips to the tip to dump stuff that we should have thrown out years ago. This week I finished reading Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Complaints by Ian Rankin – posts on both to follow and am well into Death of the Chief by Douglas Watt. I’ve caught up a bit with writing reviews of books as well with posts on:

    As for Reading Challenges I’ve really been neglecting those since we started to sell the house earlier this year but I have been keeping up with the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge and this week have posted an update of my progress. I enjoy Agatha Christie’s books immensely and this has spurred me on to read more of hers – this morning I started reading A Pocketful of Rye – a Miss Marple mystery.

    This coming week I do intend to pick up either Wolf Hall again or The Children’s Book. My problem is, as I’ve said before, they’re both physically heavy books and I really need to set aside some time to concentrate on one of them during the day rather than early morning or late at night – not easy right now.

    “A house without books is like a room without windows”: Horace Mann

    Published on by Margaret17 Comments

    We own quite a few books but I know from LibraryThing that many people own far more. There is not enough room in our house to shelve all the books we own, so one of the things we’ve been looking for in a new house is room for our books and bookcases. It’s hard.

    I’ve been surprised how few books other people own. Out of all the houses we’ve viewed there was only one that had a bookcase in the living room and books in the bedrooms. In one house there were cookery books on a shelf in the kitchen, but all the others were bookless! Everyone had a TV or two, but no books. And watching those house programmes on TV I see that very few people own books and no-one says they want room for books when describing what they are looking for in a new house.

    How do people live without books?