Only one brief entry for me in this week’s 1937 Club: Goodness, How Sad! by Robert Morley.  It’s described as “a comedy in three acts” and while it certainly has three acts, the comedic angle is more suspect. Dealing with a struggling theatre company currently encamped in an unnamed Midlands town, the entirely of the play takes place in the sitting room of Mrs Priskin’s theatrical lodging house.  It is here that Carol and Christine, two young women in the company, are currently residing and where their colleague Peter frequently (especially around mealtimes) visits, much to the annoy ..read more

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. The Waters Under the Earth by John Moore – many of you read this when it was reissued by Persephone in late 2022 but it largely passed me by until Ali included i ..read more

via VisitScotland Over the weekend, I read And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat, his classic memoir of his time as a very young infantry officer during the Second World War.  It’s a wonderful book and I do plan to write more about it soon, but I wanted to share this excerpt first. In early June 1943, Mowat and his fellow soldiers were offered four days of leave from their base near Glasgow.  It wasn’t officially embarkation leave, but by mid-June they would be on ships bound for Sicily.  Rather than head to the city, Mowat set off for the countryside and found himself in a gentle ..read more

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. Sharlene has the link this week. Back to Istanbul by Bernard Ollivier and Bénédicte Flatet, translated by Dan Golembeski – I loved Ollivier’s three volume memoir ..read more

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. I did a whirlwind tour across three different library systems recently, picking up plenty of interesting things.  And then didn’t read any of them on the wee ..read more

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. Sharlene has the link this week. Susan and Joanna by Elizabeth Cambridge – like all right-thinking people, I love Hostages to Fortune but have found Cambridge’s o ..read more

Happy International Women’s Day!  I hope you are all celebrating this most politically-loaded of holidays by looking for ways to meaningfully support working women.  Buying us flowers is nice; fighting for pay transparency and equity is better.  As I did back in 2018 and 2020, I offer up a reading list for those looking for further inspiration: The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart – an entertaining and enraging book about, as the subtitle has it, “Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It”.  Sieghart has impeccable and engaging resear ..read more

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. I’m deeply impressed by the speed of the interlibrary loan system recently.  After getting used to months and months of waiting for books during Covid, they ..read more

I am generally fairly callous about abandoning books if I find them unimpressive but I had such high hopes for these two that I persevered until the very end, unwilling to abandon all hope.  Sometimes patience is not rewarded. Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake (2022) – I adore One More Croissant for the Road, Cloake’s foodie travel book about cycling around France and enjoying local dishes.  What better pastime for a food writer!  And Britain, though hardly a culinary competitor to France, certainly could have offered up an interesting array of meals – but sadly Cloake fo ..read more

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries. Sharlene has the link this week. Very happy recent library news: months after a crippling cyber attack, the Toronto Public Library (one of the busiest library syst ..read more