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The Company She Keeps
I love Mary McCarthy’s ‘The Group’, and her autobiography, ‘Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood,’ but I could not get along at all with The Company She Keeps. I got this from the library, and renewed it several times, as I kept picking it up, and trying to read it, and putting it down, but I…
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Do You Clean Vegetables With Soap?
Today’s novel was described as ‘a real oddity’ and ‘a book unlike any other’ when it was discussed on the Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’. House-Bound, by Winifred Peck, (published by Persephone), is the second in my loosely-themed ‘housework’ quartet. The time is 1941, the place is Edinburgh, and middle-class, middle-aged Rose Fairlaw, unable to…
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Discovering Miss Read
Following the death of Miss Read (the nom de plume of Dora Saint) earlier this year, I realised I had never read any of her work so, deciding to remedy the situation, I headed for the library where I found Changes at Fairacre and The Year at Thrush Green. And what did I think? Well,…
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Witches, Woods, and a Big Cat (Saturday Snapshots)
I’ve been at my mother’s for a few days, and I scheduled these Saturday Snapshots to appear early this morning, but forgot to press publish, so they just saved themselves and stayed hidden away! They were taken a week or so ago, on a glorious sunny day when the Man of the House and I…
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Do You Have An Odd Book Shelf? (Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman)
The late-great Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen) would, I feel have approved wholeheartedly of Anne Fadiman and her family. The idiosyncratic exponent of the art of Professional Book Handling (http://chriscross-thebooktrunk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/i-want-to-be-book-handler.html) would have been delighted by their belief that books are there to be read and enjoyed, and that it is quite…
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The Book Trunk 