Books

Book 932: Young Jane Austen – Lisa Pliscou

Book cover of "Young Jane Austen" with Amazon Affiliate linkI picked this up back in 2016 and it’s languished on my TBR Austen/Brontë shelf ever since. It came up on my random book generator spreadsheet when I was packing books for our vacation back in February but it was the last one on the list and it kept getting delayed.

So FINALLY I made myself read wedge it in between ARCs this month and realized I should’ve read it weeks ago because it could easily be read in one sitting.

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Books

Book 909: The Professor – Charlotte Brontë

Book cover of "The Professor" with Amazon Affiliate linkI’m actually making an effort to clear my TBR shelves whether it’s my physical bookshelf or my Kindle, so there are going to be some random books showing up over the next few months.

This is the penultimate complete work of the Brontë sisters that remained on my TBR list. The final book remaining is Charlotte’s Shirley which I’ll probably cross off at some point this year too. I do have a book of poetry by Emily that I want to read too, but I have a hard time finding the motivation to read poetry in general.

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Books

Book 589: Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4) – Robert Galbraith

If Rowling is going to take so long between these – she may need to include recaps of the previous books. It would make life so much easier.

I didn’t realize it had been almost three years since the last Cormoran Strike book, Career of Evil. I actually ended up reading recaps of the books on Wikipedia because I knew it wouldn’t be easy to jump right back in and Rowling thankfully started right where the last book stopped, but then jumped forward a year.

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Books

Book 584: The Eagle of the Ninth (The Roman Britain Trilogy #1) – Rosemary Sutcliff

I picked this up on our July trip to the UK. Multiple places along Hadrian’s Wall sold it as a souvenir and I thought why not?I wanted something that wasn’t a usual souvenir and the cover of the omnibus version I have (Goodreads link) kept catching my eye, and so I bought it, along with way too many other books that visit.

I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect with a historical fiction young adult series originally published in the 1950s. How different from today’s young adult literature would it be? The closest in publication that I’ve read were L’Engle’s Time Quintet and O’Keefe Family books comprising the Kairos series.

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ARC, Books

Book 348: In Youth Is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather’s House – Denton Welch

Welch, Denton - In Youth is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's HouseThe publisher, Open Road Integrated Media, reached out to me with this book as I’d previously read Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, and she is even mentioned in this work.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hesitant at first as Bowles’ work was very well written but I just didn’t like the characters. Thankfully, Welch’s characters were a bit more accessible for me. This is two shorter stories so I’ve separated my response into two parts. The publisher provided a copy of this book and I received no compensation for my honest opinion.

The one over-arching them the two pieces have in common is the idea of sexuality, specifically homosexuality, before it was commonly talked about and/or accepted. I tried (aka did a brief google search) to find out about Welch’s sexuality, but again this was a long time ago before our out and proud mantras of today. Welch died young, he was only 33, and there is only speculation outside of his written works which in today’s society seem pretty explicit. Regardless, I enjoyed both of these snippets of the past for completely different reasons.

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