Books

Book 900: Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

Book cover of "Wuthering Heights" with Amazon Affiliate linkWhat a difference eight-ish years makes between reads. I last read this in November 2013 and had some interesting comparisons to Pride and Prejudice and observations about my own love life.

I’m not planning to reflect on that this time, for a couple of reasons, mainly that this read I really felt that perhaps the better Austen comparison is Fanny Price in Austen’s Mansfield Park rather than Darcy. I mean the whole nature versus nurture argument and how responsible are they for what happens and how much of an impact does their upbringing have? SO. MANY. QUESTIONS (and thoughts).

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Books

Book 668: Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre – Glynnis Fawkes

cover art for "charlotte brontë before jane eyre" and amazon affiliate linkI stumbled across this illustrated biography of Charlotte Brontë after one of my google alerts (“Boston” and “Brontë”) alerted me to this article (Seven Days, Vermont’s Independent Voice). I’ve been meaning to read an actual Brontë biography forever really, but specifically since the 2017 release of To Walk Invisible on PBS and my visit to the Parsonage in 2018.

I read The Mother of the Brontës last year which covered a good portion of this and some of the inspired works cover similar time periods because they were all so young. The downside of the Brontës and Austen are how short their lives were and we can only glean so much from the few letters and drafts of their works that exist, but there are instances where a little creative license and ingenuity can make these well known facts and situations seem new again. And that is the case with this Fawkes work.

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ARC, Books

Book 637: The Vanished Bride (A Brontë Sisters Mystery #1) – Bella Ellis

As I mentioned in my June recap, I sort of Twitter-shamed Berkley into granting me access to this book—and I do still feel a little guilty about it. I tweeted because I was so mad that sites like NetGalley force bloggers/reviewers and publishers into tiny little boxes.

How are you supposed to represent everything you are as a blogger/reviewer when they give you 50 words or less and that’s about it? I get they’re trying to provide a service, but it’s like come on be user friendly for all the users. Why would I include that I have dedicated Jane Austen and Brontë pages on my website when I read hundreds of other books. UGH. Either way, the kind people at Berkley took pity on me and granted me access to the review copy and here I am.*

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Books

Book 634: The Mother of the Brontës – Sharon Wright

Book cover for "The Mother of the Brontës"I somehow managed to read a biography of Maria Branwell Brontë prior to reading a biography of any of her offspring. I’m not sure why, but when I saw this one on NetGalley it just spoke to me.*

Maybe it’s because I finally got to visit The Brontë Parsonage last year, or maybe I some how knew that Kirkstall Abbey (which I visited over a decade ago while living in Leeds) was connected to the Brontës without really knowing it. Or maybe, like Wright, I was appalled that I spent a considerable amount of time less than 60 miles from their home. Or maybe it was just another opportunity to revisit God’s Own Country via this book which Wright references. Who knows?

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Updates

July Recap 2018

We are done traveling (long haul at least) for the summer! I know most people would not be as excited about this as I am, but it is exhausting.

I put a photo recap down below under books and bookish things because most everything we saw was connected to books, except for my friend’s wedding. We drove over 24 hours in total while we were visiting and it was awesome because we saw parts of the country I’ve never seen except by train or plane. The above photo is our full trip with a photo of our northern post point Ben A’an and our southern most point Brighton.

We did so many bookish things that I’ll just include a slide show below and put a caption explaining what they are rather than write them all out. We didn’t even set out to do that many it just happened (mostly because Tim told me this was our last trip to the UK for some time). Continue reading “July Recap 2018”