Tag: 2022

Goodreads Monday: 26/09/2022

Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club.  All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.

Hello!

Happy Monday!

I hope everyone has had a good start to the week so far. My chosen book this week is one I could swear that I have read but have no evidence that I have read it and as I have always recorded the books I have read, it seems strange that I have missed this one off the list. Hence why it is on my TBR list.

A novel that chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family.

Purchase Links

Book Depository | Bookshop.org | Foyles | Waterstones | Wordery

(All purchases made using one of the above affiliate links gives a small percentage of money to myself with no extra cost to yourself. All proceeds go towards the upkeep of this blog. Thank you ever so much, your support is gratefully received.)

Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.

Happy Reading

Etsy

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you

The Weekly Brief

Hello!

I hope everyone has had a nice weekend. I have sadly not managed much reading this weekend due to work and doing work prep but I have managed some reading in the week so it isn’t all bad.

Posts this Week

Currently Reading

Absolutely love this so far. The short stories are all fascinating so far.

Happy Reading

Etsy

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you

Friday Poetry: Kenneth Grahame

Happy Friday!

I hope you all have some fun plans for the weekend.

My chosen poem this week is one from my childhood. Mr Toad was one of my favourite characters in The Wind in the Willows so I have decided to share The Song of Mr Toad today.

The Song of Mr Toad

The world has held great Heroes, 
As history-books have showed;
But never a name to go down to fame
Compared with that of Toad!

The clever men at Oxford
Know all that there is to be knowed.
But they none of them knew one half as much
As intelligent Mr Toad!

The animals sat in the Ark and cried,
Their tears in torrents flowed.
Who was it said, 'There's land ahead'?
Encouraging Mr Toad!

The Army all saluted
As they marched along the road.
Was it the King? Or Kitchener?
No. It was Mr Toad!

The Queen and her Ladies-in-waiting
Sat at the window and sewed.
She cried, 'Look! who's that handsome man?'
They answered, 'Mr Toad.'

Kenneth Grahame

Happy Reading

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you

First Lines Friday: 23/09/2022

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

  • Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
  • Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
  • Finally… reveal the book!

Happy Friday!

I hope everyone has had a good week so far. I thought it was high time I took part in First Lines Friday again. As usual the answer is below the cat pictures.

I went to the dance with Thomas Toofat. It’s Toogood really, but he is too fat, with frizzy hair and flat feet. We never meant to let him know we call him that, but the week before, at the Turners’ picnic, Sally said without thinking, ‘And this is Thomas Toofat…’ Oh, it was utterly withering.

Get guessing

Midsummer Night in the Workhouse by Diana Athill

“I can remember in detail being hit by my first story one January morning in 1958.” So begins literary legend Diana Athill in the preface to Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, a long-overdue collection of her short fiction, originally published in the 1950s to the 1970s.

In unsentimental though often touching prose, Athill’s young women anticipate, enjoy, or just miss out on brief sexual encounters with men met on trains, at parties — just about anywhere they can. A cheating wife, back with her boring husband, is wracked with agonizing love for the unavailable partner of her brief fling; a writer seeks inspiration at a writers’ retreat whilst avoiding the group seducer’s invitation; a wife’s party flirtations propel her possessive husband into another woman’s bed; two fun-loving women face a sinister sexual assault during a Greek holiday; a teenager experiences enraptured detachment during her first kiss.

Beautifully written, perceptive, touching, and funny, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is Diana Athill at her best.

Did anybody guess correctly?

Please drop me a comment with your First Line Friday and I will head over for a visit.

Happy Reading

Etsy

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you

Lyra’s Pawsome Books #2

Hello!

I have so many new products in the pipeline for my Etsy shop and hopefully I will get those up for sale soon but until then I have released another two products on the shop. The code BOOKDRAGON10 can still be used at checkout for 10% off anything on my Etsy store.

Now one of my favourite things to do on a cold winter evening is curl up with a mug of hot chocolate, some biscuits and a good book. This made me come up with my dream book box. I would personally love to get this book box as a present.

Luxury Hot Chocolate Book Box

The box includes:

A brand new paperback book of a genre of your choice.

A bookmark so you don’t lose your place in your new book when you put your book down for a hot chocolate refill.

Kingsbridge Hot Chocolate Spoon Flavours:

– Marshmallow Milk Hot Chocolate 
– Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate 
– Marshmallow Dark Hot Chocolate 
– Marshmallow White Hot Chocolate
– Marshmallow Caramel Sea Salt Hot Chocolate 

Border Biscuit Flavours:
– Chocolate Cookies
– Viennese Whirls
– Golden Oat Crumbles
– Butterscotch Crunch

Lotus biscuits x2

Book Box with Vegan Treats

Box Includes

– Brand new paperback book (genre of your choice)
– Tea bags
– Coffee bag
– Bookmark
– Nomo vegan chocolate bar
– Candy Kittens Wild Strawberry Vegan Gourmet Sweets
– Vegan Popcorn

All products now have the option to include a free personalised gift message that will be handwritten on a bookish themed postcard.

There are now 5 different book boxes on the Etsy store and one book present so it is slowly building up. The Christmas and Advent themed book boxes will be put up soon.

Happy Reading

The Classics Club: Spin #31 – Results

Hello!

The results are in and the number was 2. This means my next read off my Classics Club challenge will be The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy.

In this classically simple tale of the disastrous impact of outside life on a secluded community in Dorset, now in a new edition, Hardy narrates the rivalry for the hand of Grace Melbury between a simple and loyal woodlander and an exotic and sophisticated outsider. Betrayal, adultery, disillusion, and moral compromise are all worked out in a setting evoked as both beautiful and treacherous. The Woodlanders, with its thematic portrayal of the role of social class, gender, and evolutionary survival, as well as its insights into the capacities and limitations of language, exhibits Hardy’s acute awareness of his era’s most troubling dilemmas.

Purchase Links

Book Depository | Foyles | Waterstones | Wordery

(All purchases made using one of the above affiliate links gives a small percentage of money to myself with no extra cost to yourself. All proceeds go towards the upkeep of this blog. Thank you ever so much, your support is gratefully received.)

Hopefully, I will be able to finish and review The Woodlanders before the deadline of 30th October.

Please drop me a comment if you are doing the Classics Club challenge or if you have taken part in the Spin Challenge.

Happy Reading

Etsy

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you

Goodreads Monday: 19/09/2022

Goodreads Monday is now hosted by Budget Tales Book Club.  All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.

Hello!

I hope everyone has had a good start to the week so far. I have gone for another book off my Classics Club list because they are all on my vast Goodreads TBR.

Alongside Edgar Allan Poe in America, Britain’s Wilkie Collins stands as the inventor of the modern detective story. The Moonstone introduces all the ingredients: a homey, English country setting, and a colorfully exotic background in colonial India; the theft of a fabulous diamond from the lovely heroine; a bloody murder and a tragic suicide; a poor hero in love with the heroine but suspected of the crime, who can’t remember anything about the night the jewel was stolen; assorted friends, relatives, servants, a lawyer, a doctor, a sea captain—suspects, all; and, most essentially, a bumbling local policeman and a brilliant if eccentric London detective. Adding spice to the recipe are unexpected twists, a bit of dark satire, a dash of social comment, and an unusual but effective narrative structure—eleven different voices relate parts of the tale, each revealing as much about himself (and, in one case, herself) as about the mystery of the missing Moonstone.

Filled with suspense, action, and romance, The Moonstone is as riveting and intoxicating today as it was when it first appeared more than a century ago.

I read The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins recently and I could not put it down, so I am quite excited to read this soon, as I just love Wilkie Collins.

Have you got a favourite Wilkie Collins book?

Please drop me a comment if you have taken part in Goodreads Monday and I will head over for a visit.

Happy Reading

Etsy

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you

The Weekly Brief

Hello!

I hope everyone has had a nice weekend so far. I have had a better week blogging this week but not so good reading wise.

Posts this Week

Currently Reading

Enjoying this so far but I am finding the dialogue a bit trying at times.

Happy Reading

Etsy

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you

The Classics Club: Spin #31

Hello!

It is time for another spin event from The Classics Club. I really enjoyed the last one I did, because it chose me an absolutely brilliant book that I think I would have left to the end of the challenge. So here are my 20 books, whichever number gets picked on the 18th September I will read and review the book before the set date of 30th October.

  1. Silas Marner by George Eliot
  2. The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
  3. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
  4. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
  5. Cecilia by Frances Burney
  6. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
  7. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
  8. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome. K. Jerome
  9. The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
  10. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
  11. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
  12. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
  13. Evelina by Frances Burney
  14. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
  15. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
  16. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
  17. Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore
  18. The Runaway by Elizabeth Anna Hart
  19. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
  20. Candide by Voltaire

I’m really looking forward to what the random selection will be and I hope I will be able to read the book within the time frame. 

Wish me luck!

Please drop me a comment if you are taking part in the Spin event or if you have read any of the books on my list.

Happy Reading

Etsy

If you enjoy reading my blog and would like to make a donation I would be very grateful. Thank you