The rules are answer the questions below and share a link to your blog in the comments section of Sam’s blog.
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you will read next?
Hello!
Welcome to my first WWW Wednesday of 2023. I have had a lovely day today doing lots of crafting and it has been so relaxing. All my crafting projects (well the ones that work) are going on to my Etsy site.
What I am Currently Reading
I started reading a chapter a day of these two books from New Year’s Day and I have really been enjoying both books. I will probably start to read more of The Count of Monte Cristo once I have finished Aeneid.
What I have Recently Finished Reading
I absolutely loved The Box of Delights and I have ordered The Midnight Folk to read next.
What I Think I will Read Next
I have so many books that I want to read at the moment I am finding it difficult to choose as I just want to read them all at the same time. I might have to start a TBR jar and pick a book at random.
Please drop me a comment with your WWW Wednesday and I will head over for a visit.
I have just realised that I never did my wrap up for December 2022! I did my yearly review but not my last month. December is usually my best month reading wise but sadly this December did not go so well but I am still pleased with the reading that I did get done considering how much I was working and fighting off illness.
Last year I was quite relaxed with my bookish goals and to be honest because of this I ignored them. This year I have decided to get back to my usual challenges.
In 2021 I attempted to read my height in books and sadly I failed. For 2023 I have decided to try the challenge again and I really hope this time I will complete it.
I had no idea what to set for this years Goodreads Challenge so I let my fellow Bookstagrammers decide for me and they chose 80 books. 80 books! I have never read anymore than 74 books in a year but I am hopeful I will manage this challenge. It might mean I read some smaller books this year.
I also want to read more classics this year as I miss my Ancient Greek and Rome literature. I am thinking I might read a lot of Greek plays but I will see what I come up with.
Blogging is now hopefully all back to normal because over the festive period everything has gone out of the window. This was sadly mainly due to illness and being too tired to blog but I am thankfully now on the mend.
I missed a weekly brief so this is technically a two week brief.
I never finished Aeneid by Virgil so I have decided that I will read a book a day starting from today to finish the book. I’m not sure why I didn’t finish it because I absolutely love the book. I have also been reading The Box of Delights by John Masefield and I am hooked. I love his writing and although the slang is rather dated it just adds to the fun of the book.
I didn’t read as many books in 2022 as I usually do but I did read bigger books than usual. I also managed to complete my Goodreads Challenge.
Here are the books I read in 2022.
I’m so glad I read more classics this year and I made progress with the book series I have been trying to finish. I’m still trying to come up with my reading goals for 2023 but I have decided I want to try and read my height in books again as I failed when I tried it in 2021.
I hope you are all looking forward to New Year and have some fun plans for New Year’s Eve. We will probably have a quiet New Year’s Eve at home but we have a nice bottle of champagne to help us celebrate.
My chosen poem today is by one of my favourites Eleanor Farjeon.
Poetry
What is Poetry? Who knows?
Not a rose, but the scent of a rose;
Not a sky, but the light in the sky;
Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly;
Not the sea, but the sound of the sea;
Not myself, but what makes me
See, hear, and feel something that prose
Cannot: and what it is, who knows?
Eleanor Farjeon
Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries by Kate Mosse
Blurb
Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries brings together Kate’s rich and detailed knowledge of unheard and under-heard women’s history, and of how and why women’s achievements have routinely been omitted from the history books. This beautiful illustrated book is both an alternative feminist history of the world and a personal memoir about the nature of women’s struggles to be heard, about how history is made and by whom.
Split into ten sections, each covering a different category of women’s achievements in history, Kate Mosse tells the stories of female inventors and scientists, philanthropists and conservationists, authors and campaigners. It is the most accessible narrative non-fiction with a genuinely diverse, truly global perspective featuring names such as Sophie Scholl, Mary Seacole, Cornelia Sorabji, Helen Suzman, Shirley Chisholm, and Violette Szabo. And in deeply personal passages Kate writes about the life of her great-grandmother, Lily Watson, where she turns detective to find out why she has all but disappeared from the record.
Review
I discovered Kate Mosse this year so when I saw this book come out I bought it straight away. It took me a long time to read this book because I found that I preferred to dip into it when I was in the mood for some nonfiction.
I found this book absolutely fascinating but at the same time rather frustrating. Just as I discover this fantastic pioneering woman from history the book quickly moves on to another pioneering woman from history. There were certain women that I would have loved to have learned more about. It did mean that I started doing my own research into these interesting characters.
I will be honest I didn’t really find the sections on Lily, Mosse’s great-grandmother, very interesting and would have happily done without them. I can understand Mosse’s interest in her great-grandmother but it just felt a little bit like she was trying too hard to make her relative who published books and articles known to the general public again as Lily had fallen from everyone’s memory and her books are out of publication.
This book is an amazing resource to dip into and one that I will return to again and again. I learned so much from this book and found some amazing women from history who I plan to research further. History has always generally been written by men about men so it was refreshing to find a book written by a woman about women from history. I didn’t find this book an easy read because I found it jumped around rather a lot but I still loved it. I give this book 4 out of 5 Dragons.
(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.)
About the author
Kate Mosse is an international bestselling author with sales of more than five million copies in 42 languages. Her fiction includes the novels Labyrinth (2005), Sepulchre (2007), The Winter Ghosts (2009), and Citadel (2012), as well as an acclaimed collection of short stories, The Mistletoe Bride & Other Haunting Tales (2013). Kate’s new novel, The Taxidermist’s Daughter is out now.
Kate is the Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize) and in June 2013, was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature. She lives in Sussex.
I hope everyone is ready for Christmas. My chosen poem today is a favourite of mine by Cicely Mary Barker.
Sadly our tree won’t have a Christmas Tree fairy living in it because our tree is artificial, this is mainly because my husband and myself are both allergic to real Christmas trees.
The Christmas Tree Fairy
The little Christmas Tree was born
And dwelt in open air;
It did not guess how bright a dress
Some day its boughs would wear;
Brown cones were all, it thought, a tall
And grown-up Fir would bear.
O little Fir! Your forest home
Is far and far away;
And here indoors these boughs of yours
With coloured balls are gay,
With candle-light, and tinsel bright,
For this is Christmas Day!
A dolly-fairy stands on top,
Till children sleep; then she
(A live one now!) from bough to bough
Goes gliding silently.
O magic sight, this joyous night!
O laden, sparkling tree!
Cicely Mary Barker
For more than thirty years Wendy Cope has been one of the nation’s most popular and respected poets. Christmas Poems collects together her best festive poems, including anthology favourites such as ‘The Christmas Life’, together with new and previously unpublished work. Cope celebrates the joyful aspects of the season but doesn’t overlook the problems and sadness it can bring. With lively illustrations to accompany the words, it is a book to enjoy this Christmas and in years to come.
Review
I bought this book in October when I was in Bath and I was really excited because I thought this little book would be a perfect festive read in December. At only 48 pages long this did not take me long to read and was a perfect diversion from the Christmas prep.
As you probably know by now if you have been following me for any length of time I was never a huge poetry fan but since I have been blogging I have been making an effort to get into poetry. Since doing this I have found quite a few favourite poets that I enjoy to read and I am always looking for new poets to read. Wendy Cope is one of these new poets for me.
Certain poems within this book I could really relate to. Cope was a primary school teacher for 15 years and a piano player and her reflections on playing for children’s services I can relate to as I teach piano and woodwind in a primary school and know all about the Christmas services and the many renditions of Little Donkey.
I will be honest there were only a few poems that I really enjoyed in this book because I found quite a few of the poems rather depressing and not very helpful for getting into the festive spirit. However, I like Cope’s style as a poet and will definitely be checking out more of her poems.
The illustrations in this book are by Michael Kirkham and were excellent and really added to the poems. Without the illustrations the book would have been a lot shorter.
Overall, I found this little book of poems an accomplished read but not really my cup of tea. It sadly wasn’t the festive read I was looking for but I appreciate the skill of Wendy Cope. I give this book 3 out of 5 Dragons.
(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.)
About the poet
Wendy Cope was educated at Farringtons School, Chislehurst, London and then, after finishing university at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, she worked for 15 years as a primary school teacher in London.
In 1981, she became Arts and Reviews editor for the Inner London Education Authority magazine, ‘Contact’. Five years later she became a freelance writer and was a television critic for ‘The Spectator magazine’ until 1990.
Her first published work ‘Across the City’ was in a limited edition, published by the Priapus Press in 1980 and her first commercial book of poetry was ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’ in 1986. Since then she has published two further books of poetry and has edited various anthologies of comic verse.
In 1987 she received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry and in 1995 the American Academy of Arts and Letters Michael Braude Award for light verse. In 2007 she was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.
In 1998 she was the BBC Radio 4 listeners’ choice to succeed Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate and when Andrew Motion’s term of office ended in 2009 she was once again considered as a replacement.
She was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s 2010 Birthday Honours List.
Lady Book Dragon 