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.

It is time for another book off my Classics Club list, which is my main TBR at the moment and any books I read not off the list are just my usual mood reading choices.

Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire.

Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, “Clarissa” is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. Its rich ambiguities – our sense of Clarissa’s scrupulous virtue tinged with intimations of her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex; the wicked and amusing faces of Lovelace, who must be easily the most charming villain in English literature – give the story extraordinary psychological momentum. .

I’m really looking forward to reading this book as it will be something for different for me as I haven’t read many books where the story is told through letters.

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

Happy Reading

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Goodreads Monday: 7/03/2022

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.

This weeks book off my Classics Club List is another new author to me and one that I have been meaning to read for many years and own a lot of her books already.

When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill-owner and self-made man, John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction.

In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell skillfully fuses individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale creates one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.

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Hopefully I will get around to reading this book this year and it will be another classic off my ever growing TBR pile.

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

Happy Reading

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

Goodreads Monday: 28/02/2022

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.

I am continuing with featuring books off my Classics Club list and I am also linking my Goodreads Monday posts on the main list as well so I don’t forget which books I have featured.

Love in Excess is a well-crafted novel in which the claims of love and ambition are pursued through multiple storylines until the heroine engineers a melodramatic conclusion. Love in Excess and its reception provide a lively and valuable record of the challenge that female desire posed to social decorum.

This is a new author for me. I made sure that when I built my list of Classics books I had some new authors as well as old favourites. I always like discovering new authors especially if they have written lots of good books that I can add to my TBR.

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

Happy Reading

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

Goodreads Monday: 21/02/2022

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. I have been trying to catch up on chores today but I did manage some quiet time with my book as well.

I am continuing with featuring books off my Classics Club list and I am also linking my Goodreads Monday posts on the main list as well so I don’t forget which books I have featured.

Wilkie Collins is rightly regarded as one of the nineteenth century’s most eminent writers. Although many Persephone readers will know The Woman in White and The Moonstone, he in fact published twenty-one other novels. The New Magdalen (1873), Persephone Book No.138, is about a ‘fallen woman’, Mercy Merrick, attempting to rehabilitate her character and her reputation; and the (often reprehensible and unkind) attitude of some of those around her.

I absolutely loved reading The Woman in White so I am looking forward to reading The New Magdalen. I always find it such a shame that books get lost and forgotten so I think it is great of Persephone books to get this book back on the shelves and people reading it again.

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

Happy Reading

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

Goodreads Monday: 7/02/2022

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. The third book I have chosen to feature from my Classics Club list is…

The story of a woman born and bred in the murky world of seventeenth-century London. Daniel Defoe created a female character-narrator who recounts, from a woman’s point of view, her life and adventures, portraying critically the society in which she lived.

I’ve never read any books by Daniel Defoe so I am looking forward to reading this book.

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

Happy Reading

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

Goodreads Monday: 24/01/2022

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners. 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 Monday so far. I haven’t had much teaching today which has meant I could do bit of reading and have a lovely walk. Tomorrow is a busier day for me so will probably mean less reading but I am still hoping for a nice walk to clear away the cobwebs.

I am continuing to use my Goodreads Monday posts to feature a book on my Classics Club List as that makes up quite a bit of my TBR pile at the moment.

Taken from the poverty of her parents’ home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle’s absence in Antigua, the Crawford’s arrive in the neighbourhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen’s first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.

This will be a reread for me but I last read Mansfield Park in 2014 so it will be nice to read again and refresh my memory.

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

Happy Reading

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

Goodreads Monday: 17/01/2022

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.

Hello and happy Monday!

I have decided for my Goodreads Monday posts I will feature some of the books I have on my Classics Club List.

This collection brings together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen’s manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Friendship [sic], and The History of England.

This edition includes:
– Frederic and Elfrida
– Jack and Alice
– Edgar and Emma
– Henry and Eliza
– Love and Freindship
– A History of England
– The Three Sisters
– Lesley Castle
– Evelyn
– Catharine, or the Bower
– Lady Susan
– The Watsons
– Sanditon

This is the only Austen I have never read so I am looking forward to reading it and seeing what her writing was like as a younger less experienced writer.

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

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

Goodreads Monday: 27/12/2021

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners. All you have to do is show off a book from your TBR that you’re looking forward to reading.

Hello Everyone!

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and got some nice new books as presents. My chosen book today has been on my TBR for ages but until yesterday I did not own it. Now I own the whole series because I had the set for Christmas.

For more than a hundred years humans, dwarves, gnomes and elves lived together in relative peace. But times have changed, the uneasy peace is over and now the races once again fight each other – and themselves: Dwarves are killing their kinsmen, and elves are murdering humans and elves, at least those elves who are friendly to humans… Into this tumultuous time is born a child for whom the witchers of the world have been waiting.

Ciri, the granddaughter of Queen Calanthe, the Lioness of Cintra, has strange powers and a stranger destiny, for prophecy names her the Flame, one with the power to change the world – for good, or for evil… Geralt, the witcher of Rivia, has taken Ciri to the relative safety of the Witchers’ Settlement, but it soon becomes clear that Ciri isn’t like the other witchers. As the political situation grows ever dimmer and the threat of war hangs almost palpably over the land, Geralt searches for someone to train Ciri’s unique powers.

But someone else has an eye on the young girl, someone who understand exactly what the prophecy means – and exactly what Ciri’s power can do. This time Geralt may have met his match.

I can’t wait to start the series and it will most likely be one that I start in the new year.

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

Happy Reading

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

Goodreads Monday: 22/11/2021

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners. 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.

The book I have chosen for my Goodreads Monday post this week is another book off my Christmas TBR list.

Midwinter. As snow falls softly outside and frost sparkles on tree branches, it’s time to curl up before a roaring fire, wrap your hands around a steaming mug of mulled wine, and forget your worries for now.

But as the temperature drops outside, malice is sharpening its claws … and murder walks abroad. In these classic stories of mystery and mayhem, let ten of the great crime writers in history surprise and delight you with twists and turns as shocking as an icicle in the heart.

Featuring stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, Cyril Hare, Anthony Berkeley, Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham, Ellis Peters … and more.

I’ve read two of the books so far from the Murderous Christmas Stories Series and I have loved both of them. My dad is also a massive fan of the series. I’m really looking forward to reading this book in December and maybe a few more of the books from the series.

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

Happy Reading

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

Goodreads Monday: 15/11/2021

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners. 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. I have had a gentle start with just a little bit of teaching so I have spent the rest of the day tidying and binning things. I’m not sure you can see any difference yet but hopefully I will make more headway tomorrow.

The book I have chosen for Goodreads Monday is one that is sat on my Christmas TBR pile and is one that I am planning on buddy reading with my best friend.

One boy and his toy are about to change everything…

Jack loves his childhood toy, Dur Pig. DP has always been there for him, through good and bad. Until one Christmas Eve something terrible happens — DP is lost. But Christmas Eve is a night for miracles and lost causes, a night when all things can come to life… even toys. And Jack’s newest toy — the Christmas Pig (DP’s replacement) — has a daring plan: Together they’ll embark on a magical journey to seek something lost, and to save the best friend Jack has ever known…

I’m really looking forward to reading this, especially as it is a buddy read as I do love a buddy read.

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

Happy Reading

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