My Year In Books: 2023

Ghosts: The Button House Archives - Them There
How to Buy a House - Kirstie Allsopp & Phil Spencer 
*The Relentless Elimination of Hurry - John Mark Comer
I Dreamed I Met Vermeer - Carol Hill Marks
The Grinny Granny Donkey - Richard Curtis
Four Weddings & a Funeral: The Screenplay - Craig Smith & Katz Cowley
Go Set A Watchman - Harper Lee  
A Thousand Mornings - Mary Oliver
Mr Peacock’s Possessions - Lydia Syson
The Art Of The Tea Towel - Marnie Fogg
Breadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives - Al Tait & Kitty Tait
The Same But Different Too - Karl Newson
Attachments - Rainbow Rowell
Song From Faraway  -  Simon Stephens
My Name Is Lucy Barton - Elizabeth Strout
The Philosophy of Beer - Jane Peyton
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - David Levithan & Rachel Cohn

Quest.

Oh, you Pretty.

I had very much planned for this visit during my time in Chicago.
First glimpse giddy.

Some online reading prior had made me realise I wouldn't get so lucky as to be in town on a regular day, complete with library tour as a book fair was scheduled but still... a fair & proper way to enjoy a library nonetheless.

Hence this fan girl left happy after time amongst the stacks.

Right proper placement amongst the stalls  ღ

[Thank you Niffenegger!]

_____________

On so many levels. 
I drafted this poem's finer details into a letter
but didn't keep stock of those for myself.

Word On The Water, LDN

book nook!

Spring Extracts.

May —

Attachments |  Rainbow Rowell

from the 'Annie Spence Recommends' list.
I liked it; it grew on me. And, importantly, the one-sided origin of the attachment was addressed outright, otherwise the snooping would've felt even more awkward. 

Lincoln still thought about Beth. All the time, at first.

He subscribed to the newspaper so that he could read her reviews at breakfast and again at lunch. He tried to figure out how she was doing through her writing. Did she seem happy? Was she being too hard on romantic comedies? Or too generous?

Reading her reviews kept his memory of her alive in a way he probably shouldn’t want. Like a pilot light inside of him. It made him make sometimes, when she was being especially funny or insightful, or when he could read past her words to something true that he knew about her. But the aching faded, too. Things get better — hurt less — over time. If you let them.  [339]

Rowell, Rainbow. Attachments. 
Orion Books: London, 2012

 _____________

February —

My Name Is Lucy Barton|  Elizabeth Strout

This, I read after talk of a staging so I thought I'd best acquaint myself with the text.

It was ... okay. 
In a nutshell, the quote below encapsulates the shifting narrator that put me in mind of Ishiguro. Strout's fragmentary style and narration meant I didn't warm to the childlike Lucy.  

I am still not sure it’s a true memory, except I do know it, I think.
I mean: It is true. Ask anyone who knew us.  [119]

I began to feel like the novel had hit its stride in the plot around the workshop with Sarah Payne. A shift came in the storytelling with the directive: 'go to the page'  being followed through & a declaration now of 'abuse', putting a wholly different slant on the childhood detailed thus far [120 / 135].

Other elements recalled Plath's Esther Greenwood: 
the clinical recovery setting post-breakdown; talk of trash & awards  [112]. 

______

... as though they were silently saying You are not one of us, as though I had betrayed them by leaving them. I suppose I had.  [162]

Strout, Elizabeth. My Name Is Lucy Barton
Penguin | Random House: London, 2016.

Winter Stack

 

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist |  Cohn & Levithan

Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's T-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning. 

Cohn, Rachel & David Levithan. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. 
Electric Monkey: Great Britain, 2014.

The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes

Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form: Eliot, Auden, MacNiece. There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book, I Capture the Castle. I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all or that they were the right books to own. [24] 

At the same time, it made sense that Veronica didn’t give me a simple answer, didn’t do or say what I hoped or expected. In this she was at least consistent with my memory of her. Of course, at times, I’d been tempted to set her down as a woman of mystery, as opposed to the woman of clarity I married in Margaret. True, I hadn’t known where I was with her, couldn’t read her heart or her mind or her motivation. But an enigma is a puzzle you want to solve. I didn’t want to solve Veronica, certainly not at this late date. She been a bloody difficult young woman, 40 years ago, and – on the evidence of this two-word two-finger response – didn’t seem to have mellowed with age. [82] 

… There was a moment in my late twenties, when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life. 

But time . . . how time first grounds and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. [93]

Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. Vintage: London, 2012.