booklish booklist #1
The lovely Jas has contributed the first Booklist for my new series: thank you Jas!
Here's her great list...
Cider with Rosie- Laurie Lee. The quintessential English summer interspersed with tales of hardship and the first world war in the background.
The Mayor of Casterbridge- Thomas Hardy. Pessimistic yes but the lesson that you can never escape your past all bound up in wonderful descriptions of the Dorset countryside.
The War Between the Tates- Alison Lurie. The war here is really the wars between old small town America and the march of progress, feminism, birth control, the new liberalism and the advance of new building and the desecration of the wilderness to build yet more modern suburbs. Interestingly the new age guru and activist was impotent.
My Family and Other Animals- Gerald Durrell. My introduction to Greece, albeit the Greece of 80 years ago, read first when I was 14. Lugaretzia and Spiros are almost caricatures of themselves, their descendants can still be found in rural Greece today. Wonderful descriptions of a landscape which is largely unchanged away from the busy coastal resorts.
A Walk in The Woods- Bill Bryson. A travelogue with a difference, Bryson's tale of his walk along the Appalachian Trail with his irrepressible friend Katz, His wit finds humour in the mundane along with a plea to protect the last great wildernesses of the American continent.
The Glittering Prizes- Frederick Raphael. Sparkling tale of the privileged classes at Cambridge in the late 1960s comes with a warning that some of the prizes may not be so glittering after all.
Comments? Questions? Want to do a list of your own? Email and let me know!
Here's her great list...
Cider with Rosie- Laurie Lee. The quintessential English summer interspersed with tales of hardship and the first world war in the background.
The Mayor of Casterbridge- Thomas Hardy. Pessimistic yes but the lesson that you can never escape your past all bound up in wonderful descriptions of the Dorset countryside.
The War Between the Tates- Alison Lurie. The war here is really the wars between old small town America and the march of progress, feminism, birth control, the new liberalism and the advance of new building and the desecration of the wilderness to build yet more modern suburbs. Interestingly the new age guru and activist was impotent.
My Family and Other Animals- Gerald Durrell. My introduction to Greece, albeit the Greece of 80 years ago, read first when I was 14. Lugaretzia and Spiros are almost caricatures of themselves, their descendants can still be found in rural Greece today. Wonderful descriptions of a landscape which is largely unchanged away from the busy coastal resorts.
A Walk in The Woods- Bill Bryson. A travelogue with a difference, Bryson's tale of his walk along the Appalachian Trail with his irrepressible friend Katz, His wit finds humour in the mundane along with a plea to protect the last great wildernesses of the American continent.
The Glittering Prizes- Frederick Raphael. Sparkling tale of the privileged classes at Cambridge in the late 1960s comes with a warning that some of the prizes may not be so glittering after all.
Comments? Questions? Want to do a list of your own? Email and let me know!
