A selection of words and pictures to represent July’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

~

She was sure that only those who had never had freedom understood its true worth, a treasure to be guarded at all times and never to be lost again.

Claudine’s Daughter by Rosalind Laker (1979)

~

If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor (1951)

~

‘But the Devil is not so cunning as he believes. He has left certain marks on the bodies of those whom he has claimed as his own. He most commonly shows favour towards a particular type of woman. Sometimes she is poor. Often she is unmarried. She may also be skilled in the art of healing.’

Despite the cool of the old stone church, Frances felt her body prickle with a rising heat.

The King’s Witch by Tracy Borman (2018)

~

‘Now, do listen, Deb! Seven hundred pounds for the bays and a new barouche! Well, I can’t think where the money is to come from. It seems a monstrous price.’

‘We might let the bays go, and hire a pair of job horses,’ suggested Miss Grantham dubiously.

‘I can’t and I won’t live in Squalor!’ declared her aunt tearfully.

Faro’s Daughter by Georgette Heyer (1941)

~

The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not adopting it.

Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy (1871)

~

He ran his hand along a shelf, but was not checking for dust. ‘One book is not enough. Never enough. What one needs is a library. A library is an investment in the future, Helena.’

The Words in My Hand by Guinevere Glasfurd (2016)

~

‘Have you noticed what is left, at the end of the day, as it were, after all these ancient civilizations have been and gone, disappeared into the mists of time?’

Mrs Wilkinson smiled vacantly as she held her wine glass to her lips.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, smiling disarmingly. ‘The beautiful things that people have made, and, occasionally, if they are lucky, the things that they have said. That is all that remains. Not fame, nor fortune or notoriety: these things pass…we take very seriously the gift of art and literature, as these are the things that will be left after all our empires are gone.’

My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis (2017)

~

It is a great prophet, is the sea: one need only sit upon the shore for a time to know that the answers to all mysteries are contained within the chanting of the waves. But we have lived apart from the sea for so long that we no longer speak its language. And so we look upon it like deafened men towards a singer, trying to understand what has been lost to us.

Smile of the Wolf by Tim Leach (2018)

~

‘Well now, suppose you got out the Meccano and made a pretty elaborate crane. Then suppose you took it to pieces again and handed just those bits to your boys and told them to make a crane. Each boy would produce something different, and each would have a few bits over, which they’d just have to use up anyhow. We’ve been given just such an assortment of bits – but we don’t even know whether they should make up into a crane or a windmill or a bridge. For instance, why am I here? Why did your precious Chief Constable get me down? What am I supposed to be investigating?’

Appleby’s End by Michael Innes (1945)

~

“You’re the daughters of a prince, Edwin’s closest marriageable kin,” said Breguswid. “Peace-Weavers, they call them. Brides who gather broken threads and weave them together to mend the hurt men cause.”

The Abbess of Whitby by Jill Dalladay (2015)

~

While it was certainly true that country folk could still be a little credulous, being far removed as they were from great seats of learning, Sarah understood that when there was a dearth of knowledge and education, people – no matter their origins – were inclined to believe just about anything communicated to them with sufficient confidence and authority. However, Sarah also knew from personal experience that when all hope was lost, when all else had failed, people were willing to try almost anything to save those that they loved.

The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry (2018)

~

“Every group of people have their own stories that they create to make sense of their world. Therefore, in folk stories, in fairy tales, we see the reflection of humankind: its strengths, flaws, hopes, fears. They tell us what it takes to survive. That, Miss Hart, is why the stories are important, and why they must be protected.”

The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola (2018)

~

Favourite book read in July:

Desperate Remedies

Where did my reading take me in July?

England, the Netherlands, Wales, Chile, Scotland, Iceland

Authors read for the first time in July:

Elizabeth Taylor, Guinevere Glasfurd, Rhiannon Lewis, Tim Leach, Tracy Borman, Ambrose Parry, Jill Dalladay

~

Have you read any of these books? Which books did you enjoy in July?

A selection of words and pictures to represent June’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

~

Charlie asked a lot of questions, and if Henry couldn’t answer them, he bought a book which he read quickly and Charlie read slowly. Henry didn’t seem at all surprised by this overwhelming plenitude of objects to look at or ideas to think about, but Charlie was. It seemed to him that he had spent thirty years circling neighborhoods and buildings without even wondering what was inside. And each building was a Fabergé egg, pleasant on the outside, a treasure trove within. Henry said, “Books are like that, too.”

Golden Age by Jane Smiley (2015)

~

They had talked of it, planned it, and now here I was, to be informed. What would be the simplest way to curb a woman whose loyalties were suspect? For centuries, how had women of influence been robbed of their freedom?

“I have planned a marriage for you,” he said, fists on the arms of his chair to take his weight as he pushed himself to his feet.

Queen of the North by Anne O’Brien (2018)

~

Everything about Brighton pleased him: the fine streets and squares and well-planned gardens, the bow-fronted emporia and the libraries, the chop-houses, the coffee shops, the Assembly Rooms at the Castle Inn and countless other places of refreshment and entertainment, all set about that grand arena of elegant promenade, the Steine. As he turned to follow the Steine he looked across at the exotic Marine Pavilion, the King’s seaside palace, which had been that royal gentleman’s favourite residence during his days as Prince of Wales and later as Prince Regent. With its opal-tinted minarets and bulbous domes glinting with gold in the sun it had the appearance of an enormous, many-faceted Arabian Nights’ jewel set down glorious and incongruously within sight and sound of the English Channel.

Warwyck’s Wife by Rosalind Laker (1978)

~

Say good-night to Vicky, looking angelic in bed, and ask what she is thinking about, lying there. She disconcertingly replies with briskness: “Oh, Kangaroos and things.”

(Note: The workings of the infant mind very, very difficult to follow, sometimes. Mothers by no means infallible.)

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield (1930)

~

“Very well, then. I want it understood that I’m a full third partner in this enterprise, and intend to remain so. I’m not to be put in a corner and disregarded because I am a woman. My uncle picked a good crew for this voyage; if you gentlemen think you can run away with this ship or go pirating, you’ll discover otherwise.”

The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, ed. Lawrence Ellsworth (2014)

~

‘To be an Amazon,’ she had said, striding ahead, her boots crunching a path for me, ‘is to fight, whether man or woman, virgin or mother. You are destined to become a queen, so the fight to protect your people will be both your calling and your duty, and nothing, no man, no marriage, no child, shall come before it.’

For the Immortal by Emily Hauser (2018)

~

‘Strawberry blonde!’ his voice boomed.

There had been a field of strawberries on their fruit farm, Cecily remembered. But as much as she searched, she never found a blonde one.

‘Real life,’ her mother Agnes had remarked, ‘is persistently disappointing’.

Real life, then, was like a field of red strawberries.

The Last Pier by Roma Tearne (2015)

~

Frances simplifies it, saying, ‘Imagine the King is a lit candle. The closer you stand the more light you have. But too close and you’re burned. My great-uncle wanted power more than anything, you see.’

The Poison Bed by EC Fremantle (2018)

~

Favourite books read in June:

Queen of the North and The Last Pier

Where did my reading take me in June?

USA, England, Ancient Greece, France, Italy

Authors read for the first time in June:

EM Delafield
H Bedford-Jones, Sidney Levett-Yeats, Jeffery Farnol, Johnston McCulley, Pierce Egan, John Bloundelle-Burton, Harold Lamb, Stanley J Weyman, Marion Polk Angellotti (all in The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure)

~

Have you read any of these books? Which books did you enjoy in June?

A selection of words and pictures to represent May’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

~

My master was not often rude to people, but he replied sternly: ‘Every war is a civil war. Does the fact that armies come from different realms make the fight between them more natural? We all occupy the same realm, sir: it is called humanity.’

Tomorrow by Damian Dibben (2018)

~

‘The guide’s here,’ she said, seeing a lady in Tudor dress advancing towards them. ‘She’s early too. And what a gown!’ It was an exact replica, in sumptuous black velvet, of the elegant attire Anne wore in her portrait. Even the French hood – no easy thing to get right – was perfect.

The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today by Alison Weir (2017)

~

‘Well, never mind about that,’ said his lordship. ‘It’s no use your saying that you’d prefer to be a governess to marrying me, because it’s absurd! No one would. Dash it, Hero, I don’t want to talk like a coxcomb, and I dare say I may want for principle, and have libertine propensities, and spend all my time in gaming-hells, besides being the sort of ugly customer no woman of sensibility could stomach, but you can’t pretend that you wouldn’t be far more comfortable with me than at the curst school you keep on prosing about!’

Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer (1944)

~

‘The thing is to be happy if you can,’ said Arthur.

‘No; – that is not the thing. I’m not much of a philosopher, but as far as I can see there are two philosophies in the world. The one is to make one’s self happy, and the other is to make other people happy. The latter answers the best.’

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope (1876)

~

‘Then I hope you are finding comfort in your memories, sire.’

William smiled a little. ‘Not all are comfortable, but they are instructive and enlightening. When I returned, I stowed them away and did not look at them again, but now it is time to make my peace with those that are still difficult, and to draw sustenance from the uplifting ones.’

Templar Silks by Elizabeth Chadwick (2018)

~

He’d grown to accept that joy was to be discovered at the edge of existence, fluttering in the corner of one’s eye, glimpsed only in those moments of serenity at dawn before one was fully awake. Happiness, when it came to Albert, was an explosion of sunlight.

House of Gold by Natasha Solomons (2018)

~

Louise apologised again. ‘I’m afraid I spoiled it. Is it a favourite of yours? I like thrillers, too. Miriam, my daughter, is trying to remould my taste. I have to keep books like that in a drawer, because if I leave them by my bed, she takes them away and substitutes a biography she thinks I should read, or one of those novels they write nowadays about uneasy people who think things for pages and pages.’

The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens (1955)

~

His smile vanished. ‘Jane, you have little idea of what makes a woman beautiful to men. It is not just a matter of face and form. If her heart is pure, it shines forth. If she be modest and virtuous, yet kindly withal, it is written in her face. But if she is shrewish, complaining and unkind, be she never so lovely, she cannot be beautiful.’

Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen by Alison Weir (2018)

~

“I am afraid,” confessed Pen, “that I am not very well-behaved. Aunt says that I had a lamentable upbringing, because my father treated me as though I had been a boy. I ought to have been, you understand.”

“I cannot agree with you,” said Sir Richard. “As a boy you would have been in no way remarkable; as a female, believe me, you are unique.”

She flushed to the roots of her hair. “I think that is a compliment.”

“It is,” Sir Richard said, amused.

The Corinthian by Georgette Heyer (1940)

~

‘One thing I do know,’ I said, ‘is that there is no pleasure on this earth better than reading. I have been transported,’ I said, ‘to realms beyond my wildest imagining, to places I shall never see, for they are on the other side of the world, or do not exist at all. And I have been made to cry – and to laugh and to think and to be peaceful, and all of this I have got from books’.

The Illumination of Ursula Flight by Anna-Marie Crowhurst (2018)

~

Favourite books read in May:

The Prime Minister, House of Gold, The Corinthian and The Winds of Heaven (lots of good ones this month!)

Where did my reading take me in May?

England, Italy, Austria, Germany, the Holy Land

Authors read for the first time in May:

Damian Dibben, Anna-Marie Crowhurst, Monica Dickens

~

Have you read any of these books? Which books did you enjoy in May?

A selection of words and pictures to represent April’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

~

There are no friends at Whitehall. Only allies and enemies. Among the great, power ebbs and flows according to their conjuctions and oppositions. And the rest of us are tossed about in the current, helpless to direct our course, let alone navigate our way to safety.

The Fire Court by Andrew Taylor (2018)

~

Alexander frowned. ‘I am sure you exist, John, for I can see you here praying to God. But say this: a man may wake up one day and feel happy, and wake up the next and feel as if he cannot go on, though his life remains exactly the same. Or, to take another example: two men may lose their sight. One man quickly adjusts to it and continues to lead a useful life, the other falls into despair. What does that tell us? That the mind is all! If we can control the mind, it does not matter the circumstance.’

The Pharmacist’s Wife by Vanessa Tait (2018)

~

When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)

~

The universe about you is charged with opposing forces – angels and devils, good and evil, light and darkness – you can call them what you will, and as you think of things and people, you invite into them one or the other. Think evil things of a man, and you’ve done your poor best to make a devil of him.

Gentian Hill by Elizabeth Goudge (1949)

~

I do believe I begin to grasp the nature of miracles! For would it be a miracle, if there was any reason for it? Miracles have nothing to do with reason. Miracles contradict reason, they strike clean across mere human deserts, and deliver and save where they will. If they made sense, they would not be miracles.

A Morbid Taste for Bones by Ellis Peters (1977)

~

If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W Tuchman (1978)

~

I usually like being by the river. I like the noise: the bellowing between ship and dock, the raucous squabbling of gulls, the shoving and shouting, the creak and groan of ropes and the slap of palms as bargains are struck. The quays reek of the scent of fish and salt air, and the refuse stranded on the beaches at low tide. Beggars pick over the debris in the mud, or snatch at scraps around the stalls. Tall ships and sturdy cogs jostle at the quays, sailed in from who knows where, destined for somewhere far from here. They set sail across the wide seas, the seas I have never seen, ploughing through the waves, bucking and rearing like horses in the wind…

The Cursed Wife by Pamela Hartshorne (2018)

~

“Patience is the capacity to endure all that is necessary in attaining a desired end. The patient man is master of his fate. The submissive man has handed his fate over to somebody else. Patience implies liberty and superiority. Impatience nearly always involves a loss of liberty. It causes people to commit themselves, to burn their boats, to put it out of their power to alter or modify their course. Patience never forsakes the ultimate goal because the road is hard. There can be no patience without an object.”

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (1950)

~

There were men who would take the sword and with it conquer the world for their countrymen or themselves. Such men were a nuisance always, and in a world of high-explosive they were a calamity. But always History – a sentimental jade – would give them a little glory: that amid an ocean of tears and blood.

The Daffodil Affair by Michael Innes (1942)

~

As we drew closer to Grenada, her forest summits became more sharply defined and green patches began a glimmeration among the inky blues. The distant mountains of the interior were veiled in grey mist, whiles to the west – as the afternoon gathered in – the sun melted the sky into the sea, turning them both pale-pale lemon.

Sugar Money by Jane Harris (2017)

~

Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym (1977)

~

Favourite books read in April:

Circe and The Feast

Where did my reading take me in April?

England, Scotland, Wales, Ancient Greece, France, the Amazon, Grenada and Martinique

Authors read for the first time in April:

Vanessa Tait and Barbara W. Tuchman

~

Have you read any of these books? What have you been reading in April?

A selection of words and pictures to represent March’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

~

And she wondered then what it would feel like to make a poem from words, as you might make a stitching needle from a sheep’s bone, or a vest from woven wool, or a rope bound so strong from slender horse hair that it could swing a man through the air across a cliff face. To tie one word to another and one line to the next and with it let one person enter the mind and heart of another – would that not be a fine thing to do?

The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson (2018)

~

“She may not have the lifestyle she could have had, but she’s happy – and free. And the two go together: You can’t be happy unless you are free, and you can’t be free until you’re truly happy – which means being true to yourself first and foremost.”

The Snow Globe by Judith Kinghorn (2015)

~

He raised his head to her. “Because how else do you steer a ship through a storm – especially a ship that’s already battered and leaking, with no certainty of safe harbour? If I abandon the helm and wring my hands in panic with the rest of the crew, then we go down…and fast.”

The Scarlet Lion by Elizabeth Chadwick (2006)

~

“It seems as if all the men in your family have been kindhearted, Alma. There aren’t many people like them in this world of ours.”

“There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed…”

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende (2015)

~

Why should life be lived as a crushing tedium and unrewarded toil? Why should the haves live in splendour and the have-nots in squalor? Although I did not envy the highwayman his vices – neither drinking, gambling nor whoring were my game – I did envy his freedom. But here I was now, on the open road, as free as any highwayman.

Ill Will by Michael Stewart (2018)

~

His early life, he thought, was like the slow flip of photographs: the images were too sparse and sporadic to make any sense together, but each was so vivid that whenever one flickered to his mind, he was startled by its intensity. How could certain visions like these remain so luminous, and yet he had no recollection at all of what had come before or after?

Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry (2015)

~

With the rest of Auburn and the thousands of villages like us I have found something out, and there is a rock under my feet. Physical fear, recantations under torture, are weapons of the enemy. They are not truths. If we are not free tomorrow, we shall not be happy tomorrow. There will be no living in false content. That in all the world is certain.

The Oaken Heart by Margery Allingham (1941)

~

Then James realised that the prince had made no complaint about the fact that he too was branded with infamy. What was it like to be a man of twenty-three, called to lead tens of thousands of men onto the battlefields of a country not his own, and to have every aspect of his life, character and high ideals dragged in the dirt for more than twelve burdensome months?

The Winter Prince by Cheryl Sawyer (2007)

~

It was Nigel’s experience that in each of his cases there was a moment when the drama took on a third dimension and became fully alive for him, as when on the stage the entrance of a character, the delivery of a key line, or it may be only a single consummate gesture, a moment of stillness or a change in the lighting, grips the spectator so that he is no longer a spectator but a participant deeply involved with the tragedy enacted before him.

The Dreadful Hollow by Nicholas Blake (1953)

~

“Surely we should be standing up to bullying?”

“I’m sorry.”

She rose as anger surged through her. “So, you’re just going to give in?”

“I have no choice.”

“Then how will we ever change people’s attitudes?”

The Sapphire Widow by Dinah Jefferies (2018)

~

“It is really remarkable,” he said, “how quickly this sort of thing becomes all in the day’s work. But I wonder, would the interest last? Suddenly into one’s life comes a romantic and dangerous episode, and one is excited, keyed-up, acknowledging fear, anger – all sorts of relatively unfamiliar emotions. But – do you know? – I believe I should get a little bored if it went on for long.”

The Secret Vanguard by Michael Innes (1940)

~

“There are enough letters,” I said. “But Mrs Bird won’t answer most of them. Some people are in a real pickle, but she says they’re just Unpleasantnesses.”

“She would,” said Mr Collins. “I have to say, it’s all Greek to me. That’s why I stick to fiction. Making things up is somewhat easier than sorting out real life.”

Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce (2018)

~

Gradually she became aware of the hugeness of the Earth, and its incomprehensible age. She learned, finally, how small she truly was, how fleeting. It was beautiful, and not at all disheartening. Quite the opposite – she finally felt that she knew who she was, and she knew her place, and she felt totally at peace with both. She felt she could go anywhere and do anything; she felt the world turning, peacefully, resolutely, unendingly. The silence was like a magic spell; it seemed to promise infinite time in which to do all the things she wanted to do.

The English Girl by Katherine Webb (2016)

~

We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of combustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn’t it?

Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift (2016)

~

Favourite books read in March:

The Scarlet Lion, Dear Mrs Bird, Church of Marvels, The Sapphire Widow

Where did my reading take me in March?

Iceland, Algeria, USA, England, Scotland, Oman, Sri Lanka

Authors read for the first time in March:

Sally Magnusson, Isabel Allende, Michael Stewart, Leslie Parry, Cheryl Sawyer, Graham Swift, AJ Pearce

~

Have you read any of these books? What have you been reading in March?

A selection of words and pictures to represent February’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

~

Now the fascination of the past, according to psychologists, consists in its air of security. The past is over and done with; nothing more can happen in it; it is therefore a refuge from the difficult to-day and the problematic tomorrow.

There Came Both Mist and Snow by Michael Innes (1940)

~

“At least you’re not a stranger to yourself, Miss Hardcastle,” I say. “Surely you can take some solace in that?”

“Quite the contrary,” she says, looking at me. “I imagine it would be rather splendid to wander away from myself for a little while. I envy you.”

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (2018)

~

“Clever? Who said that we all had to be clever? But we have to have courage. The whole position of woman is what it is to-day, because so many of us have followed the line of least resistance, and have sat down placidly in a little provincial town, waiting to get married. No wonder that the men have thought that this is all that we are good for.”

The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby (1924)

~

I’m used to all weathers and I know the tricks that Nature can play. I’ve scared myself at times, imagining spirits in the mist or glimpsing marsh lights dancing on the moor at midnight. But those are nothing more than half-remembered fantasies of a child with a head full of goblins and fairies, put there by a God-fearing father with a dread of the Devil’s creatures. I’m not one for superstition and I’ve never before felt truly afraid…

The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements (2018)

~

It may be obtuseness on my part, but I never could see that people who lived in the Basses-Pyrénées are any more cultivated or had any broader horizons than people who live in the Green Mountains. My own experience is that when you actually live with people, day after day, year after year, you find about the same range of possibilities in any group of them.

The Brimming Cup by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1919)

~

A feeling of tension hung about Lisbon these hot days of early summer: rumours ran the streets in the daytime, as packs of scavenging dogs did by night, and Camilla did not know which she found more disturbing, the whispers that ran, incomprehensibly, through the Great Square by day, or the desolate howling of the dogs by night.

Marry in Haste by Jane Aiken Hodge (1969)

~

It’s really most remarkable how the human race is so seldom satisfied with what it’s got. Give a man the world and he’s still pining for the moon.

Re-read of Penmarric by Susan Howatch (1971)

~

I should like to live here, thought Amanda dreamily; and remembered what Miss Moon had said about Time…that in the Villa Oleander, Time was their servant, and not they the servants of Time. Perhaps that was true of all Cyprus. Certainly this shimmering blue day held a timeless and dreamlike quality. But it was a deceptive quality, for Time must move on here as relentlessly as it did in colder and harsher countries, and it was only a pleasant illusion that here it drifted slowly and lazily. One day the world would catch up with Cyprus.

Death in Cyprus by M.M. Kaye (1956)

~

She had learnt to wait for the changes and the help that life brings. Life is like the sea, sometimes you are in the trough of the wave, sometimes on the crest. When you are in the trough, you wait for the crest, and always, trough or crest, a mysterious tide bears you forward to an unseen, but certain shore.

Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple (1953)

~

Favourite books read in February:

Penmarric (re-read), The Crowded Street, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Where did my reading take me in February?

England, USA, Portugal, Cyprus

Authors read for the first time in February:

Stuart Turton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Dorothy Whipple

~

Have you read any of these books? What have you been reading in February?

A selection of words and pictures to represent January’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

~

It dawned on me then that I stood at the junction of two cultures which were still struggling to come to terms with each other two hundred years on. Australia – and I – were only young and trying to work ourselves out. We were making progress, but then making mistakes, because we didn’t have centuries of wisdom and the experience of age to guide us.

The Pearl Sister by Lucinda Riley (2017)

~

“‘Tis you who are kind, Phibae. In truth, you know me so little, and yet you have done this. I have seen so much that is wicked this past year, but when there are people such as you…the compassion you show – truly, it humbles.”

“No, my lady.” Phibae glanced up. “‘Tis only how people should be.”

Traitor by David Hingley (2018)

~

We fill their minds even when we are far away. They fancy they see us even when they do not. They tell one another stories about us.
The stories are of men who, walking on the shore, hear sweet voices far away, see a soft white back turned to them, and – heedless of looming clouds and creaking winds – forget their children’s hands and the click of their wives’ needles, all for the sake of the half-seen face behind a tumble of gale-tossed greenish hair.

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar (2018)

~

“My dear Miss Gregory,” said Syme gently, “there are many kinds of sincerity and insincerity. When you say ‘thank you’ for the salt, do you mean what you say? No. When you say ‘the world is round,’ do you mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don’t mean it. Now, sometimes a man like your brother really finds a thing he does mean. It may be only a half-truth, quarter-truth, tenth-truth; but then he says more than he means – from sheer force of meaning it.”

The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton (1908)

~

“Oh, yes, slums,” said Adelaide.

Agatha Yates groaned. “Please don’t call them that. They’re Courts, or Mews, or Alleys. It’s like calling people ‘the poor’ instead of by their names. That’s the whole point of our method – dealing with people individually. And it’s working.”

Britannia Mews by Margery Sharp (1946)

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“Vasya,” he said again, low and – almost ragged, into her ear. “Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden (2017)

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“Not necessarily. I think that learning is essential for everyone – rich, poor, male, female – because it’s only through books that most people can discover the world, and be shaken out of all their prejudices and complacencies and forced to think for themselves. And of course, people who form their own opinions are not always welcome to those who govern them – or to the churches.” His face became suddenly serious. “I believe in tolerance above all, and freedom. I don’t want anyone, whether priest or parson or presbyter, telling me how to think or where to worship. My beliefs are my own business…”

A Falling Star by Pamela Belle (1990)

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Perhaps sometimes we allow life to suppress us, let our pride be eroded. Perhaps it is a state of our own consciousness, not truly driven by circumstances at all, simply a gradual shifting of the sands as life’s sorrows swell and break over us. Then something changes – the meeting of a kindred spirit, the potency of mutual trust – and the tender graces of self-belief once more visit themselves upon us and we are as complete as ever we may be.

The Wicked Cometh by Laura Carlin (2018)

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He paused a moment; his soul was full of an agreeable feeling and of a lively disposition to express it. His sister, to his spiritual vision, was always like the lunar disk when only a part of it is lighted. The shadow on this bright surface seemed to him to expand and to contract; but whatever its proportions, he always appreciated the moonlight.

The Europeans by Henry James (1878)

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The Alhambra was lovely, that much was true: it had been the scene of many atrocities, yet the serene pillars and elegant towers, oblivious to all the blood spilled, soared away from it into the night, indifferent to the sufferings of mere men. These buildings would outlive us all, I thought.

Court of Lions by Jane Johnson (2017)

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Favourite books read in January:
The Girl in the Tower, Britannia Mews, A Falling Star

Where did my reading take me in January?
Spain, Australia, Thailand, Russia, USA, England

Authors read for the first time in January:
Laura Carlin, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Henry James, David Hingley

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Have you read any of these books? What have you been reading in January?