Happy Birthday To Me…. (or rather, an excuse for more books!)

Yes, more books have arrived and been loaded onto the shelves in the past two weeks. And since I do find it hard (believe me, I do) to justify this massive addition so soon after the even more massive bundles that came in just last December, I thought maybe I could get away with the idea of them being viewed as my birthday treats instead.

Again, I have to ‘blame’ it all on the Big Bad Wolf for the further markdown in prices for these supposedly ‘leftover’ books from the year end sale, although in actual fact, I did not come across most of these at all during that sale.

One such pleasant discovery was Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. From the little snippets that I have glanced at, it looks to be a truly delightful collection.

Miranda Seymour’s Noble Endeavours: The Life of Two Countries (England & Germany, in Many Stories) and Edmondo De Amicis’ Constantinople are also two interesting finds that caught my eye.

As with the Rumer Godden biography and Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence.

Yes, these and the many more that you see in the photos, made for a really good haul, I must say. 🙂

I was thrilled to find two copies of Javier Marias’ works that came in the form of those lovely Penguin Modern Classics. I have enjoyed his writing before and am looking forward to reading more.

Another writer whose works I am also very much looking forward to exploring is Rose Tremain, and so I was really glad to pick up The Swimming Pool Season and Sacred Country. Especially Sacred Country which has been compared to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

“I have a secret to tell you, dear, and this is it: I am not Mary. That is a mistake. I am not a girl. I’m a boy.” Mary’s fight to become Martin, her claustrophobic small town, and her troubled family make up the core of this remarkable and intimate, emotional yet unsentimental novel. As daring as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Sacred Country inspires us to reconsider the essence of gender, and proposes new insights in the unraveling of that timeless malady known as the human condition. As Mary’s mother, Estelle, observes, “There are no whole truths, just as there is no heart of the onion. There are only the dreams of the individual mind.”
Sweeping us through three decades, from the repressive English countryside of the fifties to the swinging London of the sixties to the rhinestone tackiness of seventies America, Rose Tremain unmasks the “sacred country” within us all.

I think that might be a good place to start off with my first Tremain.

The Penguin Modern Classics editions are one of my favourite editions to add to my collection. Just love their aesthetic features (both inside and out). Aren’t these beauties?

Has any of these caught your eye too?

🙂