
One of the best things about being settled in our new home is that we can start acquiring books again-- particularly since we got rid of so many before we moved, because the new house has shelves built into every nook and cranny and we don't plan to move again for sixty or seventy years. The memory of packing boxes upon boxes is beginning to fade already, and so today I was quite happy to buy new books from a sidewalk sale. Stuart picked up
The Cider House Rules, as we both like John Irving and neither of us has read it yet. And I seemed to be on a British female novelist kick-- I got
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, under
the influence of one of my favourite book bloggers; Virgina Woolf's
Orlando (though if I'm not careful I'll have all of her novels read, and then what will I do?); and
In the Springtime of the Year by Susan Hill, who I've never read before.
I'm still reading Jhumpa Lahiri's
The Unaccustomed Earth, and loving it, though I wish I'd given it to a week that was not so manic. Also reading David McGimpsey's
Sitcom (it is Poetic April after all), which is something else but I'm not sure what (which is not to say that it isn't good, oh no).
And next up I am going to be reading
The World my Wilderness by Rose Macaulay, because it's the one "Virago Modern Classic" I own, it's still unread, and
everybody's talking about
Virago lately. To those of you who were wondering why we need an Orange Prize, do read
the piece by Rachel Cooke, and perhaps you'll understand, for not that much ever changes in the course of 30 years