Monday 29 July 2019

Reading From My Shelves

I ran out of library books in the heat of last week so decided to read the book picked up for 50p at a recent boot sale


Island of Dreams: A Personal History of a Remarkable PlaceThe Amazon description says...........Dan Boothby had been drifting for more than twenty years, without the pontoons of family, friends or a steady occupation. He was looking for but never finding the perfect place to land. Finally, unexpectedly, an opportunity presented itself. After a lifelong obsession with Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water trilogy, Boothby was given the chance to move to Maxwell's former home, a tiny island on the western seaboard of the Highlands of Scotland.
Island of Dreams is about Boothby's time living there, and about the natural and human history that surrounded him; it's about the people he meets and the stories they tell, and about his engagement with this remote landscape, including the otters that inhabit it. Interspersed with Boothby's own story is a quest to better understand the mysterious Gavin Maxwell.
Beautifully written and frequently leavened with a dry wit, Island of Dreams is a charming celebration of the particularities of place.


Seems Gavin Maxwell was a very strange bloke who always had teenage boys living with him on his island to look after the otters!

(Edited in to say..... Yes I did enjoy it!)
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The next off my shelves was one of Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire Series. It's been ages since I read one..........I'm gradually collecting and reading them all............... Seven have been on my Amazon wish list for years and the prices never drop.........sadly.
 Starting in the 1930s, she re-created the English county of Barsetshire (After Trollope) and filled it with intermarried families who get through World War II and the changes that challenged their old way of life. 
County Chronicle dates from 1950,  my copy was one of a bundle bought from ebay several years ago,  it's a very old Book Club Edition. In this story it's five years after the war and rationing goes on and on, but there are still grand (though impoverished) country seats, weddings and private schools and old family retainers. People from many of the earlier books re-appear and I had to fetch my copy of "Angela Thirkells World" to remember how the characters are related.


 Some people don't like them at all, they are full of genteel, snobbish characters. Lots of upper/middle/lower class distinction and, in this one,  a dislike of Them ......... the Labour government after the war. But how can  anyone fail to enjoy an author who names one of her villages 'Winter Overcotes'!
The Angela Thirkell Society in the States have published a map showing all the places in her imaginary county...........that might be handy.

And Finally when the heat of the week turned into a wet weekend, I pulled this from my shelves to re-read before I tackle the recent follow-up 'Go set a watchman'.
 Surely the ultimate in recycling...........this has the original price of 4 shillings, then on the front in pen is 2 shillings and on the inside in pencil is 50p .......must have been from a second hand book sale somewhere. It's only been on my shelf for about 5 years when I belatedly read it for the first time.



Back Tomorrow
Sue

19 comments:

  1. That's a great selection of reading material! The book club cover really brought back memories!
    xx

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  2. Morning Sue, it's been....oh must be about 30 years since I last read Mockingbird!

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    1. A lot of people seem to have read it at school but we didn't, so I was very late catching up

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  3. But did you enjoy island of Dreams, despite your dislike of Maxwell, I loved the book and Ring of Bright water.

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    1. Yes I did enjoy Island of Dreams and I've never read Ring of Bright Water and don't know much about Gavin Maxwell except from the information in this book so to say I dislike him isn't accurate.

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  5. I never read any Maxwell but I really enjoyed the film Ring of Bright Water. Sorry about original garbled comment

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    1. I'm not even sure that I've seen the film despite how well known it is

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  6. The poet Kathleen Raine was in love with Gavin Maxwell for many years. If you look her up on Wiki, you'll see the saga of unrequited love, loss of Mijbil, the whole sorry tale.
    I love second-hand books. My husband studied book-binding as part of an art conservation course many years ago, and is always pulled by good bindings and coverings, but I just care about the words inside. I buy second-hand if I can, and then donate to a charity shop so the book can find another reader.

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    1. The book mentions her love for Maxwell, he seemed to get impatient with her. I'd not heard of her before reading this but there is a bibliography mentioning her books at the back of this book

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  7. Oh no, don't read the Watchman book! Loved Mockingbird since I read it ....... erm ...... 47 years ago! Watchman was such a disappointment. Savannah.

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    1. Oh dear, it has mixed reviews, but I'll give it a try

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  8. I read a lot of Gavin Maxwell for a couple of years and dreamt about escaping from everything to some isolated part of Scotland but eventually became a mature student instead. No one at the time seemed to think anything strange about him living with teenage boys, and I know of no reason to say there was, but suspicion would be rife now as your exclamation mark indicates. Just came across this excellent review of Island of Dreams by an excellent reviewer: https://dovegreyreader.typepad.com/dovegreyreader_scribbles/2016/07/island-of-dreams-dan-boothby.html

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    1. That's why I don't do proper reviews because so many people do them so much better.
      The boys who lived with him never mentioned any impropriety and Boothby said he just seemed to prefer living with teenagers rather than adults, but it would certainly have raised eyebrows now.

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  9. Ah, shillings. Still have some of the old coins: sixpence (used for all my children's weddings-'a 6p in her shoe'), thruppence and even a ha'penny.

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    1. I have loads of old coins and useless foreign coins which people used to put in our honesty box at the smallholding. I'm keeping them for the grandchildren to play with when they are bigger

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  10. Have you tried looking on Thrift Books? I order a lot of used books fromvthem at a reasonable price. I am not sure if they are available in UK though.

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  11. It is a long time since I read any of those Sue.

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