I finished Britannia Mews by Margery Sharp, which is one of her less humorous novels so not a personal favourite but it's good at what it's trying to do, which is quirky family saga. I realised it was also an accidental re-read - my second in a row, lol.
I read a popular novel billed as "feel-good" that I was enjoying until the author decided to drop some unsubtle racism bombs.
Now just over halfway through the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing winner Late Light, The Secret Wonders of a Disappearing World, by Michael Malay, which is mostly four extended essays about four species of animal found in the UK (eel, moth, mussel, cricket) with more general top and tail chapters at each end. The writing is meditative and expansive but also melancholy and inevitably downbeat as it's tracking declining populations in reducing habitats. It deserved the award wins for both the prose and the content imo. I've read all the other shortlisted 2024 Wainwright books and the only two that came close are the travel memoir Local, A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness, by Alastair Humphreys, and popular social history Rural, The Lives of the Working Class Countryside, by Rebecca Smith. I usually find at least one or two books I want to read through the Wainwright Prize shortlists (released August with three different categories) and I often read some of the books that don't especially appeal to me as well because they're all good one way or another.
Am considering trying to persuade a few people into a one-chapter-a-month readalong of some short, obscure, and not necessarily good anthology that's out of copyright everywhere and easily available such as Aurora Australis. If I'm not currently enjoying the reading then at least I'd appreciate the company and be amused by any ensuing fanworks. :-)
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I read a popular novel billed as "feel-good" that I was enjoying until the author decided to drop some unsubtle racism bombs.
Now just over halfway through the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing winner Late Light, The Secret Wonders of a Disappearing World, by Michael Malay, which is mostly four extended essays about four species of animal found in the UK (eel, moth, mussel, cricket) with more general top and tail chapters at each end. The writing is meditative and expansive but also melancholy and inevitably downbeat as it's tracking declining populations in reducing habitats. It deserved the award wins for both the prose and the content imo. I've read all the other shortlisted 2024 Wainwright books and the only two that came close are the travel memoir Local, A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness, by Alastair Humphreys, and popular social history Rural, The Lives of the Working Class Countryside, by Rebecca Smith. I usually find at least one or two books I want to read through the Wainwright Prize shortlists (released August with three different categories) and I often read some of the books that don't especially appeal to me as well because they're all good one way or another.
Am considering trying to persuade a few people into a one-chapter-a-month readalong of some short, obscure, and not necessarily good anthology that's out of copyright everywhere and easily available such as Aurora Australis. If I'm not currently enjoying the reading then at least I'd appreciate the company and be amused by any ensuing fanworks. :-)