My reading log notebook (on the left) is full. I like to keep a written record of my reading, although I have a digital one on goodreads. For my next log, I’ve chosen the one in the middle which I bought last year at Mrs Blackwell’s Village Bookshop in Greytown. When that’s full (it’s small, it won’t take long) I’ll move on to the one with the embroidered cover from Scorpio Books. Your suspicion that I have a thing for all things book would be justified.

I’ve read eight books in the last month (August). My favourites were Be Brave, The Life of a Pacific Correspondent by Barbara Dreaver, and Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks. Both of these are memoirs. Another notable book I read was Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing by Ann Morgan who encourages the followers of her blog to read books in translation to widen our understanding of the world.

In her latest post, she writes that in this kind of reading:

… I am a guest in someone else’s space, given the opportunity to see how things are done elsewhere, without any attempt to mediate or dilute them for my perceived taste. This can be challenging, particularly if you are used to being centred in the books you read, but it is also a great privilege: a welcome disruption to the habits that surround us and a reminder that customs that can often seem mandatory are just choices. 

Her recommendations have opened up new worlds to me, but so too have books written originally in English. Two of these I have read on the cusp of the month of August: The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, which I finished at the end of July, and The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett which I finished just after midnight last night. Another is a biography: Fulvia: The Woman who Broke all the Rules in Ancient Rome by Jane Draycott. Fluvia, born in 80 BCE, has been mis-represented in history, according to the author who sets out to make corrections to the record. In the process, she educates the reader about the lives of Roman women and the mine-field that was politics of the time. It was a somewhat distressing to find parallels with today.

In between these books, I have kept up a pretty steady stream of so-called cosy crime for sheer pleasure and, perhaps, for restoring my equilibrium (or complacency?). I identified with this comment about the genre by a friend who often recommends good cosy crime books: “Reading this was like a cat soaking in warmth in a puddle of sunlight”.