Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

Online recommendations continue to influence my reading (as I mentioned in my review of “Madonna in a Fur Coat” recently), and today’s book is another fine example of that!

As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve very much distracted by all sorts of book recommendations turning up on my Instagram feed.

Whew!

For the final read of our #1949Club week, I turned to a book which I’ve owned for some time but hadn’t initially realised was released in the year in question – “The Far Cry” by Emma Smith, in a Persephone Edition.

Today for the #1949Club, I’m sharing some thoughts on a poetry book which was released in that year – “The Edge of Being” by Stephen Spender.

One of my aims with our reading clubs is always to try to get in as many different kinds of writing as I can; in some of our years, it would be so easy to just read e.g.

As we go into our Club weeks, I always have a pile of possibles drawn from the TBR which I hope to choose from for my reading.

After a couple of mixed days with 1949, I was a bit uncertain where to go next.

After a mixed bag of reading for my first day of the #1949Club, I thought I would turn to a book that’s been on Mount TBR for a number of years – since 2020, in fact, when I picked it up through Hive, no doubt stockpiling books during the pandemic.

As has become a tradition, I decided to start off our latest club reading week with some crime novels, and 1949 was certainly a bumper year for those.

I hope you’re all as excited as I am about our upcoming week of club reading which this time is from 1949!

It’s always a good day when a new title in the British Library Crime Classics range pops through the door, and a recent arrival looked to be an enticing read.

I was still feeling in the mood for something substantial after finishing “A Happy Death”, and the stacks of Instagram-inspired titles I’d put together included a number of books by Dostoevsky.

The topic of posthumous releases of author’s works has been on my mind a little lately, no doubt because of the Kafka rabbit hole I disappeared down!

I don’t quite know what it is about September, but it always seems to whizz past; maybe because I’m always back to work after the summer break and so things are frantic, with a lot of catching up!

Back in January I shared my thoughts about a wonderful book which I’d received as a Christmas gift from lovely Jacqui – “Souvenir” by Michael Bracewell.

I’ve been a keen reader of the British Library Crime Classics series since they first started reissuing Golden Age Crime back in 2012, and it’s been fascinating to watch the development of the imprint over the years.

Despite having overflowing bookshelves and a mountainous TBR, I still always seem to amass multiple copies of individual titles, and today’s book is a good example of that.

Prior to 2014 I didn’t keep any kind of record of when I bought books, where they came from or anything like that; and the list I’ve kept since then has been very useful!

If there’s ever a book which had me wanting to rush off to northern climes, it’s “An Island Rooing” by Joan Grigsby!

My second read for Short Story September is a book I picked up fairly recently after seeing it pop up on a number of blogs I follow; it’s by an author I’ve read before and was a recent recent from Penguin Classics in their nice plain coloured, French flap…

Sometimes a book crosses your path at exactly the right time, and that happened to me recently when I was browsing in a British Heart Foundation charity shop.

Books continue to lead to other books (my recent Kafka reading being a good example), but I’m also continually being influenced by online mentions and commenters here on the Ramblings.

One of the books I picked up last month when we were having our little shop to celebrate mum was by an author I’ve read before – Seishi Yokomizo.

It’s been a little while since I picked up a book from my my various casual and ongoing reading projects; however, I recently felt the need for something familiar and which I knew I could probably rely upon to enjoy.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the mythology of vampires began with Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” published in 1897.

August has obviously been quite a difficult month for me, so inevitably I spent as much time as I could with my regular coping mechanism, books.

While I was reading Kafka’s “The Castle” recently, I checked out the bibliography in the back and saw mention of an interesting sounding title – “Kafka’s Other Trial” by Elias Canetti.

It was probably inevitable that, having immersed myself in the story of Kafka‘s work and legacy, I would feel drawn to pick up a book which has been near the top of Mount TBR for a while.

A short post today to share a recent arrival in the form of another poetry pamphlet from the poet laureate, Simon Armitage.

As I do keep saying, books lead to other books… I was unsure what to pick up after the Borges/di Giovanni and did spend a little time reading up on the state of Borges’ literary estate.