pickIf you like a slow paced book about a dysfunctional family then you‘ll enjoy this ! It‘s very nicely written - not tasking in anyway and just a nice read .
Cathythoughts Sounds good Emma. Stacked 👍🏻♥️ 4mo
The Past: A Novel | 
pickIf you like a slow paced book about a dysfunctional family then you‘ll enjoy this ! It‘s very nicely written - not tasking in anyway and just a nice read .
pickHadley‘s writing is lush and luxuriant! Don‘t expect a plot here, the entire novel is character development. They aren‘t all likable, but they aren‘t horrid either. Normal complicated people.
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I ordered a collection of her short stories! 😊
Slow, but loving the character studies. Hadley‘s prose is lush! Another English countryside. 😄
I‘m only 20% in, but I put all of Hadley‘s collected short stories in my Abe cart. 😙 She is a new find for me.
This is my current read and first in July. Half way through, and it is ok. #currentread
Several years ago I decided to step off several bad medications. That caused months of insomnia. In order to cope I grabbed back issues of The New Yorker and read. One of the short stories was Hadley's The Past. When I saw it in the bookstore I bought it. I started this yesterday and wish I could curl up with it and ignore the world for a few days.
pick4 adult siblings return to their family home in the English countryside for what might be their last holiday there together. Beware: not a lot of action in this book, more introspection instead. While the siblings are joined together for 3 weeks, the narrative follows the pain and loneliness each is feeling very privately. The characters are all very flawed but I was rooting for each one to find their way.
so-soNot exactly what I look for in a book. The Past is sort of a “day in the life” type of book, with the real interest lying in the interactions between sisters and their connection to their grandparents and mother. It was an interesting concept and I did find myself intrigued by the goings of the family. However, the novel was slightly mundane and the author did not use quotation marks for when people spoke which maddened me endlessly.
pickFirst book this year- a hazy, nostalgic and claustrophobic summer retreat in the english countryside. A lovely antidote to the drizzly english weather, especially combined with coffee!
Also, this will be book number 1 of my #52BooksIn2018 challenge!
#augustgrrrl #vacation
I really enjoy tessa hadley's domestic dramas and her short stories are excellent. This is a family holiday that goes badly wrong when old sibling tensions reemerge after a parents death.
It has gotten decidedly mixed reviews but this nice hardcover for $6 beckoned nonetheless.
So excited about all these amazing books and fun goodies!!! Had to confiscate the headphones back from my tie dye loving daughter already. I haven't read any of these books and they all look right up my alley! Thanks you so much for spoiling me @AccioAlltheBooks #beachinbookswap
This is my #TBR list, and everything on it is my #JulyMostAnticipated. My reading goal for the year was to read all 45 books that were on my list on New Years Day. That list is down to 30 (the ones in color on top), but I've added 11 new unread books this year, so the total hasn't gone down much.
Half Price Books in Decatur, GA at 4 pm (also 20 minutes before we sauntered next door into Home Goods and got into a huge argument about a stupid Cynthia Rowley Dip Bowl - seriously) 😕
Tsundoku: The Japanese word for what I do all the time.
In practical terms, if I buy the hardback, but don't read it before the paperback comes out, I have failed.
so-soI had high expectations, always a danger. It's well-written, well-structured and characters are firmly drawn, the children poignant. There is a good sense of place, English country house... But it felt trite, eg Alice complaining when Roland buys the papers, "can't we not know the news, just for a while?" - the sentiment is fair but would a grown-up say that? I'd read more of tessa Hadley but this didn't move me somehow.
pickRereading because Tessa is stateside! She's on the West Coast this week and then at the New Yorker Festival & McNally Jackson on the 8th.
Woke up to a lakeside sunrise and couldn't wait to curl up in an Adirondack chair with a cup of tea and my new book. Loving The Past by Tessa Hadley so far. #amreading
Such pretty #bookmail today! 😻 I bought it purely because it's so pretty, but is it any good, though?
Babysitting my nephew (+puppy) today, and while they nap, I read! Isn't this a gorgeous cover?
pickA quiet, domestic novel that moves between the present, four siblings vacationing in their grandparents house, to the past, when their mother went back to visit her parents. The novel's imagery especially around light and nature is absolutely phenomenal. A story about practically nothing, I was engaged the entire time.
Sophy and Grantham devoured their books: reading was a freedom torn out of the day's regulated fabric.
pickMuch of this book feels languid and aimless; a sort of trance that lulls you into forgetting to brace for a conclusion. It's only when you're chasing through the last forty pages or so that you realise the entire narrative has been intricately built to topple like dominoes.
"She knew from her own experience what a great labour it was, binding up again all the mess of self, which in your extremity you had unbound."
"It was surely wrong to think that reading and intelligence had to float somewhere above the thickness of real experience."
Sunday morning session. Taking my time with this one, which was recommended by a book seller in Cambridge, where I was hunting for a new read to take with me on holiday. It's slow-paced like summer, and its omniscience lifts and settles on the characters like drifting seed pods. Very enjoyable.
Finally, finally, THE PAST library ebook is available! (BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME also just became available again for me to finish.)
so-soI felt foreboding throughout this book. So many curious things--even the gorgeous cover has that feel to me. Overgrown rundown cottage, and so on. But then nothing happens that lives up to that feeling. Maybe it's just me?
50 pages to go, and another soccer practice of reading time!
panWent into this book anticipating that I would love it as it's my kind of story (family reunion with issues to resolve). Just could not get into this one.
⭐️⭐️
"Both sisters managed to be offended ... All the siblings felt sometimes, as the days of their holiday passed, the sheer irritation and perplexity of family coexistence; how it fretted away at the love and attachment which were nonetheless intense and enduring when they were apart."
pickHadley just won Windham Campbell prize and I'd bet it's the first of many this year. Loved The Past.
