I lifted @squirrelbrain 's graphic and added stickers for the ones I've read. I've got my fingers crossed for Ministry of Time and The Dream Hotel making the shortlist. Still hoping to read some more of the others: found it harder to get hold of all of them this year.
#WomensPrizeLL25
[On Frances vs "Fanny" Burney] "Let her have her adult name," proclaimed Doody in her 1988 biography....
And yet two major biographies of Burney since Doody's proclamation have named her "Fanny" Burney. The diminutive will not die. It's enough to make one want to call all authors by diminutive nicknames they would never want to be known by. "Chuck Darwin" and "Ernie Hemingway" do have their charm.
An avid reader, Walpole came across an interesting piece of writing titled ‘The Three Princes of Serendip‘, translated into English from an old Persian tale.... How heartwarming it is to know that one of the most inspiring words in the English language has been been created by a writer with the help of a Persian fairy tale, thus connecting East and West....
From Elif Shafak's substack (link in comments)
Among the details I overheard from my post on the porch...
Boyd Ellison was alive and had told the police everything. A man on a motorcycle had attacked him. A man with a beard attacked him. It was a bearded man with a foreign accent, maybe Dutch or Turkish. It was a hippie on drugs. Boyd was in a coma. Boyd had called out his mother's name. He didn't know who his parents were. He was dead. He was alive. He was alive but just barely. He was dead.
pickThis worried me so much I had to skip to the end to check she got out! (And then could finish the book.)
#WomensPrizeLL25
The reflection that meets her in the mirror reminds her of the pandemic of her childhood. Unlike some of her classmates in school she never minded wearing masks: they concealed her bouts of acne, the rage she felt whenever a boy told her she needed to smile more, her impatience with strangers who asked, "So what are you?" She couldn't have known that the skill would come in handy so many years later.
pick'She was a very strong lady,' Marzenna recalled. 'For her, nothing was impossible.
---
Recommended history of Polish resistance in WW2.
The descriptions of Agent Zo's personal skills reminded me of my gran. Everyone loved her, but not for her small talk!
Personal gripe: one of those "hidden histories" where actually what the author means/ acknowledges is "*English speakers* didn't know about it...".
so-soI usually enjoy books about wandering Berlin, but this one not so much.
A bildungsroman featuring a lot of drugs, bad sex and bad choices, I winced for the protagonist as she made one awful decision after another. Lots of interesting individual elements, but I never felt I really understood where the author was going (and in placed desperately just hoped it would all just Stop!)
#WomensPrizeLL25
As far as possible, the women saved each other.
(Magdeburg camp, 1944)
pickLoved this first book in a new time-travelling series.
And a map as endpapers. Nice touch!
The new album ‘Between The Covers – 9 Songs For Bibliophiles‘ features 9 songs about books and reading, as the punny title suggests, there are 5 new originals sandwiched between 4 cover version.
The album will be promoted by a solo tour of UK and Europe in May and June, with performances in bookshops, libraries, literary festivals ... (Via the ever fabulous Guy Garvey) https://paularmfield.com/events/upcoming-events/
What did Victorian women do with their time? She hears Elizabeth's voice. You have to be able to make a posset, sew a seam and recite the Lord's Prayer. Can you do any of those things? Whatever your views on praying and sewing, they certainly fill in the time.
Last night, Ali took a book from the shelf...
pickI was supposed to be reading women's prize nominees, but instead I fell into this beautiful story about loss, minority communities - and mythical fox-people.
And I loved the footnotes. (Sidenotes?)
I was home neither in Rosenwald nor in Gropiusstadt. And like so many children before me, I became my own exile.
At school, the girls wore padded down jackets and boots I had seen only in equestrian ads. They knew how to ride horses and drank expensive water and used Dr. Hauschka products, which felt so expensive back then, I believed only millionaires could afford them. Longingly, I used a pump of their creams, inhaling that herbal scent.
Geoff wants me to go back to the 1850s,' says Ali.
'Cool,' says Bud. 'What was happening in the 1850s?' Bud some-times likes to pretend that he's never heard of history.
'Crinolines, horse-drawn carriages, men in beards,' says Ali.
'Sounds like Hoxton,' says Dina.
The first rule of foxes is that you don't talk about foxes. The second rule is well, I shall tell you when we get to that part, but I was so incensed right then that I almost walked out. And perhaps I should have. Turned around, and vanished into the rain-scented night, leaving Shiro smiling in that ring of rapt faces, the bright oil lamps making a charmed circle against the dark.
But curiosity has always been my weakness.
And now for something completely different...
Can you recommend a book that features neurodiversity? Ideally fictional and something you've actually read?
My work bookgroup is looking for something around this theme - so far suggestions are The Maid, How to Stop Time and Intermezzo...
She turned on the radio in the mornings, dancing when rock songs filled the kitchen with bygone delight. Recited poetry in an old, formal Persian-lines that I didn't understand but whose cadences imprinted themselves onto my brain-and took me to local libraries, where I was allowed to read as much as I wanted, the weight of the laminated library card like a luxurious treasure in my hand, my own name written in blue ink underneath: Nilab Haddadi.
...as if to signal to us idiots that reality still existed...
(How do you let someone know the party's over?)
"an insane feminist and pioneer of the "liberation" movement and equality of women', the report continued. 'A hysterical woman'.*" '
Got to love the lack of self-censorship in pre-Freedom of Information civil servants' memos.
pickI didn't realise the author was local until I came to this poem about coastal toads...
Zo usually returned from Germany [to Poland] within a few days, bringing back her observations on changing travel regulations, rationing and morale... After one Berlin air raid, Zo was asked to walk around the city and later discreetly mark up a map to help assess the accuracy of the campaign.
'The English know almost everything about the results of their attacks on Germany', Joseph Goebbels... sullenly complained to his diary."
During the Great War the Dutch dancer Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, had lodged the idea of femme fatale spies in some romantic minds Although women serving in the resistance deployed whatever skills and resources they had, their distinguishing superpower was not, in fact, irresistible sexual allure, but simply their ability to be consistently overlooked and underestimated.
Ebb and Flo bookshop has reopened in Chorley! Now on two floors, packed out for the official opening.
A funeral is when the truth comes out, when everyone comes out of the wood-work. All the secret lovers, all the people the dead cheated with, or on. It's spectacular! A real shit show, as they say, and it's only a shame that the dead aren't there to witness. But I suppose that's the whole reason it happens. Nobody has any shame once you're a corpse. The shame melts away.
Behind the scenes in Iran...
They were plain-dressed, the women not wearing scarves, and for the first time in my memory I saw a large group of women with all their hair hanging freely. It was breathtaking. I was in awe, as if seeing a scene out of a Romantic painting of sea nymphs, like the ones Maman Elizabeth once told me about at bedtime. All textures and weights, dark, wavy, flying carpet-like. I loved these women and their powerful hair.
7 weeks! I don't think so...?
There's definitely a reason I turn these 'insights' off for kindle! Haven't worked out how to do it on Libby...
#WPLL25
#WomensPrize
You, the gentrifier, have now been gentrified.... once every ten years, you should have a reunion and bitterly reminisce, clutching your paper cups of Moscow mule and growling about how this town's landlords and businesses put cash before community. At the end of the evening you should stand in a long line, in the order that your spending powers evolved to claim the city
Always the art explored uncharted terrains, and managed to get him outside his comfort zone. Almost every time he was left enthralled by this new generation of artists that were conscious and produced art that was not only beautiful but also effective in its own transgressive way.
[No title in db]
Andzani woke up with a babalas the following day...
[Book not in the database https://wisaniirvin.com/]
Failed attempt to take a picture of beautiful brunch and book...
Book not in the db yet
This is a café, they sell food, but it's also a hardware, see the timber? You can see it all the way from school, it's so long. This is the fastest route to get to the school, after passing this cafe you will find this passage. And out of this passage you are met by that big house with the red tile roofing. It is one of the few houses that have tile roofing around here as you can see. After you have passed the house you will see these boulders.
Before he fled, he ran through the stable blocks and loosed the horses rather than leave them to burn or to starve to death locked in their pens.
Sometimes when I think of Iran, the summer of 1979 before a people's hard-won freedom was scattered by the wind, I imagine the Arab horses galloping through the suburbs of the city, past the houses and the factories towards the desert--and pray that they at least never were recaptured.
Running at full pelt across the farm field then climbing up onto the top of a hay bale. I feel strong and invincible and like the sky is blue because it loves me. When I get home I am going to read a book under my covers by glow-worm. The library van stops outside our caravan once a week. It is loaning me everything it has to read and the librarian is always so nice to me. I have found a way to escape my world every night.
pickI was dreading the ending for such an entertaining group of characters - but it was a happy one.
How lovely.
"I also meet some funny people who advise me to "trade" upon my nationality. They tell me that if I wish to succeed in literature in America I should dress in Chinese costume, carry a fan in my hand, wear a pair of scarlet beaded slippers, live in New York, and come of high birth... I should discourse on my spirit acquaintance with Chinese ancestors..."
Written more than a hundred years ago by a Chinese-American author.
Maria says, 'Well they were murdered in cold blood by somebody. I think we are joined in this country by pure evil, my friend' ....
Signor stops itching a moment and snaps, 'Ladies! Would you speak of those things which you understand, and leave the rest to us?'
Maria is puffing out her cheeks and I wonder if she might open her mouth and belch real fire.
Currently reading #WomensPrizeLL25
Before they leave, you meet them for coffee and you understand then that they were always wary of Berlin, that they never committed themselves to a city that in turn never really committed to them. For all the talk of people ignoring each other at the end of relationships, it's Berlin which is the true ghost, drawing you in with a flurry of wild promises, and then abruptly losing interest.
AI's not quite there yet...
pickFascinating book, filled with details you didn't know you needed about "ordinary" Viking life.
Got to watch those guys who bath once a week...
One is the Gosforth Cross from Cumbria, carved in the first half of the tenth century, towering 4.4 metres high in the churchyard of St Mary's... [it] also has carved stories that we might remember from Norse mythology, including Loki bound and tortured with snake poison for his crimes, and a figure with its foot in the mouth of a monstrous fanged beast, perhaps Odin fighting the wolf Fenrir at Ragnarok.
![[tagged book]](https://image.librarything.com/pics/litsy_webpics/icon_taggedBook@3x.png){kind=icon}
