Melody's Blog

I started a heaven playlist and I noticed that I had many songs in my iTunes library (I'm sort of in the mode of switching to Spotify which isn't going so well, but we'll see!) already that had something to do with heaven. In my Resurrecting Blog post, I noted: “I love hymns!! ... More details about my hymn life will be forthcoming soon in the blog when I start 1) writing about hymns and other songs about heaven. My vision for this is that it will turn out to be a long series of blog posts about music that I would like to be played at my wake when I die (This is not impending as far as I know, however after 35 years of cancer life, I’ve had plenty of time to think about death and resurrection to new life and I do not shirk from talking about it at all).” Anyway, at the time I started the playlist, I was a bit worried I might be going there before too long. I’m not so much now, but I am happily finding new songs to go on the playlist! So I started a playlist with ...

Oh, dear. I dislike reviewing books I don’t really like and in general I just do not finish those I am not enjoying. But, I picked up Second Reading , A Century of Books entry for 2011, at the Seminary Coop Bookstore several years ago because generally I devour books about books and often find them useful as a way to learn about books I haven’t read and might want to read. Also, it was published by Europa Editions whose books I normally appreciate. It is a compilation of sixty or so of Yardley’s reviews that were published in a column also called “Second Reading” in the Washington Post . I found it an interesting premise that he reviewed books he had read earlier in his life and decided to have a second go at them to see if they stood the test of time. (I’m a huge proponent of rereading.) He found only a few did not meet this test for him. Unfortunately my copy has languished on my nightstand lo these past years because I just could not really get into it. I’m wondering why this...

I just finished one the best books I’ve read so far this year, Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World, my 1975 entry in A Century of Books . Over the years my children read quite a bit of Roald Dahl and I read some along with them but I had never read this one. What a larky story! Danny and his father live in a vardo, and his dad decides to go back to poaching which was a generally accepted way of life among the people, as a sport, not so much to put food on the table (although it surely evolved from that). I haven’t discussed children’s books yet on this blog, so let me just say my daughter and I have a mutual collection of about 2000 juvenile and young adult books. My description of this collection would be that they are mostly or what I would consider classic and not much contemporary fiction. My daughter is 28 now and while she still does read some children’s works, certainly not at the rate she did as a voracious reader in elementary school. She was, like me as a you...

The second Persephone book I read this year is The Young Pretenders by Edith Henrietta Fowler. It felt like going from one extreme to the other. (I’m trying to get three reviews done this week for the Persephone Readathon .) The other two are ones I had planned to read for A Century of Books . I already reviewed The Hopkins Manuscript , which was really too bleak to enjoy (I don’t think enjoyment is ALWAYS the point of reading, however), and now I have to say I didn’t particularly love The Young Pretenders either. These are the only two Persephone books out of about thirty (no, I disliked Heat Lightning by Helen Hull —do not have any recollection of why that was) that I cannot give my highest recommendation. Anyway, this certainly wouldn’t be one of my favorite Persephone books, though I didn’t dislike it. But it’s really hard when it’s up against so many other great books on their list. The Young Pretenders is a book about two children who are left in England while their parent...

Update on Persephone Readathon! I've kept up somewhat with Jessie's Daily Challenges . I posted my photos of my Persephone books, most still having their own Persephone endpage illustration bookmark. I posted a few shoutouts--writers who Persephone readers might enjoy: Angela Thirkell, Richmal Crompton, and Margery Sharp. I wrote a six word summary of the Persephone book I am currently reading (well, I'm not since I exhausted my current stash), but I posted about The Hopkins Manuscript , which I also reviewed on this blog, "interminably bleak, not dull, cataclysm narrative." And on Jessie's blog I posted a favorite quote from a Persephone book. This one is from The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby. I think I may need to find some more Holtby to read for A Century of Books , though she did not write very many; she died tragically young. Here is the lovely quote from The Crowded Street :   Fiercely she fought this sense of inexorable doom for the salvation...

So glad to have finally finished my 1939 book for A Century of Books , The Hopkins Manuscript , by R. C. Sherriff and published by Persephone . For Christmas I usually have my daughter who was living in London, now in Liverpool, just stop by the Persephone shop and buy me a couple books. She did so again this year and decided to see if they had something sciency, since that is her area and I do have an interest in reading up on some science. She came up with the science fiction book that has taken me three weeks to read. I am not one bit sorry that I have read it, but I HAD to keep putting it aside. R. C. Sherriff is an amazing writer but this was one of the bleakest books I have in my entire life read. (Others say they found hope in it, but I found precious little.) The Hopkins Manuscript of which Sherriff writes was penned in the late 1940s and found by an expedition of the Royal Society of Abyssinia 1000 years later. Every vestige of “white man” by which the Abyssinians mean a...

I got off to a rather good start of reading for A Century of Books with the new year, then hit a snag when I had three days of complete fatigue, just sleeping with nothing else gonna happen! When I woke up from that, I realized that I not only did I need to start blogging about books but that I also need to keep reading. Also realized that I was very behind in my regular work of editing other folk’s writing so I didn’t feel I could start my own blog resurrection until I got a bit of that behind me. But I can dictate voice to text on my phone laying my bed so that is what I’m doing now in order to start my blog posts about reading. I think I’ll try go in order as I read them to get started (that didn’t last long). The first book I read this new year was one my daughter had recommended to me this past summer when we were together, my 2016 entry, The Essex Serpent . I could hardly put it down. This historical novel set in the late 19th century is very beautifully written, wit...