Melody's Blog

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...

Today I'm joining Jessie's 11-day Persephone Readathon ! I heard of this by way of  Claire at The Captive Reader . I'm a day behind, but I might mention that I do not even remember how I heard of Persephone; it has been too long. I already have three Persephone books lined up to review for A Century of Books so it made sense. Unfortunately, I have no more Persephones on my nightstand waiting to be read. So today is celebrating by sharing photos of one's own Persephone Library. My photos are not beautiful like Claire's, but they suffice. The first one show them with the lovely bookmarks that are of the same design as the endpages. I thought I had all of mine, but a few a missing. That's a bummer! This second photo is just them lined up mostly in order by the ones I've had the longest to the most recently acquired.I have a ton more marked in my Persephone catalog that go on my wishlist!