Library Checkout: June 2020
It looks like my public library system may still be partially closed into July, although there are rumors of an order and collection service starting soon. I’ve signed up to be a library volunteer, so hopefully I can be a part of it.
Will I be able to stock up again next month? I do hope so, as I have a list of 14 books that I plan to borrow and another 21 that I plan to reserve just as soon as the building and catalogue are up and running again. Stay tuned to find out…
Are you out of library books, or have you been able to borrow more lately, perhaps via curbside pickup? Feel free to use the image above and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part in Library Checkout (which runs on the last Monday of every month), and/or tag me on Twitter (@bookishbeck / #TheLibraryCheckout).
READ
- The Trick Is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway (a buddy read with Buried in Print)
CURRENTLY READING
- Reading with Patrick: A teacher, a student and the life-changing power of books by Michelle Kuo
- Meet the Austins by Madeleine L’Engle [set aside temporarily]
- Property by Valerie Martin
CURRENTLY SKIMMING
- My Own Country by Abraham Verghese
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
- Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame
- When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant
- Becoming a Man by Paul Monette
- Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
- Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin
ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP
- The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
- Can You Hear Me? A Paramedic’s Encounters with Life and Death by Jake Jones
- The Accidental Countryside by Stephen Moss
- Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler
TO RETURN UNFINISHED
- The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel
TO RETURN UNREAD
- What Are We Doing Here?: Essays by Marilynne Robinson
- Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith
What appeals from my stacks?
The Secret Life of Books by Tom Mole
If you’re like me and author Tom Mole, the first thing you do in any new acquaintance’s house is to scrutinize their bookshelves, whether openly or surreptitiously. You can learn all kinds of surprising things about what someone is interested in, and holds dear, from the books on display. (And if they don’t have any books around, should you really be friends?)
Mole runs the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, where he is a professor of English Literature and Book History. His specialist discipline and this book’s subtitle – “Why They Mean More than Words” – are clues that here he’s concerned with books more as physical and cultural objects than as containers of knowledge and stories:
“reading them is only one of the things we do with books, and not always the most significant. For a book to signal something about you, you don’t necessarily need to have read it.”
From the papyrus scroll to the early codex, from a leather-bound first edition to a mass-market paperback, and from the Kindle to the smartphone reading app, Mole asks how what we think of as a “book” has changed and what our different ways of accessing and possessing books say about us. He examines the book as a basis of personal identity and relationships with other people. His learned and digressive history of the book contains many pleasing pieces of trivia about authors, libraries and bookshops, making it a perfect gift for bibliophiles. I also enjoyed the three “interludes,” in which he explores three paintings that feature books.
There are a lot of talking points here for book lovers. Here are a few:
- Are you a true collector, or merely an “accumulator” of books? (Mole is the latter, as am I. “I have a few modest antiquarian volumes, but most of my books are paperbacks … I was the first in my immediate family to go to university, and I suspect the books on my shelves reassure me that I really have learned something along the way.”)
- In Anne Fadiman’s scheme, are you a “courtly” or a “carnal” reader? The former keeps a book pristine, while the latter has no qualms about cracking spines or dog-earing pages. (I’m a courtly reader, with the exception that I correct all errors in pencil.)
- Is a book a commercial product or a creative artifact? (“This is why authors quite often cross out the printed version of their name when they sign. Their action negates the book’s existence as a product of industry or commerce and reclaims it as the product of their own artistic effort.”)
- How is the experience of reading an e-book, or listening to an audiobook, different from reading a print book? (There is evidence that we remember less when we read on a screen, because we don’t have the physical cues of a book in our hand, plus “most people could in theory fit a lifetime’s reading on a single e-reader.”)
I would particularly recommend this to readers who have enjoyed Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, Alberto Manguel’s various books on libraries, and Tim Parks’s Where I’m Reading From.
A personal note: I was delighted to come across a mention of one of the visiting professors on my Master’s course in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, Matthew Rubery. In the autumn term of 2005, he taught one of my seminars, “The Reading Revolution in the Victorian Period,” which had a Book History slant and included topics like serial publication, anonymity and the rise of the media. A few years ago Rubery published an academic study of audiobooks, The Untold Story of the Talking Book, which Mole draws on for his discussion.
Two more favorite passages:
“when I’m reading, I’m not just spending time with a book, but investing time in cultivating a more learned version of myself.”
“A library is an argument. An argument about who’s in and who’s out, about what kinds of things belong together, about what’s more important and what’s less so. The books that we choose to keep, the ones that we display most prominently, and the ones that we shelve together make an implicit claim about what we value and how we perceive the world.”
My rating:
The Secret Life of Books will be published by Elliott & Thompson on Thursday 19th September. My thanks to Alison Menzies for arranging my free copy for review.
Doorstopper(s) of the Month: Julia Glass (& Umberto Eco)
The Whole World Over by Julia Glass (2006)
When I plucked this from the sidewalk clearance area of my favorite U.S. bookstore, all I knew about it was that it featured a chef and was set in New York City and New Mexico. Those facts were enough to get me interested, and my first taste of Julia Glass’s fiction did not disappoint. I started reading it in the States at the very end of December and finished it in the middle of this month, gobbling up the last 250 pages or so all in one weekend.
Charlotte “Greenie” Duquette is happy enough with her life: a successful bakery in Greenwich Village, her psychiatrist husband Alan, and their young son George. But one February 29th – that anomalous day when anything might happen – she gets a call from the office of the governor of New Mexico, who tasted her famous coconut cake (sandwiched with lemon curd and glazed in brown sugar) at her friend Walter’s tavern and wants her to audition for a job as his personal chef at the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe. It’s just the right offer to shake up her stagnating career and marriage.
One thing you can count on from a doorstopper, from Dickens onward, is that most of the many characters will be connected (“a collection of invisibly layered lives” is how Glass puts it). So: Walter’s lover is one of Alan’s patients; Fenno, the owner of a local bookstore, befriends both Alan and Saga, a possibly homeless young woman with brain damage who volunteers in animal rescue – along with Walter’s dog-walker, who’s dating his nephew; and so on. The title refers to how migrating birds circumnavigate the globe but always find their way home, and the same is true of these characters: no matter how far they stray – even as Greenie and Alan separately reopen past romances – the City always pulls them back.
My only real complaint about the novel is that it’s almost overstuffed: with great characters and their backstories, enticing subplots, and elements that seemed custom-made to appeal to me – baking, a restaurant, brain injury, the relatively recent history of the AIDS crisis, a secondhand bookstore, rescue dogs and cats, and much more. I especially loved the descriptions of multi-course meals and baking projects. Glass spins warm, effortless prose reminiscent of what I’ve read by Louise Miller and Carolyn Parkhurst. I will certainly read her first, best-known book, Three Junes, which won the National Book Award. I was also delighted to recall that I have her latest on my Kindle: A House Among the Trees, based on the life of Maurice Sendak.
All told, this was quite the bargain entertainment at 95 cents! Two small warnings: 1) if you haven’t read Three Junes, try not to learn too much about it – Glass likes to use recurring characters, and even a brief blurb (like what’s on the final page of my paperback; luckily, I didn’t come across it until the end) includes a spoiler about one character. 2) Glass is deliberately coy about when her book is set, and it’s important to not know for as long as possible. So don’t glance at the Library of Congress catalog record, which gives it away.
Page count: 560
My rating:
I started Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1983) with the best intentions of keeping up with Annabel’s buddy read. The first 50–100 pages really flew by and drew me into the mystery of a medieval abbey where monks keep getting murdered in hideous ways. I loved the Sherlockian shrewdness and tenacity of Brother William; the dutiful recording of his sidekick, narrator Adso of Melk; and the intertextual references to Borges’s idea of a library as a labyrinth. But at some point the historical and theological asides and the untranslated snippets of other languages (mostly Latin) began to defeat me, and I ended up just skimming most of the book. I’d recommend this if you liked Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind, or if you fancy an astronomically more intelligent version of The Da Vinci Code.
A favorite passage: “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means”
My rating:
Library Checkout: November 2017
This month I’ve mostly been reading Sunday Times Young Writer Award nominees and novellas from my own shelves, but I sneaked in a handful of library reads via some novellas and poetry collections, plus the Iris Murdoch readalong. I’ve added in star ratings and links to reviews of those books I haven’t already featured on the blog in some way.
Most of the books I got out from the university library last month are still hanging around and will continue to provide me with some varied reading through Christmas. I’m especially keen to try Janet Frame and Oliver Sacks for the first time, and This Cold Heaven can’t fail to be an appropriate read for the winter months! Believe it or not, but I have never read The Catcher in the Rye, so I just have to decide the right time to finally experience it.
[I haven’t yet figured out a (free) dedicated link-up system, so if you do take part in Library Checkout please just leave a link to your blog in the comments.]
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Special Exits: A Graphic Memoir by Joyce Farmer [university library]
- Fathom [poetry] by Jenny Lewis
- Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
- First Love by Gwendoline Riley
- Halfway to Silence: Poems by May Sarton [university library]
- Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike
SKIMMED ONLY
- The Ultimate Freelancer’s Guidebook by Yuwanda Black
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
Public library:
- The Cat Who Stayed for Christmas by Cleveland Amory
- Fresh Complaint: Stories by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller
University library:
- Herzog by Saul Bellow
- This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich
- To the Is-land: An Autobiography by Janet Frame
- Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
- Vita Nova [poetry] by Louise Glück
- The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey
- There Is an Anger that Moves [poetry] by Kei Miller
- And When Did You Last See Your Father? by Blake Morrison
- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Magnificent Spinster by May Sarton
- Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells by Helen Scales

A selection of the university library books on my pile.
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell [university library]
- Jaguars and Electric Eels by Alexander von Humboldt [university library]
What have you been reading from your local libraries? Does anything appeal from my stacks?
Library Checkout: September 2017
I’ve mostly been reading review copies, books from my own shelves, and Kindle books this month, though I did manage one library read during our trip to Amsterdam. While I was at the public library on Thursday, however, I was tempted by several titles from the bestsellers display – these are two-week loans with no renewals, so I have to devote some serious time to them this week and into early October. I’ve read and enjoyed one previous book each by Binet, Knausgaard and Higashida (I just realized those are all translated – how about that? Usually I have to urge myself to remember to read literature in translation!), so will be interested to see how their most recent work stacks up.
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach
CURRENTLY READING
- The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet
- Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard
- A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold [from university library]
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Fall Down 7 Times, Get Up 8, Naoki Higashida
(Hosted by Charleen of It’s a Portable Magic.)
Have you been taking advantage of your local libraries? What appeals from my list?
Ghent and Amsterdam, and What I Read

Ghent. Photo by Chris Foster
We got back on Monday from a packed week in Ghent and Amsterdam. Despite the chilly, showery weather and a slightly disappointing Airbnb experience in Ghent, it was a great trip overall. Our charming little B&B apartment in Broek in Waterland, a 20-minute bus ride from Amsterdam, more than made up for the somewhat lackluster accommodation in Belgium and was a perfect base for exploring the area. With our three-day, all-inclusive regional travel passes we were free to hop on as many trams and buses as we wanted.
On Saturday we crammed in lots of Amsterdam’s main attractions: the Rijksmuseum, the Begijnhof cloisters, the Botanical Gardens and the Anne Frank House, interspersed with window shopping, a rainy picnic lunch and an Indonesian takeaway dinner eaten by a canal. I also got to visit a more off-the-beaten-track attraction I’d spotted in our guide book: De Poezenboot or “The Cat Boat,” a home for strays moored on the Singel canal. Alas, the resident kitties were not as friendly as many we met on the rest of the trip, but it was still fun.
The highlight of our Amsterdam stay was the Van Gogh Museum on Sunday morning. It was crowded – everything was; though Ghent was very quiet, Amsterdam doesn’t seem to be into its off season yet, if it even has one – but we took our time and saw every single painting, many of which I’d never come across in reproductions. The galleries are organized in chronological order, so you get to trace Van Gogh’s style and state of mind over the years. Superb.

Marken. Photo by Chris Foster
At this point we were just about overwhelmed by the big city atmosphere, so we spent much of the next day and a half in the outlying Dutch towns of Marken and Edam. Flat fields and dykes, cows, cobbled streets and bicycles everywhere – it’s what you’d expect of Holland’s countryside, apart from a surprising dearth of windmills.
Bookish highlights:
- This Ghent University library – I’m presuming it held Special Collections/rare books:
- The American Book Center in Amsterdam:

Photo by Chris Foster
What I read:
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov: A comic novel about a Russian professor on an American college campus. While there are indeed shades of Lucky Jim – I certainly laughed out loud at Timofey Pnin’s verbal gaffes and slapstick falls – there’s more going on here. In this episodic narrative spanning 1950–4, Pnin is a figure of fun but also of pathos: from having all his teeth out and entertaining the son his ex-wife had by another man to failing to find and keep a home of his own, he deserves the phrase Nabokov originally thought to use as a title, “My Poor Pnin”.
Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker: Bosker gave herself a year and a half to learn everything about wine in hopes of passing the Court of Master Sommeliers exam. Along the way she worked in various New York City restaurants, joined blind tasting clubs and attended an olfactory conference. The challenge included educating her palate, absorbing tons of trivia about growers and production methods, and learning accepted standards for sommelier service. The resulting book is a delightful blend of science, memoir and encounters with people who are deadly serious about wine.
You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann: And I thought my Airbnb experience was a nightmare? This is a horror novella about a writing retreat gone bad. The narrator is a screenplay writer who’s overdue delivering the sequel to Besties. As he argues with his partner, tries to take care of his daughter and produces fragments of the screenplay, the haunted house in the mountains starts to close in on him. I’ve loved Kehlmann’s work before (especially F), but he couldn’t convince me of the narrator’s state of mind or the peril. I actually found the book unintentionally humorous.
The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker: A Dutch translator and Emily Dickinson scholar has fled a mistake in her personal life and settled in rural Wales at the foot of Snowdon. “She had left everything behind, everything except the poems. They would have to see her through. She forgot to eat.” On her farmstead is a dwindling flock of geese and, later on, a young man surveying for a new footpath. Amidst her quiet, secret-filled days we also learn of her husband’s attempts to find her back in Amsterdam. Bakker’s writing is subtle and lovely, yet the story never quite took off for me.
Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach: If you liked Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Miniaturist, you may also enjoy this atmospheric, art-inspired novel set in the 1630s. (Originally from 1999, it’s recently been adapted into a film.) Sophia, married off to an old merchant, falls in love with Jan van Loos, the painter who comes to do their portrait. If Sophia and Jan are ever to be together, they’ll have to scrape together enough money to plot an elaborate escape. I thought this was rather soap opera-ish most of the way through, though I was satisfied with how things turned out in the end.
Plus other books I had on the go (lots of short works and literature in translation):
Dangling Man by Saul Bellow
- Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen
- The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret
- Notes on a Banana: A Memoir of Food, Love and Manic Depression by David Leite
- The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
- Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman
- A Girl Walks into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Love, and Women’s Work by Miranda Pennington

Extremely cheap souvenirs of Amsterdam to add to my collections: a badge, a pressed coin, and a Van Gogh bookmark.
What have you been reading recently?
Do you find that books read ‘on location’ never quite live up to your expectations?
Library Checkout: August 2017
A thin month for library books overall, although I did read two very good ones. The Aldo Leopold book is a nature classic I’m pleased we could find via the library of the university where my husband works. In the second week of September I’m going along with him to Ghent, Belgium, where he’ll be presenting a research paper at a landscape ecology conference. Though we’ve been before, it’s a lovely town I’ll enjoy wandering – in between keeping up a normal virtual workload. After that we head on to Amsterdam for a long weekend; it’ll be my first time there and I’m excited to take in all the sights.
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
From my parents’ local branch in America:
- Sparky! by Jenny Offill [a picture book illustrated by Chris Appelhans]
CURRENTLY READING
- A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
CURRENTLY SKIMMING
- Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving by Julia Samuel
CHECKED OUT, TO BE SKIMMED
- 2 guide books to Belgium
- 2 guide books to Amsterdam
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- White Tears by Hari Kunzru – I read the first 145 pages, skimmed another 70 or so, then gave up. The vibe is Jonathan Franzen meets Zadie Smith circa The Autograph Man; the theme is cultural appropriation, especially of a blues song by a forgotten master. (I had the song from The Wire in my head the whole time.) My interest started to wane after what happens to Carter happens, and by the time the parallel road trips kicked in I was lost. So to what extent this was realist or magic realist or absurdist or whatever I couldn’t tell you. I liked the writing enough that I would try something else by Kunzru if I thought I’d connect to the subject matter more.
(Hosted by Charleen of It’s a Portable Magic.)
Have you been taking advantage of your local libraries? What appeals from my lists?
Library Checkout: May 2017
We fly to America tomorrow morning, but, as you can see, despite my best efforts I’ve managed to leave behind a sizeable pile of library books for when I get back.
And that’s not to mention this gorgeous set of review copies awaiting my return!
I’ve added in ratings and links to any reviews of books I haven’t already featured here in some way.
LIBRARY BOOKS READ
- Ashland & Vine by John Burnside
- The Otters’ Tale by Simon Cooper
- Glad of These Times by Helen Dunmore [poetry]
- The Valentine House by Emma Henderson
- Bodies of Light by Sarah Moss
- Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift
- Gizelle’s Bucket List: My Life with a Very Large Dog by Lauren Fern Watt
SKIMMED ONLY
- A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy by Colin Grant
- Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir by Tove Jansson
- In the Bonesetter’s Waiting-Room: Travels through Indian Medicine by Aarathi Prasad
- Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, the Great War by John Lewis-Stempel
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Multitudes: Eleven Stories by Lucy Caldwell
- Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery by Alys Fowler
- Bee Quest: In Search of Rare Bees by Dave Goulson
- What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
- A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman
- Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson
- Human Acts by Han Kang
- White Tears by Hari Kunzru
- Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss
- Island Home: A Landscape Memoir by Tim Winton
As to America: I hope you would agree I have been very restrained in only requesting three books to borrow from my parents’ local public library. The Coates and Shapiro are extremely short memoirs I should have no trouble getting through, and the Strayed, a collection of advice columns, is the kind of book that I can dip in and out of. My Kindle and my personal library will more than make up for any further shortfall in reading material.
ON HOLD, TO BE CHECKED OUT
- Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- Hourglass, Dani Shapiro
(Hosted by Charleen of It’s a Portable Magic.)
Have you been taking advantage of your local libraries? What appeals from my lists?