Book Sharing Monday

It's cool and grey today, the stillness punctuated by the kordle of the magpies. A work day. Yesterday was a perfect day; sun, after a week of rain, and washing on the line. A park, a bakery, a loaf of sourdough bread. A trip to the book shop...

The book shop visit was work, as much as spending time in a book shop could ever be work; in other words, not work at all.  We needed books for book club, new read-alouds, something to add to  a study of the Jazz Age. Here's what we found:

Dash and Lilly's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan - Arwen's finished this one already and been generous with praise. I'm only a couple of chapters in but I have high hopes. I've enjoyed books by David Levithan ( in collaboration with others ) before. This is our modern romance for book club; a girl-boy relationship via a red Moleskine journal.

Heist Society by Ally Carter. This is the girls' new read-aloud. OK, so it's not high literature but it is amusing, snappy and reasonably well written, so not exactly from the gutter either. Kat Bishop is a reformed teenage thief from a family of thieves, drawn back into the family business when her father goes too far and steals an art collection belonging to a mobster. First chapter today met expectations...

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner. The book Snowy really wanted was One Small Dog by the wonderful Phillippa Pearce but we had to order it in. To amuse him at bedtime until it arrives, I thought we'd give Emil a go. We're three chapters down already in this classic tale of a boy who has his money stolen whilst  travelling to see relations in Berlin, his determination to get the money back and his adventures with the detectives he meets along the way. So not a bad interim choice.

Bright Young Things by Anna Godbersen is the book I chose for Lucy, to add a little colour to her studies of the Roaring 20's. I felt she wasn't quite at the right age to get the most out of Fitzgerald and decided this story of Midwesterner's Letty and Cordelia's escape to 20's New York might be a lighter and more approachable way of fleshing out the time period.

Before we left the book shop, I took Mrs Emerson's Wife by Amy Belding Brown from the second hand shelves and spent a very pleasant afternoon reading on my bed. I do suspect Ms Belding Brown has taken considerable imaginative liberties with the characters of both Mrs Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and she has thoroughly prejudiced me again Mr Emerson but that's the price you pay for a book that combines "detailed history with a page-turning illicit love story."