An Awfully Big Adventure - Bainbridge, Beryl
My Louder Than life Story - Blessed, Brian
The Luminaries - Catton, Eleanor
Nemesis - Christie, Agatha
The Christmas Surprise - Colgan, Jenny
Little Beach Street Bakery - Colgan, Jenny
Pandora - Cooper, Jilly
Frost at Morning - Crompton, Richmal
To See Ourselves - Delafield, EM
A Winter Away - Fair, Elizabeth
Jeeves and the Wedding Bells - Faulkes, Sebastian
Sisters at the Chalet School - Fletcher, Amy
A Tiny Bit Marvellous - French, Dawn
Cotillion - Heyer, Georgette
The Sex Lives of Cannibals - Joost, Maarten
Dead Now, Of Course - Law, Phyllida
Company in the Evening - Orange, Ursula
Bewildering Cares - Peck, Winifred
Brownsea Silver - Peyton, KM
Winter Solstice - Pilcher, Rosamunde
Voices in Summer - Pilcher, Rosamunde
Whose Body - Sayers, Dorothy L
Outsider: Almost Always, Never Quite - Sewell, Brian
Hidden Figures - Shetterly, Margot Lee
Miss Melville Rides a Tiger - Smith, Evelyn E
Miss Melville Returns - Smith, Evelyn E
Wild Strawberries - Thirkell, Angela
The Headmistress - Thirkell, Angela
The Demon in the House - Thirkell, Angela
Private Enterprise - Thirkell, Angela
Pomfret Towers - Thirkell, Angela
Peace Breaks Out - Thirkell, Angela
Northbridge Rectory - Thirkell, Angela
Miss Bunting - Thirkell, Angela
Marling Hall - Thirkell, Angela
Jutland Cottage - Thirkell, Angela
Growing Up - Thirkell, Angela
Enter Sir Robert - Thirkell, Angela
Cheerfulness Breaks In - Thirkell, Angela
Before Lunch - Thirkell, Angela
August Folly - Thirkell, Angela
Ankle Deep - Thirkell, Angela
A Double Affair - Thirkell, Angela
Revenge Wears Prada - Weisenberg, Lauren

( Yes, that is a lot of Thirkell. )

Modern Romance - Aziz Ansari
I, Alan - Alan Partridge
The Junior Officers' Reading Club - Patrick Hennessey
Full Service - Scott Bowers
The Radleys - Matt Haig
The Other Side of the Story - Marian Keyes
The Tent, the Bucket and Me - Emma Kennedy

More men than usual, more non-fiction than usual.

( February books. )

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - John Le Carre
Five Children on the Western Front - Kate Saunders
The Bunner Sisters - Edith Wharton
The Last 10 Seconds - Simon Kernick
Hard Landing - Stephen Leather
Rough Justice - Simon Leather
Fishnet - Kirsten Innes
Remote Control - Andy McNab
Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky - Sandra Dallas
The Fat Boy Chronicles - Diane Lang
My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
Black Moth - Georgette Heyer
No Time Like the Past - Jodi Taylor
Deadline - Simon Kernick
Target - Simon Kernick
Ciao Asmara - Justin Hill
The Little Friend - Donna Tartt
Act of Will - AJ Hartley
Fat White Vampire - Andrew Fox

( June books. )

What is the What - Dave Eggers
Wallflower at the Orgy - Nora Ephron
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction - Sue Townsend
The Moomins and the Great Flood - Tove Jansson
Diary of a Provincial Lady - EM Delafield
We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson
Life on the Edge - Jennifer Comeaux
The Provincial Lady's Diary - EM Delafield
The Provincial Lady Goes Further - EM Delafield
The Marlows and the Traitor - Antonia Forest
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
The Provincial Lady in America - EM Delafield
For Richer or Poorer - Victoria Coren
My Man Jeeves - PG Wodehouse

( June books )

I think I posted before about the Broken Elements series by Mia Marshall - urban fantasy, where people have powers relating to the elements. If that's your sort of thing, they're currently 79p on Amazon (99c on the US one, I suppose) - here's the link.

If you like, you could recommend some ebooks for £2 or less in my comments, which would be great. I recently bought Farthing by Jo Walton because it was cheap, and really enjoyed it, and I'm working through St Mallory's Forever, which is not good but is still a school story. (Sam and Sarah would hate it because the introduction bangs on about how two of the authors are incredibly young. Though not as young as Jane whatsherface.)

I went to the bookswap yesterday, which Nuala hosted in her lovely house. I made cinnamon brownie muffins, which are chewy and rather nice, and tried to make mini doughnut muffins (milk-free), which were a failure. Today I might do some more baking and take it into work. I was going to make gammon and pear casserole, but I think it uses sweet potato, which I forgot to buy any of.

I was comparatively restrained and only came away with 9 books, one of which was knitting patterns, so doesn't even really count.



I feel I have a nice mix there. I recently went through my shelves to winnow down the amount on them, and took out all the ones I wouldn't want to either reread or refer back to or lend to someone else, or just have to have them. What I also did was take off all the things I want to keep but haven't read, and piled them up on the floor to have at hand. I'm trying to work through these before buying new books or rereading books. Here they are:



So that's 151 books I need to read (not including the separate books within one set of covers). I do want to read all of them, at some point, just... not as much as I want all the other books in the world as well.

( Here are the books in more detail if you wanted to see. )

The bookswap also featured a yarnswap. There was a lot of beautiful yarn - I got some kidsilk haze, which I've never knitted with before, some light green merino, some lovely Chilean variegated alpaca, and enough gold silk yarn and beads to make an amazing beaded shawl. Now I have sorted through all my yarn (something I should probably have done properly beforehand), and I really, really have to start some projects. I have three aborted projects to finish frogging, and a cardigan that I have been stalled on for FIVE MONTHS. The pattern is wrong, and I'm at the same bit for the fifth time of starting where I have finished the chart, and I need to start calculating for bust darts, but it's also the bit where I'll find out if it's too big AGAIN and probably have to start again. I was determined not to let the pattern beat me, but I'm not sure I can bear starting again.

So in order to get back in to knitting I think I'm going to start an entirely new project to get me back into the swing of it. Unfortunately my ravelry browsing has mostly led me to patterns I love for yarn I don't have, and that is not at all the point.

Maybe I could make these pretty fingerless mitterns, probably in some fyperspates sparkly sock yarn I got in the yarn swap anglaisepaon ran a few years ago. Or does anyone have an idea of what I could make with 1300m of Kidsilk haze? or 800m of drops Alpaca? or 700m of merino fingering? or, ooh, 1500m of dk linen? THERE IS TOO MUCH CHOICE AND NEVER ENOUGH YARN.

Another meme, though this one I found on friendsfriends rather than back in the midst of time. Given my propensity for memes and books, it's likely I'll have written about these quite a lot before, but never mind, eh?

( A nice long book meme. )

Paying Guest in Siberia - Maria Hadow
The Guttenberg Bible - Steve Guttenberg
Bossypants - Tina Fey
Toujours Cricklewood? - Alan Coren
The Rehearsal - Eleanor Catton
Bad Girls Don't Die - Katie Alender
Waiting for the Party - Ann Thwaite
The Sara Summer - Mary Downing Hahn
Woman Alive! - Nelle McFather
Seducers in Ecuador and The Heir - Vita Sackville-West
Fearless Fourteen - Janet Evanovich
Les Girls - Constance Tomkinson
Heartburn - Nora Ephron

( June Books. )

Thank You For The Days - Mark Radcliffe
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase - Joan Aiken
Tehran, Lipstick and Loopholes - Nahal Tajadod
Babel Tower - AS Byatt
The Moth Diaries - Rachel Klein
The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo - Zen Cho
The Camomile - Catherine Carswell
The Worry Girl - Andrea Freud Loewenstein

I have missed three months of books this year, partly because my computer died and took two months' worth of writing about it with it, and I have yet not been able to either rescue it or duplicate the work. But at some point I shall.

( April books. )

Three's a Crowd - Alison Dale (Sweet Dreams)
Too Young for Love - Gailanne Maravel (Sweet Dreams)
Her Secret Self - Rhondi Vilott (Sweet Dreams)
Dead Man's Cove - Lauren St John
The Hawkwood War - Ankaret Wells
My Friend Flora - Jane Duncan
My Friend Madame Zora - Jane Duncan
A Wreath for the Enemy - Pamela Frankau
The Young Artists - Constance M White
The New Girl - Emily Perkins
My Friend Cousin Emmie - Jane Duncan
My Friends the Mrs Millers - Jane Duncan

( October books. )