February Books of the Month

March 20, 2020 by Christina

February feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? I know it was a busy month for me because my calendar is packed with book club meetings, dinner plans with friends, and an introduction to quilting class on Sundays. Yet, from the vantage point of mid-March, it feels unimaginably footloose and fancy free. What did I do when I could go and do whatever I wanted? Well, what I did was read an astonishing 17 books during this month thanks in […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Amish, Animals, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Book Club, Canada, Caribbean, Classics, Classics Club, Crime, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Juvenile, LGBTQA+, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Religion, Travel, United Kingdom, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: A. J. Finn, Adam Darlin, Audre Lorde, Becky Ohlsen, Brendan Sainsbury, Catherine Bodry, Chris Chalk, Christopher Ketcham, Coco Morante, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward, Jia Tolentino, John Lee, Jon Krakauer, Kamila Shamsie, Kevin Harrison Jr, L. M. Montgomery, Linda Castillo, Marghanita Laski, Richard Thomas, Rutina Wesley, Shelly Frasier, Steven Higashide, Susan O'Malley, Sy Montgomery

January Books of the Month

February 7, 2020 by Christina

Whenever I am in Montana, I tend to go dark across social media, focusing on spending time with family and being outdoors over writing blog posts, responding to emails, or posting to Instagram. (I deleted Facebook in August 2019 followed by Twitter the next month.) I planned to return to blogging once my vacation ended. Then, work threw my team and I through another re-organization, and I was too mentally scrambled to organize my bookish thoughts in coherent ones. I’m really […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Canada, Cartography, Chunkster, Classics, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Germany, Iceland, Icelandic, Indigenious Peoples, Japanese, Mexico, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Reread, South America, Translated, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Andrew Cauthery, Anna Funder, Björg Árnadóttir, C.J. Box, Cathy O'Neil, Charles C. Mann, Guðmundur Andri Thorsson, Kaoru Mori, L. M. Montgomery, Monica Dickens, Naomi Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett

December 20, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Project Gutenberg, 2012. Originally published 1906. 522 pgs. Free download. The book’s title refers to ships shuttling back and forth over the Atlantic, carrying wealthy Americans heiresses to England in search of titled husbands and impoverish, titled Englishmen in search of wealthy women. (Think Cora Crawley from “Downton Abbey” and her marriage to Lord Grantham.) According to Persephone Books, it would later be estimated that more than five hundred American women married titled foreigners and some […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Classics, Classics Club, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, New York, North America, Persephone Books, United States • Tags: Frances Hodgson Burnett

They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple

December 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. Persephone Books, 2000. Originally published 1934. 496 pgs. Purchased.  The Blakes are considered to be a typical English family: Celia is a homemaker with three children – Freda, Ruth, and Douglas – while Thomas holds down a job at a Leicester engineering business and serves as the breadwinner for his wife and children, his widowed mother, his unemployed brother, and his unmarried sister. Yet, the family has long believed they could be more and have more […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Dorothy Whipple

The World that was Ours by Hilda Bernstein

November 27, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Persephone books, 2009. Originally published 1967. 394 pgs. Purchased. Nelson Mandela spent nearly 28 years in prison – 18 years of which were spent on Robben Island – as a result of the Rivonia Trial, which charged him and seven other men with 221 acts of sabotage designed to encourage violent revolution in apartheid South Africa. Among his seven codefendants were Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, a white man with allegiances to the banned Communist Party and the goal […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Africa, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, South Africa • Tags: Hilda Bernstein

Kitchen Essays by Agnes Jekyll

October 14, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Persephone Books, 2009. Originally published 1922. 264 pgs. Purchased. First published in The Times during the 1920s, this collection of essays presents the proper setting and occasion for different recipes. There are essays for particular events – the wedding breakfast, the Sunday luncheon, and the country hunt – as well as for certain people – the too thin, the too fat, and the bachelor. I follow a handful of food blogs as I’m always on the hunt […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Food, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Agnes Jekyll

The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff

September 30, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2017. Originally published 1931. 326 pgs. Purchased.  For the past two decades, the Stevens family has taken a two-week holiday in Bognor Regis on the southern coast of England. The family has their routine down; tasks and chores are handed out the night before in order to make sure they can leave their home at 22 Corunna Road in Dulwich in time to catch the train via Clapham Junction to their holiday destination. Upon arrival, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: R.C. Sherriff

The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

August 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2011. Originally published 1924. 288 pgs. Purchased.  Evangeline Knapp threw herself into motherhood, obsessively monitoring the food her three children eat and keeping every spec of dirt out of the family’s home. Her eldest son, Henry, is unable to eat foods cooked by his aunt because they don’t match the delicate balance his mother has made to aid his delicate constitution. Her youngest son, Stephen, screams, hid, and is generally considered an unruly child. When […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Feminism, Fiction, North America, Persephone Books, United States • Tags: Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

July 17, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2009. Originally published 1945. 377 pgs. Purchased.  In 1939, the four Wiltshire children enjoy an idyllic summer holiday with their parents, a middle-class couple from central London. Their holiday – and, in fact, their comfortable lives – ends with the children being informed that the two oldest, Laurel and Tony, will be sent to boarding school while the two younger children, Kim and Tuesday, will be sent with Nannie to live with their paternal grandparents. […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Noel Streatfeild

Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

June 26, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Russian by Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari. Persephone Books, 2014. Originally published 1967. 344 pgs. Purchased. In February 1937, a professor, journalist, and proud member of the Communist Party in Kazan named Eugenia Ginzburg was arrested for failing to denounce her fellow professor, Nikolay Naumovich Elvov. Ginzburg, whose non-Latinized name is often spelled as Yevgenia or Evgenia, was accused of participating in Elvov’s counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group through her position on the editorial board of […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, Russia, Russian, Translated • Tags: Eugenia Ginzburg

Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski

May 20, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2008. Originally published 1949. 232 pgs. Purchased. In 1940, as the Nazis were marching onto to Paris, an English solider named Hilary Wainwright was forced to abandon his wife and newborn son. His wife, Lisa, was too ill from childbirth for a hasty evacuation back to England; his son, John, seemingly better off in the care of his mother and her friends than a single father. In 1942, the British War Office notified Hilary of […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Adoption, Europe, Fiction, France, Persephone Books • Tags: Marghanita Laski

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple

April 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2005. Originally published 1944. 464 pgs. Purchased. When their mother died of influenza, eighteen-year-old Lucy abandoned her dreams to further her education and returned home to care for her father and siblings, including younger sisters Vera and Charlotte. Their sisterly bond morphed into one where Lucy took on the role of mother – protective, worrying, quick to correct and provide advice – and Vera and Charlotte shared secrets and jokes and excluded Lucy from their […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Dorothy Whipple