vel veeter – Page 180 – Cannonball Read 17

I am obliged to begin this story with a brief account of the Hampton family, because it is necessary to emphasise the fact once and for all that the Hamptons were very grand as well as very rich.

Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

March 30, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This is the second of two books that take place within the social context of this group of friends and acquaintances. In this book we follow along the trials and tribulations of Polly Hampton, a young woman who more or less becomes a fallen heiress but works her way back to some kind of set of graces through ingenuity and charm. I wasn’t a giant fan of the first book by Nancy Mitford, nor did I really like a different novel of hers I read […]

This is the chronicle of a six-month trip that my wife and I made to Bafut, a mountain grassland kingdom in the British Cameroons in West Africa.

A Zoo in my Luggage by Gerald Durrell

March 30, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This is a memoir piece (and apparently part of a set of four) from Gerald Durrell, brother of Alexandria’s Lawrence Durrell, and also the writer of the series My Family and Other Animals. This memoir is about the various trips he and his wife made in the 1960s looking for animals to create a zoo. They begin in Nigeria and West Africa picking up a lemur here, a bush baby there, and eventually look for larger animals as they go. The premise, according to Durrell, is […]

May 7th — I love my garden.

Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim

March 29, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

This is a memoir/journal from 1898 by the author of The Enchanted April which is a wonderful novel as well. Elizabeth begins this memoir by stating that in her fifth year of her marriage she and husband sort of realized or remembered that they owned a farm in Germany and why not go and live there. Seems reasonable. So the book is a series of different journal entries that take on a number of different subjects including discussing the flowers and birds and plants and surroundings […]

Everything was a mess, especially in the dark.

Barn Blind by Jane Smiley

You Shall Know Them by Vercours

March 27, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

Two very different two star reviews from my continued QUARANTINE READING! (I am not quarantined, just working from home and/or staying at home like most everybody else). Barn Blind I started reading this book a few weeks ago my classes’ SSR (Self-Selected reading) periods and it was so dry and bland that I put it aside and read comic books. When I picked it up yesterday, it was equally dry and bland as before. It’s Jane Smiley’s first novel, and what I normally like […]

He found her already seated at the coffee shop.

False Bingo by Jac Jemc

Separate Hours by Jonathan Baumbach

The Suitcase by Sergei Dovlatov

Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz

The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty

Souls and Bodies by David Lodge

March 26, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

False Bingo 3/5 This is a solid, weird, sometimes scary, sometimes cutting short story collection. I didn’t really like Jemc’s other novel that I read, but I generally liked these stories. The collection begins with a really funny and weird meetup in a coffeeshop that’s punchy and wry. We get some stories about seemingly haunted houses, about weird relationships. Many of the stories are quite short, but some of the longer ones really put something down that is interesting to stick around with. Two come […]

the night was clere though i slept i seen it.

The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth

March 26, 2020 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

What a truly impressive book that I didn’t like very much! The premise of this book is looking at a turning point in Anglo-Saxon England right after 1066 as a kind of apocalypse for those involved. Some recently books I’ve read (Gone with the Wind; The Grapes of Wrath) also treat the lives of the primary characters as if they are facing down the apocalypse….this too is a theme in a lot of other books like Doomsday Book and many different encounter narratives by indigenous groups. […]

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