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What's the latest book, ebook, audiobook you've acquired - old or new? Share it here!

My daughter Charity recommended this book to me yesterday - it's full of swears and very funny despite its dark overtones. I got the e-book.

Dreaming of You: A Novel in Verse (2021) - Melissa Lozada-Oliva
A macabre love story in verse about celebrity, loss, and longing following a poet who resurrects pop star Selena from the dead. Absurd, lyrical, and heartfelt, Melissa Lozada-Oliva's Dreaming of You is a genre-bending novel in verse that examines questions of death, love, celebrity, and queer identity.

I'm currently reading this one, I read the blurb then had to purchase the ebook and i'm really enjoying it.

Line of Sight - Christina Koning
(2014)
London, 1927. An 'unreal city', full of fog, and cigarette smoke, and drifting shadows... Or that's how it seems to Frederick Rowlands, who works as a switchboard operator for a firm of City solicitors. With his sight badly damaged by shrapnel during the First World War, Fred is forced to rely on his other senses to understand what's going on. Being a blind man in a sighted world hasn't been easy, but with the stoicism so characteristic of his generation, he's made a life for himself. Then something happens which threatens to destroy the safe, secure world Fred has established with his wife, Edith, and their young children.

I can't remember where I found out about this classic book. I needed a book that started with 'J' so I looked through ebooks on offer and found this absolute diamond by an author who sadly died alone, forgotten, and ignored.



Journey to Paradise: Short Stories and Autobiographical Sketches by Dorothy M. Richardson

Dorothy M. Richardson (1873-1957, aged 84)

Richardson was born in Abingdon in 1873. Her family moved to Worthing, West Sussex in 1880 and then Putney, London in 1883. At seventeen, because of her father's financial difficulties she went to work as a governess and teacher, first in 1891 for six months at a finishing school in Germany. In 1895 Richardson gave up work as a governess to take care of her severely depressed mother, but her mother committed suicide the same year. Richardson's father had become bankrupt at the end of 1893.

Richardson subsequently moved in 1896 to Bloomsbury, London, where she worked as a receptionist/secretary/assistant in a Harley Street dental surgery. While in Bloomsbury in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Richardson associated with writers and radicals, including the Bloomsbury Group. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was a friend and they had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and then miscarriage, in 1907. While she had first published an article in 1902, Richardson's writing career, as a freelance journalist really began around 1906, with periodical articles on various topics, book reviews, short stories, and poems, as well as translation from German and French. During this period she became interested in the Quakers and published two books relating to them in 1914.

In 1915 Richardson published her first novel Pointed Roofs, the first complete stream of consciousness novel published in English. She married the artist Alan Odle (1888-1948) in 1917 – a distinctly bohemian figure, who was fifteen years younger than she. From 1917 until 1939 the couple spent their winters in Cornwall and their summers in London, and then stayed permanently in Cornwall until Odle’s death in 1948. She supported herself and her husband with freelance writing for periodicals for many years. In 1954, she had to move into a nursing home in the London suburb of Beckenham, Kent, where she died, forgotten, alone and ignored, in 1957.

Richardson was one of a select group of writers who changed the rules of prose fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. With James Joyce in Ireland, Marcel Proust in France, William Faulkner in the United States and, in England, Virginia Woolf, Richardson invented a new form of writing. She can claim, with Proust and Joyce, to have been at the forefront of a revolution in literature. The first ‘chapter’ of her long work, Pilgrimage, was begun in 1912 - a year before the publication of the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, two years before the first appearance of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and seven years before Woolf’s first experimental novel Jacob’s Room.

Richardson also published short stories in a variety of periodicals (a collection was published by Virago in 1989) and a handful of poems. She was the author of numerous articles in periodicals such as Adelphi and Vanity Fair. She began her literary career reviewing for the vegetarian journal, Crank. Between 1912 and 1921, she wrote a regular column, ‘Comments by a Layman’, for the Dental Record. She translated eight books into English from French and German. Between 1927 and 1933 she published 23 articles on film in the avant-garde little magazine, Close Up.

Richardson’s aesthetic was influenced by diverse currents of thought. She was part of the alternative, bohemian culture at the turn of the century that embraced vegetarianism, feminism and socialism. Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman made an early impact on her work and one of her first reviews was of a book by the advocate for homosexual rights, utopian socialist, and Whitmanite poet, Edward Carpenter.

If you are interested, please join the Goodreads group on her that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

Jazzy wrote: "I can't remember where I found out about this classic book. I needed a book that started with 'J' so I looked through ebooks on offer and found this absolute diamond by an author who sadly died alo..."

What an amazing life! Thank you for this gem!

Years ago I read Richardson's 13 Volume Pilgramage series of novels. Stylistically, the later books were ahead of her time and she was good at creating atmosphere in the the earlier books.
I recomend them if you can find them and have the time.

you're most welcome Cosmic! And Rosemarie, If i can find them I certainly will! She is capable of painting the most detailed pictures with words.

Do you have links or names of the novels?

I bought the Complete Stories of Kafka. But apart from Metamorphosis, which I already had, there are only 7 stories, which are VERY short, like only 2 pages. I was SURE that there were more than that!

I thought so too, Bernard!
Did you enjoy them anyway?

I got
Henry and June by Anaïs Nin

50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die Vol: 4

This was on Kindle today for 00.00. I found the book Sybil, or the Two Nations and The Jungle Books Vol. 2 both books that I could read for Tea for Two challenge.

MMS Health Recovery Guidebook

A friend turned me on to this book and I told her I would read it this month.

Table Two by Marjorie Wilenski. I’m looking forward to starting this one tonight.

ooh I got my son The Gormenghast Trilogy
(Folio Society Edition)

Clifford Simak was one the writers of "pulp" fiction back in the 1940s and continued writing until his death in 1988. He has won Hugo Awards for Science Fiction and a lifetime acheivement award for horror the Bram Stoker Award. I just read his book. Lately I have focused on Project Gutenberg versions of older texts. This is one where I actually bought the book!

Jazzy wrote: "ooh I got my son The Gormenghast Trilogy
(Folio Society Edition)


"

What a lovely set!

I just bought Lost Horizon for my Kindle. It's been on my list to read for a while and the price was down to $1.99 so I snagged it!

Everyone is finding some really good books!

I just downloaded Jane Of Lantern Hill by Lucy Maud Montgomery. So far it’s a really delightful classic!

sounds like a lovely book! x