Post AbE9UcCjSyPbcVWWy8 by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
(DIR) More posts by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
(DIR) Post #AbCm6RJDpajWm76Paa by macha@spinster.xyz
2023-10-27T19:03:23.609152Z
0 likes, 2 repeats
Christmas book ideas needed.Does anyone have suggestions for books to read over Christmas? It doesn't have to be about Christmas but just something that makes you think about it and is good to read over the holidays. Not the cheesy Christmas romances which are a plenty but just good books with something that links to the season.One of mine is "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" by C.S.Lewis. I got it as a Christmas gift in a lovely boxed set of all the Narnia books when I was six and a good chunk of the book is set in an icy winter. I also associate Little Women with Christmas and another favourite is Agatha Christie's "Hercule Poirot's Christmas". It is perfect for an afternoon snuggled into a soft blanket on the sofa and with some hot chocolate.What are your recommendations?
(DIR) Post #AbCm6SHqCDDro7Sp4i by Flick@spinster.xyz
2023-10-27T19:26:02.905835Z
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@macha John Grisham has a sweet (non-legal) book called Skipping Christmas that I quite like.
(DIR) Post #AbE7m8SkaGQqgMF6Lg by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T10:53:02.991031Z
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@Flick @macha https://bibliolifestyle.com/classic-christmas-stories/
(DIR) Post #AbE7m9KdLvX9NTS8Ku by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T10:53:59.824196Z
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@macha @Flick Reginald’s Christmas! If you like Saki, I bloody love him 😂 Not for everyone though, God, he was a vicious wasp!Of course there were other people there. There was a Major Somebody who had shot things in Lapland, or somewhere of that sort; I forget what they were, but it wasn’t for want of reminding. We had them cold with every meal almost, and he was continually giving us details of what they measured from tip to tip, as though he thought we were going to make them warm under-things for the winter. I used to listen to him with a rapt attention that I thought rather suited me, and then one day I quite modestly gave the dimensions of an okapi I had shot in the Lincolnshire fens. The Major turned a beautiful Tyrian scarlet (I remember thinking at the time that I should like my bathroom hung in that colour), and I think that at that moment he almost found it in his heart to dislike me. Mrs. Babwold put on a first-aid-to-the-injured expression, and asked him why he didn’t publish a book of his sporting reminiscences; it would be so interesting. She didn’t remember till afterwards that he had given her two fat volumes on the subject, with his portrait and autograph as a frontispiece and an appendix on the habits of the Arctic mussel.I used to carry a small volume of his work always in my bag, for reading in moments of waiting, at Dr or on train etc, but he makes me laugh so much people would look at me like I was wanting.
(DIR) Post #AbE7oCNsyUb1QKx1XM by Flick@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:03:58.668249Z
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@HebrideanHecate @macha I’ve never read him, but that makes me want to!
(DIR) Post #AbE80nWOj0Sg4twLjc by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:04:51.490881Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@Flick @macha He’ll be well cancelled now 😂
(DIR) Post #AbE83pnaiLvA0fQjdQ by Flick@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:06:48.179628Z
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@HebrideanHecate @macha I’m sure! Even his semi-namesake Taki is currently cancelled.
(DIR) Post #AbE9UcCjSyPbcVWWy8 by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:09:14.279961Z
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@Flick *After all,” said the Duchess vaguely, “there are certain things you can’t get away from. Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain well-defined limits.”“So, for the matter of that,” replied Reginald, “has the Russian Empire. The trouble is that the limits are not always in the same place.”Reginald and the Duchess regarded each other with mutual distrust, tempered by a scientific interest. Reginald considered that the Duchess had much to learn; in particular, not to hurry out of the Carlton as though afraid of losing one’s last ‘bus. A woman, he said, who is careless of disappearances is capable of leaving town before Good-wood, and dying at the wrong moment of an unfashionable disease.The Duchess thought that Reginald did not exceed the ethical standard which circumstances demanded.“Of course,” she resumed combatively, “it’s the prevailing fashion to believe in perpetual change and mutability, and all that sort of thing, and to say we are all merely an improved form of primeval ape–of course you subscribe to that doctrine?”“I think it decidedly premature; in most people I know the process is far from complete.”“And equally of course you are quite irreligious?”“Oh, by no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.”The Duchess suppressed a sniff. She was one of those people who regard the Church of England with patronising affection, as if it were something that had grown up in their kitchen garden*
(DIR) Post #AbE9UdyGti276Em0hs by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:14:33.654412Z
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@Flick also….The plot,” said Reginald, “would be one of those little everyday tragedies that one sees going on all round one. In my mind’s eye there is the case of the Mudge-Jervises, which in an unpretentious way has quite an Enoch Arden intensity underlying it. They’d only been married some eighteen months or so, and circumstances had prevented their seeing much of each other. With him there was always a foursome or something that had to be played and replayed in different parts of the country, and she went in for slumming quite as seriously as if it was a sport. With her, I suppose, it was. She belonged to the Guild of the Poor Dear Souls, and they hold the record for having nearly reformed a washerwoman. No one has ever really reformed a washerwoman, and that is why the competition is so keen. You can rescue charwomen by fifties with a little tea and personal magnetism, but with washerwomen it’s different; wages are too high. This particular laundress, who came from Bermondsey or some such place, was really rather a hopeful venture, and they thought at last that she might be safely put in the window as a specimen of successful work. So they had her paraded at a drawing-room “At Home” at Agatha Camelford’s; it was sheer bad luck that some liqueur chocolates had been turned loose by mistake among the refreshments–really liqueur chocolates, with very little chocolate. And of course the old soul found them out, and cornered the entire stock. It was like finding a whelk-stall in a desert, as she afterwards partially expressed herself. When the liqueurs began to take effect, she started to give them imitations of farmyard animals as they know them in Bermondsey. She began with a dancing bear, and you know Agatha doesn’t approve of dancing, except at Buckingham Palace under proper supervision. And then she got up on the piano and gave them an organ monkey; I gather she went in for realism rather than a Maeterlinckian treatment of the subject Finally, she fell into the piano and said she was a parrot in a cage, and for an impromptu performance I believe she was very word–perfect; no one had heard anything like it, except Baroness Boobelstein who has attended sittings of the Austrian Reichsrath. Agatha is trying the Rest-cure at Buxton.8
(DIR) Post #AbEBhdLIkHqYp5rpE8 by LostInCalifornia@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:47:36.404668Z
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@macha Left Hand of Darken by LeGuin. Icy planet.And Call of the Wild by London, for the doggie.
(DIR) Post #AbECWdih6PMclJ89gW by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:30:23.253229Z
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@Flick Some of his short stories were quite dark too, not all of it was the comedy of manners stuff.
(DIR) Post #AbECWh2eke7945UdiS by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:32:42.670023Z
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@Flick Tell you who else makes me roll round the floor, George MacDonald Fraser’s McAuslan books.
(DIR) Post #AbECWhjCCU8rC1Oc1Q by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T11:35:25.391234Z
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@Flick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saki
(DIR) Post #AbEDs6GyEr59LuxaRU by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T12:10:18.638685Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
@Maud_Gonner @macha I got this for part of birthday gifts, it’s a lovely wee selection, it’s probably aimed at children but the poems are not child ones.
(DIR) Post #AbEF5Yv78gmLv5ihU0 by HebrideanHecate@spinster.xyz
2023-10-28T12:15:15.033581Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@Maud_Gonner @macha Oh, I’ve just remembered this, Macha