Mailbox Monday

Mercifully, I haven't received much lately...I've been really trying to make a dent on the TBR shelf, but paperbackswap.com just makes it so easy to acquire more.

Anyway, I did receive two new books that I am eager to get to.



I enjoyed Jospehine Tey's The Daughter of Time so much that I ordered her Miss Pym Disposes. The description on Amazon sold me:

Miss Lucy Pym, a popular English psychologist, is guest lecturer at a physical training college. The year's term is nearly over, and Miss Pym -- inquisitive and observant -- detects a furtiveness in the behavior of one student during a final exam. She prevents the girl from cheating by destroying her crib notes. But Miss Pym's cover-up of one crime precipitates another -- a fatal "accident" that only her psychological theories can prove was really murder.

On another book blog I learned about Penelope Lively's A House Unlocked, and got a copy for my sister's birthday and then I couldn't get resist getting a copy for myself so that we could chat about it this winter, hopefully at Christmastime.

Again, cutting and pasting from Amazon:

Whitbread Award and Booker Prize-winning novelist Lively's latest book is a mixture of autobiography and social history. The house in question is Lively's ancestral home Golsoncott in Somerset, England, acquired by her grandparents in 1923. In 1995, when the house had to be disposed of, its familiar objects spoke elegiacally of a way of life that had changed in the intervening years. The figures on the embroidered sampler, for instance, recorded the effect of historical events like the Blitz, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust on the inhabitants of Golsoncott; the potted meat jars served as a mnemonic for the state of the Church; and the bon bon dish evoked a social class served by domestic servants. Lively's writing is a palimpsest of past and present on which flit scenes of England's changing mores and rituals. Add to this a narrative graced with fictional elements and felicitous prose and the result is, to borrow Lively's own phrase, "a rattling good read," as absorbing as any of her novels.