Mailbox Monday - Memorial Day 2013

Time for my favorite meme, Mailbox Monday, where book lovers share the titles they received for review, purchased, or otherwise obtained over the past week. This month’s host is 4 the LOVE of BOOKS--stop by and check out what other books are being profiled this week.

I've had a great new set of books enter my house via all sorts of paths.

Here's my new acquisitions...

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, by Anne Lamott - I really enjoy Lamott's non-fiction.  Her honesty, story-telling, and fresh prose is always a joy to read. Really looking forward to this memoir of babyhood as my own nest empties this summer.

The Widow Waltz, by Sally Koslow - this is a review copy from a publicist; I don't accept many review copies because I tend to read books that have been out for awhile, but this one, about a newly widowed mother in NYC, appealed to me.

Highland River, by Neil M. Gunn - I found this author and title in Robert Macfarlane's wonderful book about distance walking, The Old Ways, and wanted to add it to my collection of books on walking.  Here's the Amazon blurb:

Ken is a scientist, with a scientist's dispassionate eye for the material world, as he reviews his life from the difficult 1930s, through the slaughter of World War I, back to an idyllic boyhood in the Highlands. When the mature man finally reaches the source of the river that has haunted his imagination for so many years, he finds that the wellsprings of magic and delight were always there, in the world all around him at the time, inexhaustible and irreverent. Awarded the James Tait Memorial Prize 1937, Highland River is written in prose as cool and clear as the water it describes, and is the simplest, most poetic, and perhaps the greatest of Neil Gunn's novels.

Sorcery & Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, by Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer - I've read about this novel on many other blogs and it sounds fun.  Another witchie read after The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which I just finished.

Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain - this book has been recommended for years, so I finally got a copy so that I could finally read it.  Here's the Amazon blurb:

Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain’s elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war’s end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as a book that helped "both form and define the mood of its time," it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war.

The Plantagenets: the  Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England, by Dan Jones - lent to me by a brother who came out to visit and who insisted I borrow it because I will love it.  I will--starting this week!