Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week. Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.  Check out what other readers are excited about at Mailbox Monday.

I've been blessed with an influx of new books lately, just in time for cozy reading by the fire this winter.

Here's what just arrived last week...

ghostly: A Collecton of Ghost Stories, introduced and illustrated by Audrey Niffenegger (author of the wonderful The Time Traveler's Wife).  This is really a classics collection, with stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, P.G. Wodehouse, A.S. Byatt, Saki, and Niffenegger herself, among others.  I  missed out on the spooky reading season this October with my trip to Italy, but I think spooky reading works all winter, when the days are short, the shadows are long, and the owls roost across from our house.

The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse: An Extraordinary Edwardian Case of Deception and Intrigue, by Piu Marie Eatwell.  I've read a few reviews of this book, and I can't wait to sink my teeth into it.  It's not a novel, but it certainly sounds like it could be!

Walking Jane Austen's London: A Tour Guide for the Modern Traveller, by Louise Allen.  I absolutely love books like this, and use them!  Since my next international trip will most likely be to Great Britain, I plan to use this extensively for our time in London.

Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katharine S. White - I like books like this.  The kind of book that I can read over the course of a year, a bit at a time, while I wait for spring and the growing season to return.

Here's the Amazon blurb:

In 1925 Harold Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell as a manuscript reader for The New Yorker. Within months she became the magazine’s first fiction editor, discovering and championing the work of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, James Thurber, Marianne Moore, and her husband-to-be, E. B. White, among others. After years of cultivating fiction, White set her sights on a new genre: garden writing. On March 1, 1958, The New Yorker ran a column entitled “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” a critical review of garden catalogs, in which White extolled the writings of “seedmen and nurserymen,” those unsung authors who produced her “favorite reading matter.” Thirteen more columns followed, exploring the history and literature of gardens, flower arranging, herbalists, and developments in gardening. Two years after her death in 1977, E. B. White collected and published the series, with a fond introduction. The result is this sharp-eyed appreciation of the green world of growing things, of the aesthetic pleasures of gardens and garden writing, and of the dreams that gardens inspire.