Well I’ve got a lot to tell you about today, having not blogged since the weekend, so here’s some Shiny Linkiness, a sweet book that wasn’t my Iris Murdoch and some purchases!

First of all, as we know, I read Malala Yousafzai’s wonderful autobiography fairly recently, and that was because I’d won a copy of her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai’s book, “Let Her Fly” from NetGalley (thank you to NetGalley and publisher Penguin Random House for the opportunity to read it). I loved “Let Her Fly” and here’s an excerpt from my review:

Now, we can argue about nature and nurture, can’t we, but what is clear is that the extraordinary Malala would not have got as far as she has without this background and this amazing man pushing her onwards and opening the gates of education for her. They form a great team, and still work together on the Malala Foundation. But he doesn’t idolise her and put her on a pedestal, and he’s very honest on the family dynamic and especially his relationship with his own sons.

(read the whole review here)

Paul Gallico – “Mrs Harris Goes to New York”

(31 January 2018 – The Newlyn Bookshop)

I bought this on a trip to Penzance from the lovely second-hand bookshop on Chapel Street, a dear old Penguin from 1960.

A charming sequel to “Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris” in which Mrs H, South London daily, plus her doomy friend Violet, ends up in New York and also in possession of a small boy she has liberated from next door. While the introduction of some trendy late-50s culture misses the boat a bit, the return of an old friend and the addition of some super new ones is lovely, and the whole, if slight, is warm and a joy. Partly told in letters, which makes for a very sweet read.

Naughties

So do we remember when I bought some books cheap at The Works because they were Christmas books and it was January? Well of course they were all in series, weren’t they, and not the first in each, and they were about Cornwall and I found second-hand copies cheap and although I left one alone, I now have this.

Oops, not oops.

And then on the Prosopagnosia group (read about proso or face-blindness and me on my business blog here), there was mention of a YA novel with a whole  prosopagnosic hero and so that had to be got, didn’t it?

Yes, it seems it did

So there we go. Currently reading Janet McNeill’s “The Maiden Dinosaur” which is brilliant, then it’s on with the Murdoch, I promise. It’s not as wonderful as I remembered it being, but one’s bound to dip down after all the promotions up the favourites list.

Have you been naughty recently? What do you do if you accidentally buy the middle book in a series? They don’t count, right?