Library Haul

 We did a library run today--I had 5 books in. I was waiting for the last one, which came in today. 

Here they are:

I read an excerpt from this book in The Guardian several weeks ago. It's written by a rare book dealer who became interested in the woman authors whose books were available to Jane Austen during her lifetime. I'm quite interested in women writers from the past who may now be mostly forgotten--or at least not as well known as some of the male authors writing at the same time. I've read some of Frances Burney's work and loved it, as well as some Victorian women writers, but the latter would've been after Jane Austen, so I'm looking forward to learning more about women who wrote before. I suspect there may be some clicking around Project Gutenberg in my near future.

Next, I got this one, which is hard to see. It was recommended in someone's book blog and is a short novel that was originally serialized in Japan in the late 70s.

It's a pretty little book called Territory of Light, written by Yuko Tsushima

Not sure where I heard about this next one--probably came across it when doing a library search for something else.

Bill is going to read the next one too, and he asked me how I learned of it. I have no idea. I suspect it was another one that I found when looking for something else. I love the online catalogue!

This is from the Oxford University Press web page about the book:

• From the celebrated historian of Nazi Germany, Mark Roseman, winner of the Wingate Prize and the Fraenkel Prize for previous works.
• The story of a remarkable but completely unsung group that risked everything to help the most vulnerable.
• Offers the most richly documented account ever of any rescue network and sheds unparalleled light on the choices, dilemmas, and dangers of acting under Nazi rule.
• Explores the tensions between wartime experience and the way we have to come to think about rescue in later memory which challenges conventional ways of thinking and writing about rescue and the rescuer, and opens up new perspectives.

Finally, here's the last book I got today and the one that's been on my list the longest. I read about it in January in an article about books to look for it 2025 and immediately went to the library and put myself in the queue. At that point, there were several copies on order and I was number 12. Once the books came in and got processed, I moved down pretty quickly and it went in transit last week and arrived at my library this morning.

When I read about it, I was intrigued. Back in 2015, I noticed that the people who were fans of the orange creature that is currently polluting the White House sounded quite like the people I'd read about in oral histories (I highly recommend Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich by Alison Owings) and other work about Germany in the 1930s. Change some proper nouns and the sorts of things they were saying were just about identical. This is a topic that interests me for a few reasons, one of which is that my paternal grandfather, who died when my father was a child, was one of the original Nazis. I did know my paternal grandmother and have tried to imagine her as a young Nazi wife in that era. This was not something that was really talked about and I think she was told not to speak to me about it, but I'm not sure. I did not have the kind of relationships in my family of origin where it was safe to be curious and ask questions. Beyond that, I'm also interested in the cultural issues that lead people to this way of thinking and allows them to think that they are somehow going to be immune from the disastrous consequences that these kinds of movements have resulted in in the past. So my interest is both cultural/societal and personal. This is the book I'll be reading first. I'll let you know how it is.

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