READING NEXT  

Among my long list:
Thomasina,
by Paul Gallico
Middle Grade fantasy
1957
288 pages
It counts for the Classics Club
Will be buddyreading it with Mallika

I was quite impressed by The Snow Goose, the first book I read by Gallico four years ago already, so I am really thrilled to try this one. I hope it won’t disappoint.

Here is part of the synopsis – the full synopsis reveals too much, as usual!

“Seven-year-old Mary adores her ginger cat, Thomasina, and is crushed when Thomasina falls sick, and Mary’s father, a grim, inflexible man who is the town vet, decrees that the only thing to be done is to put Thomasina down.
Mary refuses to speak to her father, and then she herself contracts a life-threatening disease.
In the meantime, however, Thomasina has been rescued—by the mysterious Lori…”

Descent Into Hell,
by Charles Williams 
Christian fantasy
1937
220 pages
Counts for my Classics Club 5th list

This is the book I got for The Classics Spin #44.
I had already tried to listen to it some time ago, and it didn’t work too well.
I think reading it instead should do it. We’ll see.

“Charles Williams is less well known than his fellow Inklings, such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Like some of them, however, he wrote a series of novels which combine elements of fantasy fiction and Christian symbolism.
Forgoing the detective fiction style of most of his earlier supernatural novels, most of the story’s action is spiritual or psychological in nature. It fits the “theological thriller” description sometimes given to his works.
For this reason Descent into Hell was initially rejected by publishers, though T. S. Eliot’s publishing house Faber and Faber would eventually pick up the novel, as Eliot admired Williams’s work, and, though he did not like Descent into Hell as well as the earlier novels, desired to see it printed.

The action takes place in Battle Hill, outside London, amidst the townspeople’s staging of a new play by Peter Stanhope. The hill seems to reside at the crux of time, as characters from the past appear, and perhaps at a doorway to the beyond, as characters are alternately summoned heavenwards or descend into hell.
Pauline Anstruther, the heroine of the novel, lives in fear of meeting her own doppelganger, which has appeared to her throughout her life.”

 Red Bird,
by Mary Oliver
Nonfiction / Poetry / Nature
2008
78 pages

Humming along in my project of reading all of her poetry collections, in chronological order.

“This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver’s work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet’s work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement.
As in all of Mary Oliver’s work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy.
But here, too, the poet’s attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power.
Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver’s most wide-ranging volume to date.”