I’ve opened my first Christmas present – not illicitly, it was Opening Day for a Virago Modern Classics LibraryThing Secret Santa. My Secret Santa was especially Secret. I guessed who it was as soon as I saw their comment, in the thread about it all, that they knew their Santee had too many books already. An accurate description of moi, non? And then my Santa – who also happens to be my supervisor in the Bodleian – texted and asked when my last day was before Christmas. The clues, they accrued! I told Verity my suspicions, and… she threw me off the scent for a day or two. But I was right ;)
And today I opened up a lovely Slighty Foxed edition of The Young Ardizzone by Edward Ardizzone. I know that anything SF publish will be wonderful, so I’m excited about it – and, as I flicked through, I discovered that the first two chapters are set in East Bergholt. It’s a beautiful Suffolk village that my grandparents lived in for about forty years, so I know it pretty well – a lovely coincidence.
Can you tell that I’m delighted with it? Christmas has begun!
Good detective work Sherlock!:)
Why, thank you ;)
Another new-to-me author – I'll look forward to hearing more about him & the book.
New to me too, although I did recognise the illustration style. I'll definitely be reading this one soon!
What a lovely way to start!
Absolutely!
A wonderful gift – and my absolutely favourite SF!
Heather
Oh really? What a great endorsement, especially since their standard is so high!
Lovely! Who doesn't need more SF Editions?
Precisely! I do long for them all – although none of the ones I've read look at all pristine any more.
I adore Ardizzone and have an old edition of this book. You're going to love it!
Hurray! I was already really excited to read this, but these glowing reports have made me even more excited!
How exciting! And what a great way to celebrate this holiday season by exchanging books with people you know'll appreciate them! (My family doesn't really read, so regardless of how many books I see in bookstores that I'd LOVE to buy for them, I never do…) Do you and your family exchange books as gifts?
I quite often buy *them* books, and they sometimes get me things from my Amazon wishlist, but it's not often that they (or my other friends) go off-piste with buying novels etc. Because usually I'll already have the book! But they do buy me lovely baking books etc. They all like books, but not to the extent that I do, so it's definitely not a case of buying each other dozens of books that we'll all love.
Oh, what a lovely gift – well done, Verity! But can there ever really be too many books? I think not!
And so say all of us!
Tend to agree with Darlene here – there can *never* be to many books! But a lovely gift – I adore Ardizzone's illustrations for Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales" (which is also a wonderful book!).
Isn't it lovely? It somehow feels inherently Christmassy too, although I don't know why – maybe because it's read?
What a wonderful gift! I do agree with comments above, there isn’t such a thing as too many books! And what a lovely picture, this little angel hanging on the tree is sooo cute :)
Isn't it wonderful!
The Christmas tree (sadly fake) is looking quite nice, but might not stay that way if Sherpa has anything to do with it… she's rather disgruntled that we've put up this big toy, and then won't let her play with it.
Oh, joy!
Absolutely!
Wow, I didn't realise that East Bergholt featured in any novels of note. I've lived there for about 15 years now, and no-one I speak to outside of it seems aware of its existence. Wouldn't mind getting a hold of that now.
Lovely! I didn't make clear, but this is actually an autobiography – but it comes to the same thing, I suppose. My grandparents lived on Richardson's Road (or Richardson Road, depending on which side of the street you come from!) and are now in the beautiful churchyard. You'll have overlapped with them in East Bergholt at some point, in fact. It's such a lovely village!
What a great gift :)
I'm so lucky!