Page 2 - Margery Sharp News Today

Another lockdown month, at home, lots of reading, not a lot of anything else. But thank goodness for books, there were a lot of great ones in March. I read twenty books in a wide variety of genres and modes, with a high concentration of things that made me feel free and among friends, at least while I was reading them. Sequel to  The Paris Wife, a novel about and from the first person POV of Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s second wife. I didn’t like it as much as the first book, perhaps becau...

February was another locked down month with a curfew in Quebec, and I was at home going nowhere. It snowed a lot. I saw a total of three other human beings in the whole month. The prevailing mood of this pandemic for many of us is “other people have it worse, but this sure sucks.” I read a perfectly reasonable seventeen books, and many of them were really excellent, which is always cheering. This is the story of a young man with enough money to live on in London for a year and try to write,...

January was another lockdown month—worse than ever, because now we have a curfew at 8 PM and huge fines for breaking it, which means it’s not just illegal but pretty much impossible to see anyone. Isolation is really getting to me. The numbers are going down, though, which is good, and people are starting to be vaccinated, though I am low on the list. In any case, I spent a lot of time in January on pure escapist reading, and I read twenty-eight books in a variety of genres, with a very hi...

Book World: Our readers recommend light classic novels to lift your holiday spirits Stephanie Merry, The Washington Post Dec. 22, 2020 FacebookTwitterEmail Love in a Cold Climate/The Enchanted April/Diary of a Provincial LadyVintage/New York Review Books Classics/Macmillan Collectors Library - handout Critic Michael Dirda has found the antidote to the winter blues, and it should surprise none of his readers to learn the cure involves cracking open a book from a time gone by. "In a last-ditch e...