Weekend Books

 

Here it is, Monday again!  We had rather a lot of rain over the weekend so it was very soothing to get distracted with looking through my new books.

I find I am not a great fiction reader – only one book was fictional (an old book, “Bracebridge Hall,” by Washington Irving) – and some of them (like the one on English country pubs) are more a “coffee-table” book that can be picked up and put down at will.

There are a couple of garden books and one on how to make a Kate Greenaway doll with clothes, and then a couple on travel experiences (like Michael Palin’s “Pole to Pole”).  They might, on the whole, be old books (it was a Book Fair of donated books, after all), but I like going through them.

One book I was particularly attracted to was “The Darling Buds of May Book of the Seasons.”  It contains sketches and excerpts from the writings of H.E. Bates, and is full of descriptions like this one:

“The August rain is heavy and dark; it seems to blacken the green of the trees and wash out the burnished shine on the wheat.  At the same time it gives the oats a fresh, airy grace.  Beads of clear rain hang on the beards.  The black seeds are shown up like darts.  The oat-stalks are washed clean, opalescent, and all through the rainy, windless days they do not move.  For some days the wheat has an astonishing colour, especially against the hedgerows.  It is part green, part gold, partly the colour of dark honey.  The colours shade into each other and are more than ever like waves as the wind gently blows the corn.” (from “In the Heart of the Country”)

Don’t you just love how he manages to paint a picture with his words?

Margaret 😊