I just finished a one-night family staycation (picture is taken during that time!) and now I’m feeling slightly more ready to tackle the busyness of the next ten plus days! This weekend, I’ll have the one workshop to attend and another one to translate for, so fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly. I have some time tomorrow, so I’m hoping to schedule some posts (the first discussion for A Year With Christie 2021 will be happening on Instagram tomorrow, so I’d like to get my review up then).

Anyway, this is what I’ve been reading:

• I finished a new-to-me book called The Silence of the White City since it was a NetGalley read. It’s a mystery set in Vitoria (Basque region of Spain) and this was pretty long, so it took up most of my time.
• The Book of Lost Things – I was reminded I read this a decade ago when I was looking for my original post on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It’s a very intense read and I’m enjoying it very much. But I had to take a break because it was taking over ALL THE EMOTIONS and I needed some breathing room to be able to write my review of The Silence of the White City. I’ve finished my draft, so I’m excited to get back to that tomorrow.
• Forgotten English – I started this because I wanted a reread that I would enjoy but wouldn’t make me forget about other books I read. Forgotten English is a fun book of the history of various words. Not all of them are forgotten (I believe that most readers will recognise words like “succubus”, “brownie” and “press-gang”), but they are fun. The word Groaning-Cheese (a special large cheese that “was provided, until the nineteenth century, by a husband in the interest of soothing his wife during childbirth”) reminded me of a piece of advice in Ask the Past that recommended wives scream loudly while giving birth so that they would be given “capons, candied almonds, and fine wines.”. I now have an image of childbirth being an event where the mother-to-be is just surrounded by lots of party food and wine.