Weekend Blog Hops - 28 December 2018

It's the weekend once more. That means it's time for my book-blogger hopping.

Did you get any books for Christmas? If so, name the titles.

I get books every Xmas, and in large numbers. This year I got around twenty new ones--so a few too many to list individually! Anyone interested, though, can check them out on my Want to Read page on Goodreads, which you'll find HERE.





Opening sentence:
He was standing on the foreshore below the farm with the oyster catchers and purple sandpipers, watching the waves soughing in and out

 



From page 56:
When the parish pauper started writing out his own poetry in a book on Sundays, it was hardly surprising that the members of the family began to look at him askance.

My Current Read

World Light
Halldór Laxness

As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation: the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet's life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness.

As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olaf's ambition drives him onward--and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible women--World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing of environments, and even the most unpromising human vessel.