Each week we assemble a collection – a bouquet, if you will – of books you can read for yourself, or use to build into a display in your library. As always, the books we link to have info from Amazon.com. If you click a link and then buy anything at all from Amazon, we get a small percent of their profits from your sale. Yay!!! Thanks!!! We really appreciate the assistance! 💕😊
We are all spending a lot of time at home, staying inside and staying healthy to do our part to reduce the spread of COVID-19. And, probably everyone has some spare time on their hands. And we are living through a pretty historic time – it’s the first global pandemic we’ve had in our lifetimes. So people are increasingly turning to doing some journaling – online or on paper. It can be a form of self-care, it can be a way to get your ideas out of your head and onto paper or a screen, and it can be a way to help preserve your experiences and lessons from this time.
To help inspire you to do some journaling, or to just give you some fun reading, this week’s bouquet will give you some reading opportunities.
I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle’s walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has “captured the castle”– and the heart of the reader– in one of literature’s most enchanting entertainments.
The Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot
She’s just a New York City girl living with her artist mom…
News Flash: Dad is prince of Genovia. (So that’s why a limo meets her at the airport!)
Downer: Dad can’t have any more kids. (So no heir to the throne.)
Shock of the Century: Like it or not, Mia Thermopolis is prime princess material.
Mia must take princess lessons from her dreaded grandmére, the dowager princess of Genovia, who thinks Mia has a thing or two to learn before she steps up to the throne.
Well, her father can lecture her until he’s royal-blue in the face about her princessly duty — no way is she moving to Genovia and leaving Manhattan behind. But what’s a girl to do when her name is Princess Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo?
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4, by Sue Townsend
Adrian Mole is approaching fourteen, and like all radical intellectuals he must amass his grievances: His acne vulgaris is grotesque; his crush, Pandora, received seventeen Valentine’s Day cards; his PE teacher is a sadist; he fears his parents’ marriage is over since they no longer smoke together; his dog has gone AWOL; no one appreciates his poetry; and Animal Farm has set him off pork for good. If everyone were as appalled as Adrian Mole, it would be a better world.
Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton
May Sarton’s parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her “real” life – not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude – both an exhilarating and terrifying state. She likens writing to “cracking open the inner world again”, which sometimes plunges her into depression. She confesses her fears, her disappointments, her unresolved angers. Sarton’s garden is her great, abiding joy, sustaining her through seasons of psychic and emotional pain.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, by Samuel Pepys
The diary which Samuel Pepys kept from January 1660 to May 1669 …is one of our greatest historical records and… a major work of English literature, writes the renowned historian Paul Johnson. A witness to the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, Pepys chronicled the events of his day. Originally written in a cryptic shorthand, Pepys’s diary provides an astonishingly frank and diverting account of political intrigues and naval, church, and cultural affairs, as well as a quotidian journal of daily life in London during the Restoration.