Friday Finds (April 13)

FRIDAY FINDS… is where you share the book titles you discovered or heard about during the past week. These can be books you were told about, books you discovered while browsing blogs/bookstores online, or books that you actually purchased. This event is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

As usual MizB asks the question:

What great books did you hear about/discover this past week? Share with us your FRIDAY FINDS!

This week one of our local thrift stores was advertising fill a bag of books for $1.00. I went a couple of times and found the following 12 books. I think it was quite a decent haul for a couple of bucks:

• The Documents in the Case – Dorothy L. Sayers
• Pacific Vortex – Clive Cussler
• The Last Kingdom – Bernard Cornwell
• Last Orders – Graham Swift
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary – Simon Winchester
• Pigs in Heaven – Barbara Kingsolver
• The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
• In the Skin of a Lion – Michael Ondaatje
• Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
• Killer Year: Stories to Die For…From the Hottest New Crime Writers – Lee Child
• The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway
• The Mission Song : A Novel – John Le Carré

Friday 56 – two from Orkney (April 13)

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

I’m kind of cheating this week, as I’ve included a couple of books in my 56. I’ve started to sort through my books for a number of reasons as I’ve begun to realise that there are some I really don’t need to hold on to, for a variety of reasons. The two I’ve included here don’t come into that category – I like them both too much. However, if I decide which ones I don’t need to hold on to, I can take them to Bearly Used Books, in Parry Sound, and exchange them for store credit to allow me to get more used books that I actually want to have on my bookshelves.

Anyways, I digress! Here are my selections for this week’s 56:

He had long since ignored questionnaires. He agreed with one of his favourite poets, W.H. Auden:

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires / Nor quizzes upon world affairs / Nor with compliance / Take any test. Thou shalt not sit / With statisticians, nor commit / A social science.

From The Reluctant Reformation of Clarence McGonigall by Ron Ferguson. This is a humorous little book about a fictional Church of Scotland minister, the Reverend J. Clarence McGonigall, trying to deal with life and changes in the 21st Century.  It’s a fun read and is one book among many written by Ron Ferguson, who is himself a retired Church of Scotland minister, who retired to Orkney after many years ministering in such diverse places as Iona, inner-city Glasgow, and Orkney. He has a number of diverse works published and I always enjoy reading his stuff. One of his latest, which I received for Christmas, is a biography on George Mackay Brown, Orkney’s most famous writer, called George Mackay Brown: The Wound and the Gift. Other books he has written include collections of columns he wrote for the Glasgow Herald newspaper, a history of Cowdenbeath F.C., and books about the Iona Community.

My second 56 is:

My mother was a farm servant at what is now Corrigall Museum. At that time there were a number of servant men there, one of whom, Willie, we’ll call him, was a little simple minded. It was tattie hinteen time and Willie was hintan beside my mother. It was a good crop and some of the tatties were huge. Holding up a specially big tattie, Willie called to my mother, ‘My Jessie hid’ll no tak many o that tatties tae mak a dizzen.’

This is from Lamb’s Tales – Gregor’s Concert Stories by Gregor Lamb. This funny story (in Orcadian dialect) is from a collection of over 200 by Gregor Lamb, an Orcadian who has done so much for the continuation and preservation of the Orcadian dialect. He has had a number of books published, including  The Orkney Wordbook: A Dictionary of the Dialect of Orkney and Sky Over Scapa 1939-1945. The story I shared reminds me of one person I worked with in the Post Office in Orkney before moving to Canada in 1994. It just sounds like something he would say. I can give anyone a translation if they need it!