December and Bookish Goodies

It's been a whole week since I've posted anything...time seems to go so quickly this time of year. I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday planning and Happy Hanukkah to those celebrating tonight!

I've been busy with work, events and life in general. I'm behind on all my blogs! But, oh well. Stuff happens. I have some reviews that I'm working on, but today I just wanted to share a look at the bookish goodness I've gathered at the library this week. I don't know how much time I'll have for reading but I just could not resist these titles ~ sharing the covers along with the publishers' summaries for quick reference. Are any of these on your radar?

A Stitch in Time by Penelope Lively

A quiet lonely child spending her holidays by the sea is changed by an inexplicable link with people and events of one hundred years ago and also by the very real and lively family next door. 

This is a nice reissue of a Lively book I haven't yet read. Children's.

Malarky by Anakana Schofield

Recommended to me by Pickle Me This, I knew I wanted to grab this one!

Swamped by a confusion she refuses to let overcome her, Philomena embarks on a rural odyssey that skirts madness, passes through grief, and returns her to the remarkable resilience of spirit that will make Our Woman the character of the decade.

Psychology and other stories by Craig Boyko

"Psychologists are people we admire and resent. They're all in this book, and so are their patients." 

A singularly nondescriptive blurb... I've read this author's short stories before and liked his work quite a lot.

Magnificence by Lydia Millet

This stunning novel introduces Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle's Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to "the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans-including a cheating husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women-joins her in residence. 

The Circus of Ghosts by Barbara Ewing

New York, late 1840s, and in the wild, noisy, brash and beautiful circus of Silas P. Swift a shadowy, mesmeric woman entrances crowds because she can unlock the secrets of troubled minds. Above them all her daughter sweeps and soars: acrobat and tightrope-walker. People cannot take their eyes from the mysterious woman in the Big Top who can help so many others but she cannot unlock dark, literally unspeakable, memories of her own. In London memories fester in the mind of an old and venomous duke of the realm. He plots, with an unscrupulous lawyer (and a huge financial reward) against the mother and the daughter: to kill one, and to abduct the other and bring her across the Atlantic to him.

Dark of the Moon by Tracy Barrett

Retells the story of the minotaur through the eyes of his fifteen-year-old sister, Ariadne, a lonely girl destined to become a goddess of the moon, and her new friend, Theseus, the son of Athens' king who was sent to Crete as a sacrifice to her misshapen brother. 

 I have to read this, since it has some connection to the myth of Ariadne, the minotaur and the labyrinth.

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Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!