Sunday Rambling: Rather Be the Devil to Smoky The Cow Horse

As I do almost every Sunday, I stopped off at Barnes & Noble this morning before spending the rest of the day with my rather elderly (97) father. I have been blowing right through my book budget in the last few weeks so I limited myself to one hardcover from the remainders table, Ian Rankin's 2016 John Rebus novel Rather Be the Devil. I'm trying to add as many Rankin hardbacks to my library as possible, so picking this one up while it's still available on the remainders tables was kind of a no-brainer. But that doesn't mean that I didn't add a bunch of new books to the list I keep of books to be requested from the library. Some interesting stuff:

• The Grammarians (Cathleen Schine) -"The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret “twin” tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word."

• The Reckless Oath We Made (Bryn Greenwood) -"Zee is nobody's fairy tale princess. Almost six-foot, with a redhead's temper and a shattered hip, she has a long list of worries: never-ending bills, her beautiful, gullible sister, her five-year-old nephew, her housebound mother, and her drug-dealing boss.
  
  Zee may not be a princess, but Gentry is an actual knight, complete with sword, armor, and code of honor. Two years ago the voices he hears called him to be Zee's champion. He's barely spoken to her since, but he has kept watch, ready to come to her aid."

• After the Flood (Kassandra Montag) - "A little more than a century from now, our world has been utterly transformed. After years of slowly overtaking the continent, rising floodwaters have obliterated America’s great coastal cities and then its heartland, leaving nothing but an archipelago of mountaintop colonies surrounded by a deep expanse of open water."

• The Ventriliquists (E.R. Ramzipoor) - "Brussels, 1943. Twelve-year-old street orphan Helene survives by living as a boy and selling copies of the country’s most popular newspaper, Le Soir, now turned into Nazi propaganda. Helene’s world changes when she befriends a rogue journalist, Marc Aubrion, who draws her into a secret network that publishes dissident underground newspapers."

• The Winemaker's Wife (Kristin Harmel) - "Champagne, 1940: Inès has just married Michel, the owner of storied champagne house Maison Chauveau, when the Germans invade. As the danger mounts, Michel turns his back on his marriage to begin hiding munitions for the Résistance. Inès fears they’ll be exposed, but for Céline, half-Jewish wife of Chauveau’s chef de cave, the risk is even greater—rumors abound of Jews being shipped east to an unspeakable fate."

• The Long Call (Ann Cleeves) - "In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his estranged father’s funeral takes place. On the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too." (First book in a brand new detective series)

• The Ungrateful Refugee (Dina Nayeri) - “With inventive, powerful prose, Nayeri demonstrates what should be obvious: that refugees give up everything in their native lands only when absolutely necessary . . . A unique, deeply thought-out refugee saga perfect for our moment.” ––Kirkus Reviews (I read the first few pages of this one and found it fascinating...first one I'm going to put on my library hold list.)

But the best part of my day was still ahead of me. I found a used book in a local used-book bookstore that I remember from my childhood. Smoky The Cow Horse by Will James was already over thirty years old when I first read it, and now it is pushing ninety. It's still in beautiful shape with the exception of a little foxing and some yellowing of the book's pages. The book's Canadian author also beautifully illustrated this Illustrated Classic Edition from Charles Scribner's Sons and I can't wait to re-read it. 

Look for a separate post in the next few days that will include pictures of the actual book I bought today and not just that stock photo I used up above. Smoky The Cow Horse deserves a blog post all of its own.