Cooking Reading Cooking Reading Cooking Reading

Both go-to relaxation activities at Cafe Drake HRV, Cooking and Reading occupy much of our leisure time. With the exception of our new-found love of gardening, we can't imagine better ways to pass all too rare downtime. Here's what's on our bedside table (or just finished, off tucked away in our library) now:

L.P. Hartley is such an elegant prose stylist that we couldn't resist scouring the local libraries - SCORE at Woodstock!! - for an unread novel of his as described on Kirkus website:

KIRKUS REVIEW

A subdued, subtly compelling portrait of childhood, of the projection of fantasies and fears, pleasure and pain which shadowed the activities of a boy of nine, Eustace Cherrington. Delicate, apprehensive, susceptible, Eustace had always been under the supremacy of his sister Hilda, older, possessive and vigilant. In conflicting moods of self-assertion and subjection, Eustace finally rebels against Hilda when he runs away to play with another girl, and as a result falls ill for several weeks. In further evasion, this time not deliberate, he becomes the protee of the frightening old Miss Fothergill, receives from her a different -- but excessive -- adulation, and at her death becomes her heir and finds the tenor of his life quite changed. A strange, uneasy story, sensitively interpreted, and written with the English acuity of phrase -- this is a book for a distinctive, critical following.

Pub Date: Sept. 6th, 1945

Publisher: Doubleday, Doran

 AND:

A vicious little jewel about Seconal-addled housewives and humid homicide, The Girl in the Plain Brown Paper Wrapper is acknowledged widely as a pulp masterpiece of wrought writing and genius plot construction. Sorta sad it took Cafe Drake HRV so many years to lap up.

AND:

Unearthing another novel from our beloved Penelope Mortimer embodies the Freudian concept of delayed gratification. Quiet despair in faded lives reaches an aesthetic zenith in Mortimer's 1975 creation, The Handyman.