Friday Fancies

Writing this post feels like the return of a long lost friend. These Friday posts used to be some of my favorites to put together. At a certain point, though, I started to feel uninspired by much of what I was seeing online. Of course, I still kept up with a core group of favorite bloggers whose posts I always look forward to reading and commenting on. At the same time, however, there was a whole other group of blogs in my feed that I felt committed to keeping up with, but was just barely skimming through. It started to feel like a chore to mine through everything out there in the hope of finding some links to share on a Friday.

Am I back to a regular schedule of Friday posts now? I'm not sure. But I may be moving toward that direction. I've pared down on some of the blogs I subscribe to, eliminating those that I don't enjoy or find inspiring. I've also been feeling re-energized about blog reading recently because of several new-to-me blogs that I discovered, the kind that are so good they make me want to go back and read through all of the archived posts. 

(image via here)

Here are some of my new favorite online reads:

Deliciously Ella is an food blog focused on healthy meals based on whole foods and vegetables. It's kick-started me to give my daily diet a spring cleaning.

Speaking of whole foods, Sophie Dahl's blog has plenty of recipes that feature them, plus lovely photography and posts on travel, art, beauty, and the like.

Shiny New Books is a, well, shiny new quarterly online magazine that looks like it will be a real treat for bibliophiles (especially for those of us who can't seem to grow our To Read lists fast enough).

And EmilyBooks is another literary blog featuring thoughtful posts on an interesting array of books.

Have you started reading any new blogs lately? Do tell...I want to keep up this momentum and discover more.

Another Year, Another Book Sale

A couple of weeks ago I made my second annual trip to the Bryn-Mawr Wellesley Book Sale, one of the biggest on the East Coast. I didn't make it there on half-price day like I did last year, but still did  well for myself, coming away with almost thirty books for just over $50. Here's a look at what I found:

A new-to-me novel and novella by Edith Wharton; a lavishly illustrated copy of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall by Washington Irving, which I know nothing about but looks like it might be worth a read when the holidays roll around; and a little book called A Gift From the Sea by Ann Morrow Lindburgh, which drew me in with it's sweet book jacket.

Vintage Penguin editions of novels by Sinclair Lewis and Evelyn Waugh; The Little Girls by Elizabeth Bowen; a collection of the juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte; and Miss Mackenzie by Trollope.

A smattering of (mostly) more recent novels that have (mostly) been on my To Read list for a while: Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Charms for the Easy Life by Kay Gibbons, The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, and All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky.

Several Barbara Pym novels to round out (and add a couple duplicates) to my collection, plus three novels that I hadn't heard of but picked up based on the fact that they were green Virago editions: The Squire's Daughter by F.M. Mayor, On the Side of Angels by Betty Miller, and Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley.

And last but not least, my favorite finds of the day were a handful of books that I've been on the hunt for for quite a while: three installments of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia series, The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning, and the first installment of Angela Thirkell's Chronicles of Barsetshire series.

Have you found any used book treasures lately? Are there any that you would particularly love to find?