bookish

A trip to the library, a trip to The Iliad Bookshop, and a delivery from Amazon all on the same day? I must have been a very good girl indeed.

The loot by mail this weekend included the latest Coralie Bickford-Smith designed Emma (it's beautiful! And it's from Penguin, my favorite publisher!), season one of the Canadian television series Emily of New Moon (which I've been dying to see for literally years--they're finally all available here in the U.S.), darling little Labels and Stickers from The Small Object, and Sarah Water's fabulous gothic mystery, The Little Stranger, which I never got to finish when I had it from the library.

At Iliad, I also came away with the sequel that I didn't know existed to Harriet the Spy. I'm not referring to The Long Secret or its better follow-up Sport, but to a book released somewhat recently in 2003 called Harriet Spies Again by Helen Ericson. Although it was written with permission of Louise Fitzhugh's estate, and was presumably timed to the film adaptation I never saw, I tend to look upon these things with a great deal of suspicion.

But of course, I had to read it--and it's actually pretty good so far. The author does a nice job of echoing Harriet's muttering and suspicious thought patterns, which made the character such an original, as well as in illustrating the loving but careless interactions between Harriet and her parents or Cook. I'm only about a third of the way through, so the major plot devices have yet to really take shape, but thus far it's been a very pleasant surprise.

Books are full of such great promise, aren't they? I'm very much looking forward to diving into this pile.