A Bluestocking Knits

Booking Through Thursday wants to know what’s on our holiday lists!

1. What’s on your book/reading wish list? A surprise was finding on Amazon a biography of Amelia B. Edwards, Victorian lady traveller/novelist/Egyptologist, that I didn’t know existed!  Ever since I read her Nothing to Do But Stay, Carrie Young’s Prairie Cooks: Glorified Rice, Three-Day Buns, and Other Reminiscences has been on my list — her lovely, simple, rich prose of late-pioneer life on the prairies is wonderful.  Donna Druchunas’ The Knitted Rug is very intriguing — I haven’t seen the book yet, but the rug on the cover is stunning!  And I must confess to a rather wistful longing for English Gardens in the Twentieth Century and Walking Shakespeare’s London: 20 Original Walks In and Around London, too.
2. What books are you giving this year?  I haven’t gotten all of my shopping done yet, but ready to wrap is Uncle Blue’s New Boat by Elsa Beskow for my daughters, another title in Beskow’s "Peter and Lotte" series that we like so much — old-fashioned (even when they were written a hundred years ago) but not sappy, with charming illustrations.  One of these days I’m going to have to break down and start using the out-of-print dealers in the UK and build our collection of Susanna Gretz’s Teddy Bears books, which we love and are getting hard to find even at the library!  I’m not going to say more, because a goodish number of family members actually read this blog…!