Random book from our personal library:
📖 Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott
2015 review: ★★★★★
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@bibliothecarivs@mastodonapp.uk
mastodon 4.6.8Joseph N. Anderson (he/him) · ¹partner of Amy ²father of five ³friend ⁴ally ⁵anglophile ⁶mediævalist ⁷public librarian ⁸religious humanist ⁹ecosocialist ¹⁰ovovegetarian, &c. · Shoshoneland (UT, US)
Profile: Me and Amy, together since 1998, photographed in 2016 by our Emma.
Cover: https://showyourstripes.info
131 Followers
244 Following
50 Posts
Joined December 10, 2022
My team:
My home library:
My current reads:
📖 The Bayeux Tapestry by Carola Hicks, Common Sense by Thomas Paine, London Review of Books, Guardian Weekly
Random book from our personal library:
📖 English Mediaeval Monasteries 1066-1540: A Summary by Roy Midmer
Recent acquisitions for our personal library:
📖 Adventures of Robin Hood by Eleanor Graham Vance
Father's Day gifts from my daughter.
Random book from our personal library:
📖 History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold
Random book from our personal library:
📖 Beowulf & Grendel: The Truth Behind England's Oldest Legend by John Grigsby
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Beginnings of English Society by Dorothy Whitelock (The Pelican History of England 2)
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Midwinter Break: A Novel by Bernard MacLaverty.
The new film based on this book looks good!
Random book from our personal library:
📖 Utah Libraries: Keystone of Healthy Democracy, Student Success, and Prosperous Communities by Utah Library Advocates
Random book from our personal library:
📖 My History: A Memoir of Growing Up by Antonia Fraser
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Folk Tales of Yorkshire by H. L. Gee
Father's Day gift from my partner, Amy. ❤️
'...the fate of Charles the First, hath only made kings more subtle — not more just.'
📖 Common Sense by Thomas Paine (Pelican Classics), p. 71
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Secret Churches: Ecclesiastical Gems from Around Britain & Ireland by Richard Surman
#bookstodon #ChurchGoing
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form by Penny Boumelha
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief by Richard Barber
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 An Enemy of the People / The Wild Duck / Rosmersholm by Henrik Ibsen (Oxford World's Classics)
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Celtic Prayers: A Book of Celtic Devotion, Daily Prayers and Blessings by Robert Van de Weyer
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Day Michael Collins was Shot by Meda Ryan
Rating from sometime 1999-2003: ★★★★★
I've been very interested in the life of Irish politician Michael Collins (1890-1922) since I viewed the biopic starring Liam Neeson nearly 30 years ago. Over the years I have collected a small Collins library and maintained an online bibliography.
#bookstack #MichaelCollins
Random book from our personal library:
📖 Truth Will Prevail: The Rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles, 1837-1987 edited by V. Ben Bloxham
Random book from our personal library:
📖 1066: The Year of the Three Battles by Frank McLynn
Another book with an old sword on the cover.
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Unto a Good Land by Vilhelm Moberg
#2 in The Emigrants series. I love these cool Penguin paperbacks with movie tie-in covers.
★★★★☆
🎞 The Odyssey directed by Christopher Nolan
📖 Based on Homer's Odyssey
See the film for Anne Hathaway's Penelope, Elliot Page's Sinon, Samantha Morton's Circe, and John Leguizamo's Eumaeus.
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg
#1 in a series. I already owned this in a cheap 'book club edition' hardback but when I found it and others in the series in cool Penguin paperbacks with movie tie-in covers at a local charity shop, I had to get them.
Random book from our personal library:
📖 Cathedrals & Abbeys of England by Stephen Platten
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
These Saints Are Stones: Poems by Millie Tullis
#bookstodon #poetry
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography by Janine Barchas, illustrated by Isabel Greenberg
#bookstodon
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Nancy Barnhart
I keep a small collection of books on my desk at the public library where I work and this is one of them.
2014 rating of a different edition: ★★★★★
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Secret Life of Bees: A Novel by Sue Monk Kidd
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Thomas Sunderland Hawkins: Biography of a Mormon Pioneer by Evelyn Hawkins Hughes
When my dad's cousin posted in a family Facebook group that he had copies of a biography of our ancestor to give away, I gratefully requested one. Hawkins, my great-great-great grandfather, was born in Birmingham, England 1829, joined the LDS (Mormon) Church '48, moved to Utah Territory, USA '51-'52, moved to Arizona Territory '81, moved to Chihuahua, Mexico '85 for polygamy, died in Juárez, Mexico 1903.
Random book from our personal library:
📖 Christian Origins in Sociological Perspective by Howard Clark Key
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow
Random book from our personal library:
📖 King Arthur's Britain: A Photographic Odyssey by John Matthews and Michael J. Stead
‘Irish Catholicism has many mansions, but one of them includes a good bedrock of paganism, or animism. I've never heard the banshee knock on my door in the night to announce that someone in the family would soon die, but I think I would know the sound if I heard it. I don't have a fairy fort in my garden, but if I did I wouldn't allow it to be removed, and if it were removed I would expect bad luck, and soon. (My neighbors have one, and it won't in our lifetime or any foreseeable lifetime be bulldozed, although it is in the way.)'
📖 A Guest at the Feast: Essays by Colm Tóibín, p. 215
Random book from our personal library:
📖 In Memoriam: An Authoritative Text / Backgrounds and Sources / Criticism (A Norton Critical Edition) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, edited by Robert H. Ross
Recent acquisition for our personal library:
📖 Edward the First (Twelve English Statesmen) by T. F. Tout
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England by H. R. Ellis Davidson
Replying to
It was also a joy to come across small mentions of artists whose work I admire, including Yeats, Hardy, and Bergman, and full essays on subjects I'm interested in, including Catholic popes and Catholic sexuality.
The centrepiece and gem of the collection is the eponymous A Guest at the Feast, a perfectly-titled short memoir that somehow feels both local and universal. The scenes at home, at school, at church, at the beach, at the museum, at the library, in Tóibín's aunts's houses are full of life and the way he ranges from a family tale of his relative's part in the Easter Rising of 1916 to examining the books in his mother's bedroom after her death in 2000, including the cultural changes that occurred in Ireland in the middle of the last century, is wonderful.
This collection has only whetted my appetite for more from the author. Next up may be Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, which I already own, or Lady Gregory's Toothbrush, which I don't... yet.
#bookstodon
Random book from our personal library:
Hondert vyf en vyftig bybelsche print verbeeldingen, vertoonende de voornaamste historien der H: Schriftuur, cierlyk in het koper gebragt door Andries van Buysen, en met Nederduytsche vaersen verciert door Reynier van Anslo (1736)
[One hundred and fifty-five biblical print illustrations, depicting the principal histories of the Holy Scripture, elegantly engraved in copper by Andries van Buysen, and adorned with Dutch verses by Reynier van Anslo]
Random book from our personal library:
📖 Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg
Found this after watching the films directed by Jan Troell and starring Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann. I enjoyed them and have thought a lot about my ancestors who emigrated from Scandinavia to Utah, USA: great-great-grandmother from Norway in 1869, great-grandfather from Norway in 1871 (source of my surname), great-great-grandfather from Denmark in 1909, great-grandmother from Sweden in 1918 (whom I met).
Random book from our personal library:
📖 The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama
'The normalisation of immoral conduct in public office may be Trump's lasting legacy.'
Opinion: As Leaders Suffer Moral Malaise, Thank Heavens for the Pope
Simon Tisdall
Guardian Weekly
10 July 2026
Vol. 215 No. 2