D থেকে Parson Drove, Wisbech PE13 4PT, UK
3½ out of 5 stars The story takes place mainly in a yarn shop called "Walker and Daughter" in Manhattan, NY; which turns out into a knitting club as well every Friday night. :) The book reveals the life of several women all of them in different age and pretty much different stages in life. They all gather around the knitting table every Friday night where they discuss at first ordinary matters like cooking and the secrets of knitting.. but step by step, their personal stories and "worries" take over in those gatherings. Each of them has to face and conquer new challenges in order to find happiness and harmony again. They will also find out who their real friends are, when they most need them... This is NOT a chick-lit book!!! It is a lot more serious and deep that it can even test your emotions! I didn't really like the style of writing in this book. I wish it was somehow more natural and without a one or two-word sentences...
BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM is the tenth novel of Anthony Powell's long sequence "A Dance to the Music of Time". It opens in the winter of 1945/46 as Britain settles back into peacetime, though not without annoying rationing and shortages. Jenkins has come to his old university for research towards a biography on Robert Burton, but soon first himself involved in the launch of a new literary magazine with distinct leftist tones. Indeed, we return to a world of shady politics left behind in the early 1930s in THE ACCEPTANCE WORLD, the third novel of the sequence, and many of the characters from those days return. Widmerpool, his political career now taking off, also comes into the picture, and his continual defence of the Soviet Union makes him a more repulsive antagonist than ever. But beyond revisiting old friends, BOOKS DO FURNISH A ROOM introduces two new characters with very distinctive personalities. One is the novelist X. Trapnel, whose bohemianism mystifies his fellow characters and ultimately leads to his grisly ruin. The other character is Pamela Widmerpool. Though she appeared first in the previous novel, she was mostly a force of nature destroying the lives of numerous male characters offscreen. Here Jenkins talks with her on several occasions, revealing something of her as a person. As this volume was written at the end of the 1960s in a more frank era, Powell felt that his language could be a bit more coarse, and it is Pamela who utters all the profanity. The relationship between Widmerpool and his wife sometimes descends into mere soap opera, and the literary allusions, especially to Burton, get rather tiresome. So, this isn't among the best novels in the Dance. Still, I enjoyed this novel, especially the diary-like chronicles of life in a postwar literary magazine, and I look forward to continuing with the Dance.