I’m busy clicking my way through The Duke’s Children on my Kindle. I’ve reached 63% so it shouldn’t take too much longer now. I must admit that I haven’t been enjoying this one quite as much as the others in Trollope’s Palliser series. The younger members of the family are getting into trouble one way or another and Planty/the Duke of Omnium is trying to get his only daughter safely married off but is finding the whole procedure distasteful. I haven’t found much in the way of humour in this one, so far anyway. I do like Trollope’s foray into a lighter tone, and he isn’t averse to poking fun at himself when he mentions in one of the previous books that the job of Postmaster General is such a lowly and insignificant one, or words to that effect. Of course it was exactly the job which Trollope himself had and all I can say is that he must have had an awful lot of free time as he was able to write so many chunksters.

Anyway, more on the book when I actually get to the end of it.

I found myself in Broughton, Edinburgh again a couple of weekends ago but this time I only bought two books. I had actually intended buying a lovely old copy of Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford, I couldn’t make up my mind about it on my first visit and as always happens – I got home and wished I had just bought it. Of course by the time I got back to the shop it was gone! I’ve had a look on Project Gutenberg since and I think I’ll just download it. Has anyone read it. I don’t think it’s written by anyone connected to the Mitford sisters, but you might know better than I.

I ended up buying Mary Anne by Daphne du Maurier and a book called The Fathers by Allen Tate, first published in 1938. It’s just a paperback – Penguin Modern Classic but it was the cover which attracted me.

It’s a detail from ‘The Plantation’, circa 1825, by an unknown American artist which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I like old naive paintings, I think it would make a lovely embroidery/textile design.

I’d never heard of the book but presumably it’s well known as it’s a Penguin classic. It seems to have an American Civil War setting, has anyone out there read it? I’m hoping to get around to reading it soon.