5/13/2023 0 Comments A time of giftsHowever, I kept not quite getting around to opening up a copy to actually read it. Recently this happened to me as I finally got around to reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and as I plunged in, it felt like meeting an old friend.įor years, via an early-twenties obsession with Bruce Chatwin and a long-standing liking for books involving long walks – such as Laurie Lee’s I walked out one midsummer morning, I had been dimly aware of Leigh Fermor’s work and had the feeling that I might enjoy it. I remember handling paperback copies and noticing John Craxton’s cover illustrations on several occasions over the years since at least the 1980s, when helping-out in my Mum’s bookshop in Bristol and later working in The Gloucester Road Bookshop in London in the mid 1990s. One day you will read the book that’s been nagging at you and when you do open the first page, then turn the next and the next, and on and on as you are drawn in, you’ll wonder what took you so long. They haunt your days appearing in bookshop window displays, in people’s hands on trains, or in review section round-ups of the books the literary world wants the rest of us to know it has been reading. “For now the time of gifts is gone, O boys that grow, O snows that melt.” Louis MacNeiceĪs a reader, some books are inevitable.
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