Here is the cool cover of the week. Unlike Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing (see review below), Guy Browning’s Maps of My Life actually delivers what it says it will. It is an amusing little memoir organized around maps, real and imagined, that tell the story of his life. One of the more amusing things is the fact that Browning refers to his brother as the Fatted Calf. It also has fun maps inside as well as other illustrations. Since I read it some time ago, I won’t review it here, but the Independent has.
Claire at Kiss a Cloud figured out my little book cover quiz, that the cover art below is also used on the endpages of Persephone No. 32, The Carlyles at Home by Thea Holme. After months of staring at the image in the Persephone catalog and then finally getting the book, I was so so surprised to see the same image, albeit a little worse for the wear on a book I found while digging through a bin at a charity bookshop. For those of you interested in content the book looks at the marriages of John Ruskin and Effie Gray, Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, and of course Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. I am not sure whether to read it before or after the Persephone.
hogglestock 
Yes indeed, “Maps of My Life” looks AWESOME! Thanks for pointing it out. :)
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Love the concept behind “Maps of My Life.” Seems like an interesting read and I'll have to give it a try.
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You always come up with books that I have never heard of, and they're usually good! :)
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Tuulenhaiven: I must admit it was one of those books that I judged by its cover before I bought it. Thankfully it worked out.
Kimberly: I satisfied my math requirement in college by taking a class called “The Language of Maps” so you can imagine how I might be drawn to this one. Plus the Master's in Urban Plannin kind of played into as well.
Matt: Thanks for the vote of confidence. As I mention above, the cover is what caught me on this one. It was nice that it turned out to be an interesting read.
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Heavens, I am having dinner with Phyllis Rose next weekend!
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Earl, Tell her I said hello and that her book is alive and kicking in the blogosphere.
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