1937 Club overview from my TBR and beyond

Sadly, I am once again late posting for one of the inimitable publication year-based club weeks hosted by Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. This time round, I was disappointed to read the year they chose was 1937. I was sure I wouldn’t have many, if any, books from so long ago. I was wrong! And thanks to online sites like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, there are plenty of options for reading online for books that are long out of print, so that is also a tempting rabbit hole to disappear into.

Books from my own TBR

Unexpectedly, I own more 1937 books than I had time to read, even though I started reading at the beginning of April. Some I had already read before, so they were doomed to be unread this time (marked with an x). The ones I did read are starred and I will link them to my reviews when I add them.

• * Sunset House, Winifred Fortescue. A precursor to A Year in Provence.
• x Towers in the Mist, Elizabeth Goudge. Read long ago, a historical novel about a cathedral town. Goodreads says 1937, the book itself says 1938.
• * Reis bij maanlicht (Journey by Moonlight), Anton Szerb, tr. Györgyi Dandoy. A Hungarian classic, this ex-library book has languished on my TBR for years.
• x Out of Africa and Shadows in thne Grass, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen). Not as romantic as the film with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.
• xx The Case of the Dangerous Dowager + The Case of the Lame Canary, Erle Stanley Gardner. These are my husband’s books, so they can stay on the shelf for now.
• * The D.A. Calls it Murder, Erle Stanley Gardner. I was intrigued because my husband collects Erle Stanley Gardner’s books, but doesn’t actually read the non Perry Mason ones. I decided to squeeze this one in at the weekend.
• x Adventures of the Wishing Chair, Enid Blyton. I saved myself the trouble of reading this out loud to my children by buying them the cartoon series on video. I fell entirely out of love with Enid Blyton when I foolishly volunteered to read an omnibus of The Magic Faraway Tree to the boys, then my daughter insisted on a repeat performance. Yawn!
• x On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I would love to have reread this, but ran out of time.
• x Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck. I really enjoyed this when I read it for the first time a couple of years ago. What a sucker punch of an ending!
• x The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien (not pictured). I was captivated by Lord of the Rings, but I didn’t read The Hobbit until I was an adult and so it paled into insignificance beside its big brother.

Tempting books online, at the library or elsewhere

Scanning through the Wikipedia list of literature from 1937, I added a few books to the possibles, though I only read one.

• * Forbidden Journey: from Peking to Kashmir, Ella Maillart. This should have been available on interlibrary loan, but for some reason it wasn’t possible. Fortunately it is available on the Internet Archive, though it is a pdf of a photocopy and the photos are virtually unrecognisable. I particularly wanted to read this because it is the account of a journey the Swiss photographer Ella Maillart took with Peter Fleming, whose account of the same journey I read many years ago (Travels in Tartary). Too long ago to be able to compare, but I couldn’t resist.
• Swastika Night, Katharine Burdekin . Sci-fi.
• Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: the 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers, Ilya Ilf. Doesn’t that sound fascinating?
• The Nutmeg Tree, Margery Sharp. Crime. Interlibrary loan possible. Margery Sharp wrote the book The Rescuers was based on!!!!
• The Land of Green Ginger, Noel Langley. I’ve always wanted to read this because the title sounds so delicious, but now I’m not sure if it’s this children’s book I’ve heard of (probably) or Winifred Holtby’s novel about a woman in Yorkshire whose husband returns broken from the First World War (less likely, though that sounds good, too).
• Capricornia, Xavier Herbert. An Australian classic with insight into Aboriginal life and race relations. Lisa at ANZ Lit Lovers has reviewed it, though she says it was first published in 1938; Goodreads says 1937.
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston. A classic of Black literature. Available through interlibrary loan, but on loan at the moment.
• Pensioen [Pension], Willem Elsschot. This is a novella, the fictionalised version of the absurd story of what happened to the Belgian author’s own family. In this version, a woman continued to claim her son’s war pension, when it should have gone to his son, who was overlooked when his mother married another man. I would have liked to include a Dutch language book in my 1937 books, but once again, the only library copy was unavailable.