Lori has this her library ... ( )

On the whole I enjoyed all four books, but not being British I didn't understand many of the "punchlines", and reading all four in a row makes the essays seem a little repetitous (but maybe it did rain for four consecutive years in Wales) ( )

I love these little books, and go back to them every couple of years to read them straight through. Alice Thomas Ellis has a talent for bringing you right into her messy, disorganized, loving, crowded home, and makes you part of the family in a very no-nonsense, unsentimental way.

She can have you laughing out loud at the beginning of a sentence, only to bring you up short by the end of it (for example, a casual reference to "visiting her son's grave" when she has a boisterous family of adolescents at home, and you've had no previous warning that she'd lost one).

If one disorganized home (in London's Camden Town section) were not enough, she has another in the countryside in Wales, where it rains so constantly the sheep appear to her to be suicidal.

These pieces are delightful to read and reread. ( )