BW15: Sunday's Book Babble - The Cloistered Life

Saint Guilhem Cloister

It's week 15 in our 52 Books Quest and this week's 52 Books Bingo category is The Cloistered Life. 

Years and years ago when I was a teenager...  Why does it sound like the opening crawl to Star Wars?   "In a galaxy far far away...."   *grin* 

No, I did not wish to become a nun when I was younger, but was always fascinated by the idea. Our high school religious class took a field trip to a cloistered convent and it was an interesting experience to say the least.  We were allowed to talk to the sisters through a screen in which they could only see us from the waist up, a privacy screen raised in case any outside visitor was inappropriately dressed. They were a giggly group of ladies who enjoyed their simple life of prayer and work inside the convent walls.  

The experience stuck with me which is probably why I enjoy stories about hermits and anchorites, monks and nuns, abbeys and monasteries, and lives lived in solitude.  Books such as historical fiction The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader, biographical stories such as And Then There Were Nuns by Jane Christmas and  Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, and fictional books such as Dean Koontz's suspense story  Innocence in which a young man lives beneath a city in solitude and Louise Penny's The Beautiful Mystery in which Armand Gamache tries to solve a murder within a cloistered monastery. 

I finished Genevieve Cogman's The Lost Plot #4 in the Invisible Library series  which was very very good and our spy librarian Irene was put to the test in trying to complete her mission while on the run from the fae, dragons, mobsters and gun molls, and the human police.  Continuing the Invisible Library series saga with #5 The Mortal Word.

 "Peace talks are always tricky, especially when a key diplomat gets stabbed. This rudely interrupts a top-secret summit between the warring dragons and Fae. As a neutral party, Librarian-spy Irene is summoned to investigate. She must head to a version of 1890s Paris, with her assistant Kai and her detective friend Vale, where these talks are fracturing. Here, she must get to the bottom of the attack – before either the peace negotiations or the city go up in flames.

Suspicions fly thick and fast and Irene soon finds herself in the seedy depths of the Parisian underworld. She’s on the trail of a notoriously warlike Fae, the Blood Countess. However, the evidence against the Countess is circumstantial. Could the killer be a member of the Library itself?"

This week's 52 Books theme fits right in with my 10 x 10 Get thee to a Nunnery category and I have a number of books on my shelves to choose from. 

Next up, Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk