The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

By Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

I read this book about three weeks ago for a book club, but it's the perfect post for Valentine's Day. The title may be long-winded and a bit confusing, but luckily this lovely book is not. The novel unfolds as a series of letters and journal entries (an epistolary novel for you English majors) between a London writer and a book group located on one of England's Channel Islands after the end of World War II.

The book is one of those rare treasures that is lovely and romantic, but is saved from overt cheesiness by being well-written. It also manages to work in historical details on the German occupied Channel Islands without making the story too dry or weighed down by data.

Workspaces of Creative People

From Flavorwire. Not all writers, but still fun. 

Roald Dahl

Woody Allen

Yves Saint Laurent

Writer's Rooms

My last post got me interested in writer's workspaces, and luckily one of my favorite websites has a whole collection of such images (originally published from 2007 to 2009). A few of my favorites:

Jane Austen

Located at Chawton Cottage, Jane wrote at this small desk next to the front door. From this 12-sided walnut table she wrote, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion.

Charles Darwin

This is the study, located in a village in Kent, where Darwin wrote his On the Origin of Species. It was also here he researched and wrote 10 books. Apparently only the most select guests were ever allowed inside.

Virginia Woolf

This room was created for Woolf's writing in a wooden toolshed next to her house in Sussex. Though it had beautiful large windows she often had to retreat indoors during the winter because it was so cold. Other times she wrote under a chestnut tree on a board on her lap. She wrote parts of all her major novels here, and it was here that she wrote a farewell letter to her husband Leonard on Friday March 28, 1941 before drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Sarah Waters

Waters, one of my 2010 favorites, admits she wants to create an amazing workspace, but all she really needs to write "is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door." She says the world map is to improve her sense of geography and that she also has a map of London, which is used while writing The Night Watch.

Antonia Fraser

Fraser, the writer of Marie Antoinette: The Journey, The Wives of Henry VIII, and one of my favorites, The Warrior Queens, works in this study on the fourth floor of her house. It used to be her children's nursery, but once they moved out she installed the bookcases. She decorated the room like "an old-fashioned country house bedroom, blue bows, chintz and roses...It's all rather untidy, but that gives me a sense of security. I want my mind to be the only orderly thing in the room."