Cynthia

Cynthia’s Bookshelves

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Cynthia is Currently Reading

Cynthia is currently reading

The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

bookshelves: mystery, added2017, 17-select, 2026-100, currently-reading

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(page 6 of 530)
— Dec 31, 2025 01:52PM

Dec 30, 2025 09:51AM

Cynthia is currently reading

The Vicious Vet (Agatha Raisin, #2)

by M.C. Beaton

bookshelves: cozy-misc, lib-cincy, lib-kenton, ky-unbound-kenton, kenton-mysteries, quarantine-options, 2025-total, 2025-cozy, ch-czy-03, ch-czy-04, 2025-misc-mystery, cozy-mystery-all, 2025-qp-mystery, 2025-shorties-priority-17-24, 2026-100, currently-reading

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(68%)
— 19 hours, 17 min ago

19 hours, 18 min ago

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Mrs. Pargeter's Pound of Flesh (Mrs. Pargeter, #4)

by Simon Brett

bookshelves: 2s-and-later, currently-reading, 2026-100

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(page 33 of 207)
— Dec 21, 2025 06:51AM

Dec 30, 2025 09:56AM

See all 14 books that Cynthia is reading…

“I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine. I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have names, but she did. She was called Mrs. MacGregor.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

3 likes

“nobody dared in those days to question such bullies, and the freedom that is more normal these days has come too late for these victims. Auden would have helped, because the whole message of his life and his poetry is the antithesis of cruelty and meanness of spirit.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

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“I’ve squandered plenty of ink arguing against the notion that God had to kill Jesus because we were bad. But when Caitlin said that Jesus died for our sins, including that one, I was reminded again that there is nothing we have done that God cannot redeem. Small betrayals, large infractions, minor offenses. All of it. Some would say that instead of the cross being about Jesus standing in for us to take the really bad spanking from God for our own naughtiness (the fancy theological term for this is substitutionary atonement), what happens at the cross is a “blessed exchange.” God gathers up all our sin, all our broken-ass junk, into God’s own self and transforms all that death into life.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

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“it evokes so powerfully what we all must have felt as children—the conviction that things are better elsewhere if only we could get there. The powerlessness of the child is what makes that so poignant: children are trapped in the world created for them by adults, and for most children the possibility of escape is remote. The same idea is present in the Freud poem, where he talks about the child … unlucky in his little State, some hearth where freedom is excluded, a hive whose honey is fear and worry … The sympathetic effect of these lines is immediately apparent. Yes, we all knew people like that when we were ourselves children.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

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“And then I awoke, and just as Auden did when he awoke from his dream of the croquet match, I felt that I had been vouchsafed a vision. It was a feeling of utter elation and goodwill—in other words, a feeling of agape. I felt bathed in the warm, golden glow of this feeling. Some year later my wife and I were having dinner with psychiatrist friends in an Edinburgh restaurant. The talk turned to dreams, and I recounted my dream. Unfortunately, as I did so, there was a lull in the conversation at nearby tables, with the result that others heard what I had to say. At the end there was silence. Then one of the psychiatrists said: “I know what your dream is about.” A pin could have been heard to drop. “Mrs. MacGregor is your mother.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

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