Elizabeth Yeoman
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elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Elizabeth Yeoman
@elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
79 followers 120 following 48 posts
Occasional posts about language, writing and the arts. More frequent posts about active and public transportation, my small contribution to climate change mitigation and our own well-being.
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elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

9/10 memoirs: The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets by Bart Moore-Gilbert

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
This book cover is yellow at the bottom merging gradually into red at the top, sunset style, with an Indian looking lattice pattern superimposed over it (or maybe I'm just imagining it's Indian because the book is about India). In the centre is a sepia photo of a man in a tropical type uniform. I believe it is Bart Moore-Gilbert's father, who was in the Indian Police, though that too is a guess based on the content of the book.
March 19, 2025 at 2:06 AM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

8/10 memoirs: All Our Ordinary Stories: A Multigenerational Family Saga by Teresa Wong

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
This book cover is hand drawn, graphic novel style (and the book is a graphic, well, not a novel, but a graphic memoir). The colours are exquisite: deep sapphire blue and black water, two people in deep shade with highlighted areas in bright turquoise, and a crimson rope linking them. Text of title and author overlaid in white.
March 18, 2025 at 2:25 AM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

7/10 memoirs: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
The cover is bright citrus yellow with a jigsaw pattern of geometric shapes cut from, presumably, the author's family photos in black and white and some undecorated brightly coloured shapes to round out the design. Other information on the cover, apart from title and author noted above are: a blurb from Dwight Garner (NY Times) stating, "A major book that I suspect will be among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade;" a black medallion inscribed "The New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2019;" a gold medallion inscribed "National Book Award Winner;" and, in red "A New York Times Bestseller."
March 17, 2025 at 1:11 AM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

6/10 memoirs: Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach by Jean Sprackland

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge #Beaches
"Compelling...sharply observed, clued up, environmentally aware and deeply researched" says the blurb from the Independent at the bottom of the cover image, which is of a beach. It's quite an ordinary looking beach: beige sand, some wooden fencing and water in the distance shining in the evening (or perhaps early morning) sun. The title is in red against an evening or early morning sky, palely glowing, with author's name in black below. I agree with the blurb. I seem to remember this book had slightly mixed reviews but I loved it.
March 15, 2025 at 10:32 PM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

5/10 memoirs: The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam: An Illustrated Memoir by Ann Marie Fleming

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
This book cover is a vivid light-filled turquoise with the title and author printed in white, along with a blurb from the Globe and Mail: "A delightful look at just how wide one life can spread." The extraordinary life of Chinese acrobat and magician, Long Tack Sam, did indeed "spread wide," over at least four continents, and his great-granddaughter, Ann Marie Fleming's telling of his story is a masterpiece of research and mixed media. (It's a film too, free to watch online at https://www.nfb.ca/film/the_magical_life_of_long_tack_sam/.) To get back to the ALT text cover description, there's also a coloured ink (I think) drawing of a man in a traditional bright yellow Chinese gown and hat holding a fiery sparkler over a black dragon with a multi-coloured face surrounded by stars.)
March 14, 2025 at 10:13 PM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

4/10 memoirs: The Color of Water by James McBride

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
The cover includes the full title: The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to his White Mother and the information that it's a NY Times bestseller and is "moving and unforgettable." I too found it moving and unforgettable. I read it many years ago; it's not new but, as Ann Patchett would say, "if you haven't read it, it's new to you." I found it utterly fascinating as a story of childhood and a mystery about the mother's origins and where she came from. To get back to the description of the image, the top half of the cover is deep sky blue with some sort of water mark and the word "star" (part of a longer text but the rest isn't visible) and the bottom half is orange with a b/w vintage headshot of a dark haired serious faced boy.
March 14, 2025 at 1:23 AM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

3/10 memoirs: Deeper Than Indigo: Tracing Thomas Machell, Forgotten Explorer by Jenny Balfour Paul

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
The image shows the cover of the book referenced in the post, its title and author and a blurb from A.N. Wilson: "One of the most remarkable books I've ever read." The cover is stark black with white lettering. The only image is a replica of an envelope or packaging of some kind with 19th century stamps (I assume, knowing the content of the book) in red and blue (the only colour featured) and handwriting that is partly occluded by the postage franks but the legible part says "Machell" and "Calcutta, India." Like A. N. Wilson, I also thought it was a remarkable book: for its strangeness, its lyrical story of love across centuries, and its scholarly detail--not to say obsession.
March 12, 2025 at 11:09 PM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

2/10 memoirs: Belonging: A German Reckons With History And Home by Nora Krug

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
The cover of the book features a view of a green valley with a bit of blue water in the distance and two red roofed houses in the foreground. I think it's intended to look (and probably is, since it's a photo) rural and German. Superimposed on this scene are two more layers: a red bordered label at the top with the author's name and title (noted in the text of my post) and a cartoon drawing of a brightly clad young woman standing on a rock looking out over the valley. One more detail that you only notice when you look closely is that the photo of the bucolic valley seems to be printed on lined yellow writing paper, perhaps suggesting old documents and hidden histories.
March 11, 2025 at 10:20 PM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers!

1/10 memoirs: Giving Up The Ghost by Hilary Mantel

#booksky #bookchallenge #20bookchallenge
I love how alt text lets you write more. It's like a secret message that maybe will never be read, or maybe it will, either by someone who can't see the photo or by someone who, like me, is fascinated by how people describe their images and keeps hoping they'll do it more imaginatively. Anyway, this photo shows one of several covers of Hilary Mantel's memoir, Giving Up The Ghost, the deeply sad and searingly witty story of Mantel's childhood loss of her father through family breakdown and her later inability to have children of her own. In this version of the cover, a wooden but pink cushioned and vaguely Victorian "sidechair" stands in the middle of a room suffused with sunlight. The light streams through closed and gauzily curtained French doors framing a garden outside and making patterns on a wide plank probably pine floor inside. The colour scheme is dusty rose and spring bud, muted versions of the complementary Christmas primaries, red and green.
March 10, 2025 at 5:08 PM
elizabethyeoman.bsky.social
The same tulips on my kitchen table, a week apart. Sylvia Plath wrote, "The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here." It's a very sad poem and I don't feel about tulips as she did but this seems to describe my tulips and their context. #tulips #SylviaPlath #winter #spring #drawing #Derwent
A brown and green Lorenzen jug holding some tightly furled and very upright multicoloured tulips on a table covered with an oilcloth decorated with dragonflies. The wings and head of one of the dragonflies emerge from under the jug so it looks as though the jug squashed it but I didn't do that on purpose! The same jug with the tulips now wide open, lolling all over the place, some missing fallen petals. The table is now white because I got tired of drawing dragonflies, but I think I did a better job on the jug in this one. It feels more three dimensional and shows the reflected light better, at least in my opinion. (The medium is mostly Derwent aquarelle coloured pencils by the way. Also, I love how alt text allows me to write so much more than the regular caption feature!)
February 23, 2025 at 5:05 PM