St Kévin
Happy Birthday to Alice, with lots and lots of love xxxxxxx
The last three days have been wet, wetter and wettest. We haven't uncovered the pool since Sunday morning and the garden water features have been coming and going. No sooner does the rain ease off and the streams disappear than the rain gets heavier and they start up again.
On a positive note, it is bright and dry now, if not brilliant sunshine and the forecast for the next two days is sunny.
Which is just as well as mother is coming to stay. She arrives tomorrow morning. On Thursday it is our turn to host the book group lunch and twelve people would be prove a very cosy affair in the kitchen so we hope that the forecast is correct and we can lunch in the sunshine.
Jon and I have been browsing Amazon.co.uk to see what books we can find to suggest for the coming months. The last two we have read were A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, a riveting novel about two women in Afghanistan, and What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn. What Was Lost is published by a small publishing house called Tindall Street Press, based in Birmingham. They publish what they label as 'contemporary regional fiction' and have an impressive list of works. What Was Lost won the Costa First Novel Award and Ms O'Flynn appeared recently at Hay on Wye book festival. It was an intriguing book. I think I may well read it again sometime.
My other book groups have given me Eric Newby's The Last Grain Race and my surprise postal book this month is Unweaving the Thread by Monica Tracey. Newby I know from his other works but I had never heard of Monica Tracey and when I saw it was 'another' Irish novel, my heart sank - however, I started reading the first chapter and I am really enjoying it - don't like to put it down. With this postal group we each make notes in a little notebook that travels on with the novel, I took a sneak preview at what other group members had thought of this one and they all seem to be of the same opinion.
In between my book group books, as I had caught up and had some spare time, I read Jilly Cooper's Wicked!, which I picked up in a charity shop on my last trip to the UK.
I used to like Jilly Cooper, lots of innuendo, puns, nothing too challenging, but this time I found the book a bit of a chore - maybe all the new novelists and the challenging books the groups are giving me have changed my tastes!
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A happy life in France
3 comments:
Hallo Sue so you have been soggy and mopping up!!me as well although I could do without it coming through the house again!here in Queensland we have had torrential rain and it keeps trying to wend its way through my patio doors, so once again angel son in law has put up a barricade, bit of a worry as our pool height is above my door step so it only has to oveflow a bit and it would be a case of who put those noodles in my lounge room!!big hi to my dear Aunty xxxx
I read Jilly Cooper at a panto once..."Polo"...the only one of hers i've ever read, i thought it was good but couldn't be bothered with the others...i have also received back my "Memoirs of a Geisha" which appears to have done the rounds lately amongst friends, now that is a book i need to have in my house, absolutely fab!!
Other than that we've been reading "The Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse" and "Biff and Chip" books!
I find that Biff and Chip are vastly overrated. Try 'Hold Tight' by Harlen Coben - I read it on Saturday!
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