My life is becoming more and more hectic as spring flashes by and summer is just around the corner. My work for CCS is expanding exponentially and the detailed work required often tires me. I dislike using my remaining sight too intently for fear it may leave me descending into less sight and more difficulties with coping.

I have now finished 'The Umbrian Supper Club' which I found to be a tad boring. I am beginning to wonder if Marlena de Blasi has begun to run out of topics to write about which makes her books appear to have stretched every last fact to extend the book. 

I am now enjoying;


I thought this book was nonfiction, although I missed the movie I thought it was a story about a real professor. I was quite shocked when a member of WLM told me it was a novel. It certainly reads like a memoir.

Alice Howland is proud of the life she worked so hard to build. At fifty years old, she’s a cognitive psychology professor at Harvard and a world-renowned expert in linguistics with a successful husband and three grown children. When she becomes increasingly disoriented and forgetful, a tragic diagnosis changes her life--and her relationship with her family and the world--forever.

At once beautiful and terrifying, Still Alice is a moving and vivid depiction of life with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease that is as compelling as A Beautiful Mind and as unforgettable as Judith Guest's Ordinary People.





On my VRS I am listening to


n 1984, architect Scott Warren comes to China on a scholarship to study Daoist buildings, just at the time when the liberalisation policies of Deng Xiaoping are unfolding and Chinese people are experiencing new freedoms. Twenty-three years later he returns, to honour his dead wife's request to take her ashes back to China. He encounters a country that has been propelled into international commerce, culture and politics that has Western-style prosperity yet continued human rights restrictions and one-party rule. In this complexity, Scott confronts painful memories and revisits the past, which merges dangerously with the present. (less)

I am enjoying reading this book though falling asleep before the 15 minutes I set to turn off means I seem to have lost track of the plot. Another novel, again I thought it was non fiction, its portrayal of the huge culture shift in China is evocative.





I have also bought some more books for my kindle, mostly those recommended by WLM.





With more than two million copies of her novels sold, New York Timesbestselling author Geraldine Brooks has achieved both popular and critical acclaim. Now, Brooks takes on one of literature’s richest and most enigmatic figures: a man who shimmers between history and legend. Peeling away the myth to bring David to life in Second Iron Age Israel, Brooks traces the arc of his journey from obscurity to fame, from shepherd to soldier, from hero to traitor, from beloved king to murderous despot and into his remorseful and diminished dotage.

The Secret Chord provides new context for some of the best-known episodes of David’s life while also focusing on others, even more remarkable and emotionally intense, that have been neglected.  We see David through the eyes of those who love him or fear him—from the prophet Natan, voice of his conscience, to his wives Mikhal, Avigail, and Batsheva, and finally to Solomon, the late-born son who redeems his Lear-like old age. Brooks has an uncanny ability to hear and transform characters from history, and this beautifully written, unvarnished saga of faith, desire, family, ambition, betrayal, and power will enthrall her many fans.

I have enjoyed all her other books so hopefully this one is just as gripping.