2016

Another new year, I am still unsure where the last year went, it was filled with happiness, busyness, friendship and losses. I have written up a new lot of goals which I need to achieve - everything from finally being able to try new recipes now that I have put back most of the foods banned in my elimination diet to reading the online magazines I subscribe to. Most of all I want to write and paint, and I hope to avoid losing all my 'own' time to the demands of work at CCS. I intend to keep the list of 'to do's' right next to my ipad and check them regularly. Top of this list, which combines well with my desire to cook again, is to get healthy. I hope to lose weight, work on lowering my blood sugar levels and try to work towards a much healthier heart. I hope to keep blogging about this along with my reading and books I hope to buy for my kindle. Music also fills my soul and my days - it is a lifeblood I have always fed.

On new year's eve I finished reading 'A Harrowing Tale' on my VRS, an exciting book full of danger and travel. Avoiding Somali pirates filled up the majority of the book as this couple wended their way across the Indian Ocean and into the Red Sea. A book I would thoroughly recommend.

I have trawled up and down the 300 or so books on my kindle and decided yesterday to read the Pulitzer Prize winner - 'All the Light We Cannot See' by Anthony Doerr.
  

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times). 

I have only read a few pages so far but the descriptive language is fabulous. I felt as though I was in the room with the young girl and can of course empathise with her blindness. Although this is a very long book I am sure the pages will fly by as I become engrossed in the story.

I love the magazines the Blind Foundation sends to me but I tend to save them up until I have finished a book on my VRS. At present I am listening to the selections from the Readers Digest, it seems to be a thoroughly interesting issue. I just wish there was a key on the VRS one could press to discover how far one is through a book or magazine. I put in a lot of guesswork trying to discover how many hours I have listened to.

Jay is lying beside me hoping I will give him an early dinner while Chocolat has again retired to the rug near the door. She does not sense when I move, not does she see or hear me. She seems to be sleeping the last of her life away which is sad. I suspect I need to offer her a change of scenery and some fun in her days, perhaps this is something I should add to my daily list of 'to do's'.