July reading

I am just about finished this and I keep flicking on ahead and reading paragraphs in the hope that I can devour it quickly and slowly at the same time - the agony! On the back cover of the 1972 copy I'm reading a critic said 'It will keep thousands of people dithering with excitement' ~ ha, yes I'm all a dither and consequently I keep having to sneak off, away from children, to try and gulp down more in between feeding time at the zoo, refereeing squabbles and laundry baskets which seem to have their own life force.

funny ha, ha

The other evening Mide remembered a book that his teacher was reading to the class in school. Luckily we had it at home (Mr. Stink by David Walliams) so he spent an enjoyable hour before bed reading out all the funny bits he liked from it. Having a sense of humour is something so intrinsically human that we barely think about it. People with autism are sometimes regarded as having no sense of humour or as not being able to understand or tell jokes. In Mide's case this is not true - he enjoys jokes, word-play and puns and he definitely gets the humour in books like Mr. Stink and cartoon strips like Calvin and Hobbes. Indeed, it also helps us as parents to have a sense of humour when dealing with situations that might otherwise make us furious or cry (or both). On more than one occasion we've used silliness and joking to diffuse tension or reduce his anxiety. Of course, that said, it doesn't always work...

Calvin and Hobbes

reading

Not for the first time I have wintered well due to books. We have far more than we read, to be honest. But it's such a comfort to have a bookcase full with ones that are dear friends and others that are not yet known to me. I have just finished Thin Paths by Julia Blackburn. It's a lyrical meandering tale of life in the mountains of Northern Italy, part reflection on life, part nature writing, part travel writing. The tales of village life are captured beautifully and simply, although what is being recounted (hardship, poverty and atrocities of the second world war) is not easy reading. I'd first come across Julia Blackburn on Radio 4 reading Murmurations of Love, Grief and Starlings, her poem of loss written after the death of her husband, Herman. Thin Paths makes her life with him come alive and shows that our paths intersect and weave alongside others' paths, creating beauty even in the simplest of lives lived. 

I am always trying to understand our son's autism. I want to understand his brain, how he thinks, how he processes information. Of course I can't do this anymore than I can with my other boys, or my husband, but there is always that hope that somehow by reading all that I can about autism I will get in there. I read a lot, ranging from the serious, academic stuff to the practical advice giving blogs. In the beginning after receiving the diagnosis that changed our lives forever I did an enormous amount of reading as though words, explanations and theories would somehow soothe and calm me. In fact it did the opposite. I quickly became overwhelmed by all the information when all I wanted was to fix things. There is no 'fixing' this but there is understanding and now I choose much more carefully what I read. Oliver Sacks' book An Anthropologist on Mars is a series of essays about people with different neurological conditions (including autism) and opens a door into that wonderful thing - the brain - and the complicated beauty of life.

Which brings me to Gratitude. Not 50 pages long here are four short essays written by Sacks as  he faced illness, old age and death. Sometimes I find comfort when I'm not looking for it. And here it is, on the last page... "And now, weak, short of breath, my once firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life - achieving a sense of peace within oneself."

January reading

I'm just finishing off The North Water by Ian McGuire which has been a heaving read set on a rolling whaling vessel in the Arctic, where the hero (surgeon Patrick Sumner) doesn't come off too well and the villain of the piece, Henry Drax, is of such malevolence and raw power with an instinct to survive so powerful that you can't take your eyes off him nor believe he could ever be vanquished. To compensate for all that unrelenting tension and drama I'm also reading the classic Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. This is a gorgeous hardback edition and although I've only read the first 40 pages I know this is a book that will have something to say to me for the rest of my life. Written over 60 years ago it gives gentle advice about how to balance life, family, work, marriage and finding space to be yourself while advocating a paring down, a simplification in order to be at peace.

the other International Phenomenon

At eleven the other evening I said, 'Right I'm off to bed. With an International Phenomenon.'
Kevin, who was reading reports for a meeting the following day said, 'Well actually, I'll be up in a while'.
'No, says I tapping the cover of I am Pilgrim... the other International Phenomenon...'

reading

 

We are being spoiled . We wake to the sun pouring through the windows. I put on a wash, knowing that it will dry outside. We eat outdoors - coffee in the morning, lunch in the garden, the smell of woodsmoke from the barbecue wafting in through open doors at supper time. Last night I washed a tired boy's dusty feet before folding him in under his duvet to sleep while the sun was still shining at half past eight in the evening. I often think about my children's childhood. Will they remember sunlit days, the swing under the branches of the sycamore tree, picnics and reading on the grass, camping and the musty smell of tents, homemade cakes and warm early morning sleepy hugs. Oh, I hope they do. Whatever they remember, I hope they feel that their childhood was full of love.

I've just finished My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, which is essentially about the love between a mother and daughter. It's a story told about poverty, the grinding endlessness of having nothing, coming from nothing and all the pain that it brings. But it's the emotional poverty that really hurts. A mother who cannot bring herself to tell her daughter she loves her. A daughter so glad to spend time with her mother that it doesn't matter what her mother says, so long as she can hear her voice. It's written in a deceptively simple style and yet it cuts to the bone: human relationships can be tricky things, but no matter what your childhood or your upbringing was like you must sing your own song, write your own story.

great outdoors

 

Now that the Spring has finally, finally arrived it's time to get outdoors a bit more often. I'll be the first to admit the great outdoors is not my natural choice of habitat. I'm more of the great indoors persuasion. However when it comes to children there is nothing better than fresh air and a run around to sort out all kinds of things. And actually the same can be true for the grown-ups too! This morning the postman delivered '101 things for kids to do outside' by Dawn Isaac. From staging an open-air play or building a bird hide to constructing a water wall and flying homemade kites there are lots of ideas to make the most of Spring sunshine. I also bought 'Dirty Teaching: a beginner's guide to learning outdoors' by Juliet Robinson. Written to encourage teachers to bring school children outside I chose this one as we'd recently had a note home from the boys' school about children not being allowed to play on the grass which surrounds their playground...oh dear, don't get me started on that!

linger on

Now that the days are slowly lengthening you might imagine opportunities to sit by the fire and read are fewer. But no, reading is as part of my daily life as cooking and eating and school runs and laundry and walking the dogs. I often have two or three books on the go at once and that's the case at the moment. I'm nearly finished Sightlines and it's been such a joy that I'm lingering over it, stretching the words over a few more bedtimes. Kathleen Jamie's essays are rooted in the natural world and are informed by her interests in archaeology, whales, birds, bones, pathology, islands and people. She brings us alongside icebergs, through whale museums to the islands of Rona and St. Kilda, past noisy gannetries and glinting orcas, to the moon and deep into the mysterious landscapes of the human body. All the way I journey with her, never leaving home and how my heart soars. 

grey and misty

Oh it's a bit uninspiring all this rain. Today it's too wet to consider all but the briefest of walks and even then I only go up the hill. The low lying cloud and mist have covered the hill in a blanket of damp grey. Quick - get back home, indoors to the fire, maybe a few stolen pages of reading (the poetic and beautiful essays in Kathleen Jamie's Sightlines). Not quite hibernating but certainly something close to it. 

December reading

I cannot believe we are in December! The year has flown by. And every month I have enjoyed picking my book as part of Laura's The Year in Books. 

My year has looked like this:

January: A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli

February: The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

March: The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard

April: The Letter for the King by Tonke Dragt

May: Fox Encounters in the Wild by Jim Crumley

June: The Search Warrant by Patrick Modiano

July: Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard

August: Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

September: Findings by Kathleen Jamie

October: The Hog's Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts

November: Limoncello and Linen Water by Tessa Kiros

December: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Over the course of the year I have read and enjoyed lots more , especially H is for Hawk and I Capture the Castle and luckily my pile of books is healthily growing so there's plenty for the coming months!

September reading

I am doing a bit of tail chasing this month so far. It's been a busy few weeks but I've still found time for reading, though it's more snatched happen-chance rather than luxurious wallowing.  I have to admit I haven't yet finished Testament of Youth ~ I'm still enjoying it but, as with all big books I find smaller books nuzzle their way in seeking attention and so I've read Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James and The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness in the meantime. 

Death Comes to Pemberley - a sequel to Pride and Prejudice but this time with murder most foul - was a fun read, although I'd have liked Elizabeth Bennet to have had a bit more 'oomph' to her, the book featured more of Mr Darcy than it did of her and there wasn't much mystery solving to it.

The Crane Wife was unusual - part fable, part love story - it tells of George who, in the middle of the night, rescues a crane which has been shot by an arrow .... the next day the mysterious Kumiko appears in his shop and George falls in love with her.... The book's fairytale quality made it a bit hard to believe and, to be honest, I preferred the likeable, real and humourous characters of George's daughter, Amanda, and also that of Mehmet who works for George. 

This month's book is Findings by the poet Kathleen Jamie. I'm afraid I'm a sucker for anything Scottish, wild and winterish. I'm barely 10 pages in and I'm already captivated by her writing which holds close the everyday mundane alongside the magical.

**Joining in with The Year in Books**

August reading

I bought Testament of Youth way back in January and between the swings and the roundabouts didn't think to pick it up. To be honest I think its size scared me a little. It's hefty (600 or so pages) but the other evening with the rain dripping endlessly outside I lit the fire and started it. Of course Vera Brittain's writing is such that you get effortlessly sucked into her story, beginning with her early life and her battle to get out of provincial Buxton and into Oxford. Of course the Great War gets in the way of those plans and takes the lives of her brother Edward, her fiance Roland Leighton and their friends, creating the lost generation, and of course changing her life too. If the summer continues in its dismal way I shall have lots of fireside reading time - although I'm wondering should this be my August and September choice for The Year in Books and that way I can stop hyperventilating over its size...

July reading

Well, that was a bit of an unintentional holiday from blogging. We'd no internet for days, days I tell you and so instead of spending time on-line reading and generally nosing around in other peoples' lives I have been forced to spend time with my husband, my children, my friends, my laundry basket and myself and oh, what a relief it is to find all is working in the www.world.com again.

I did however use the time to do some reading and am well through my book for July Marking Time by Elizabeth Howard. It's the second in the Cazalet family series and picks up where the first book left off, so now the family are in 1940 and the reality of war is starting to bite. It's perfect for this time of year when having a book that you can pick up and put down, as children demand, is needed. It's also fairly much character driven so there's no pesky plot wranglings to deal with if you have to leave it for a day or two. I'll also be reading The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair from Persephone Books. So those are my choices for The Year in Books  over at Circle of Pine Trees.

rena gardiner

This arrived in the post this morning. I'd read about Rena Gardiner here and here and I immediately followed Mr. Pentreath's advice and bought a copy of the book (Little Toller Books produce the most gorgeous books, really anything from them is just fantastic) and I'm so glad I did. She was a prolific and wonderful book maker, printer, artist. I am looking forward to later on this evening when all children are in bed and I can lose myself in her wonderful work. 

June reading

How do you choose a book? The size? (I especially love slim books, 200 pages or less). The cover? The hype? The title? The smell? All of the above? When we're book shopping it's usually with the three boys. Peaceful and quiet choosing time is limited, even when we spend an age in the children's section while they choose theirs, I usually get a hurried ten minutes to see what I might like to read. Last week we were in Hodges Figgis in Dublin and as I'm nearly finished H is for Hawk I thought I'd pick up something new. Immediately I saw The Search Warrant I knew it was for me. Thin, intriguingly titled and about the disappearance of a girl in Paris during the second world war it was ticking a lot of boxes. I flipped it open about half way through and read, in the bustling bookshop, a few paragraphs. That is how I choose. If it feels right, if I like the writing, if there's an atmosphere, if the voices of the characters sound real even though I don't know the story then I buy the book. Oh, and the size, the cover, the hype, the title and the smell also count.

***This is my June choice for The Year in Books at the always lovely Circle of Pine Trees***

children's books

One of the (many) joys of having an eight year old and a six year old is reading The Bedtime Story. William and Mide share a bedtime and therefore get the benefit of two stories - one each. They snuggle down in their beds, only heads peeping out, the night light is on, the room is dimly lit and the story begins...Over the years we have progressed from picture books to chapter books and have read everything from the Secret Seven, endless Famous Fives through to Emil and the Detectives, passing Awful Auntie, the Moomins, the Worst Witch, Horrid Henry and How to Train your Dragon along the way... William's recent bedtime read was Charlotte's Web which, bizarrely, I had not read as a child. It's a well known and much loved classic, a tale of friendship and bravery and love between Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig. This was a lovely read, and for William who was (is?) afraid of spiders it lessened the fear by explaining lots of spidery facts cleverly woven (ahem) into the story. Although I have to admit the ending had me biting back tears...

Our new bedtime read is William at War (part of the Just William series) - perfect for our William, who is just a tad obsessed with the First and Second World Wars.

in the landscape

Sometimes I can fuss too much. Children needing showers, bedtime needing to be observed, dishes to be done. And sometimes I am wrong and need to go with the flow. And last night the flow lead us to the lake with the boat and dogs. It was raining but only that gentle rain that really can be ignored if you're distracted by other, more interesting, things. The boys were buttoned up in raincoats and life jackets and the boat was duly launched and oars taken in hand. Now, there's only so much room in that little boat so I stayed in the Landrover with the binoculars and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald for company. Sometimes I get a book that just hooks me, straight away from the first page and this is one such one. It's nature writing at its very best as it leaves your spirit soaring, your mind full of glinting goshawk savage beauty tethered by the grief in the writing. It was perfect reading while sitting there watching the rain on the windscreen blurring the boys, the lake and the sky. Eventually they rowed back to shore and it was time to dry the dogs and head home, back to showers, bedtime and dishes but all the better for being on the water, in the landscape, in the rain.

dear diary

Not long after having Hugo I realised that there is not much you can actually do while feeding a baby, except gaze adoringly at them. Gazing adoringly at your baby soon wears a trifle thin, especially if they choose to feed every two hours, so I bought a cassette tape (yes, a tape ~ it was a long-ish time ago) of Diary of a Provincial Lady and hooted my way through several feeds. Recently I was lucky enough to get a copy of Persephone's Diary of a Provincial Lady and I swished through it faster than the arrival of Lady Boxe's expensive car. The diary records the daily ups and downs of family life in the 1930s, when being a mother of two and wife to one has its own (hilarious) difficulties, not least because the bulbs won't grow, the servants are threatening to leave and one never reads the right books, sees the right exhibitions or wears the right clothes.

January 22nd.- Robert startles me at breakfast by asking if my cold-which he has hitherto ignored-is better. I reply that it has gone. Then why, he asks, do I look like that? Refrain from asking like what, as I know only too well. Feel that life is wholly unendurable, and decide madly to get a new hat.

treasure

We had a day away this weekend. We packed a picnic and went adventuring. On the way home we stopped off at Springhill, but only briefly as it was closing. We managed a quick rummage around in the second-hand book shop there (in a teeny gate-lodge) and found treasure. The Shell Book of Roads may not be the most enticing sounding book but it is, in fact, an absolute delight. It's a slim volume published in 1964 and it details 12 roads, ridgeways, steps, ways, lanes or passes throughout the UK. There's a short, lively descriptive piece by Geoffrey Grigson and each is illustrated with David Gentleman's atmospheric paintings. There's also a line drawing by Peter Branfield to show which section of road is being discussed. 

Fosse Way

 

Sewstern Lane 

The Bath Road

The Antrim Coast Road

This one is my favourite. It happens to be a road we know well. Here's how Mr Grigson finishes his piece on the Antrim Coast Road

"Joining glen to glen, running round headlands and under cliffs which are black, white, and red, between the various blues of the sea and the slopes of viridian turf, crossing fast streams which rush down from the glens and the mountains, this is a wonderful scenic road at all times of the year, but especially in the flowery times of spring and early summer - the time of bluebells and primroses, very tall purple orchises, and roadside cushions of sea pink and egg-yellow tufts of birdsfoot-trefoil"

April reading

Hugo, who is twelve, does a lot of reading. It's hard to keep up with him. He likes a wide variety of books but they have to be exciting, have complicated plots, a bit of gore and preferably be fat and in a series. I had read a lovely review of The Letter for the King on EmilyBooks and I thought of Hugo.

But then I thought of me. 

And I'm so glad I did. It's my book for April for Circle of Pine Trees The Year in Books. Imagine you are 16 and are on the cusp of becoming a knight. Imagine you are suddenly called on a quest. A secret quest to deliver a letter, the contents of which you do not know. Enemies are all around you. Who can you trust? How far will you go to deliver this letter? How long will your courage hold? It's such a different book to my last one (The Light Years, which I loved and, like Hugo, I'm delighted it's in a series!) but I have to say I'm gripped and look forward to it each evening when the household quiets and stills and medieval life and chivalry take over.