SandDune in 2014: January thread part 2

Welcome to my second thread of 2014: the first time that I've ever had more that one thread in a month! January reading has been moving along at a fair old pace, mainly due to illness in the first few week, but this can't continue!

For those that don't know me from previous years, I'm SandDune (aka Rhian), a 52 year old Finance Manager working for a local charity. I live about thirty miles north of London in the UK with my husband of 25 years (aka Mr SandDune), our thirteen year son (aka J), our (almost) 2 year old sweet-tempered Staffordshire Bull Terrier Daisy, and 10 year old cat Sweep, who is not sweet-tempered at all as far as Daisy is concerned and whose life ambition is to drive Daisy out of the house. Mr SandDune is an Assistant Principal at the school that my son attends and so our lives tend to be rather dominated by school issues during term time. I'm half-way through an English Literature degree with the Open University and currently studying the Nineteenth Century Novel module.

My reading tends to be quite varied. Historically, I've read a lot of literary and classical fiction, but in recent years (thanks largely to LT but also my University course) I've been branching out and exploring science-fiction, fantasy, children's and YA fiction, and graphic novels. I read very little chick-lit, thrillers or detective fiction. I haven't read much non-fiction during the last couple of years but I hope to remedy that this year.

To continue my theme of dogs in art the second painting of the year is:

'A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society' 1868 Edwin Landseer (1802-73)



This painting of a Newfoundland dog is the sort of painting that immediately springs to mind when I think of a Victorian painting of a dog: a loyal animal working for the benefit of humanity. Landseer was a hugely popular painter of animals, in particular dogs, in the Victorian era, and he seems to have had a particular fondness for the Newfoundland, especially in their role as water rescue dogs.

Reading Plans for 2014:

This year I'm going to be a little more flexible in my reading plans. Last year I joined the 2013 category challenge but I didn't find that it really suited how I wanted to read, so in 2014 I'm just going to have some general overall goals:

- First World War Centenary. As it's the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, I'm intending to read at least some fiction connected with this period.

- American Author Challenge 2014. I am very poorly read in some of these American greats from the 20th century and so a lot of these authors will be new to me.

- Vorkosigan Year Long Challenge. I read Shards of Honour in 2013 and I'm really looking forward to continuing this series.

- Open University reading. The Nineteenth Century Novel at the moment and then Twentieth Century Writing later in the year.

- RL book group. We read a book a month (mainly literary fiction), as well as the Booker prize short list every year.

In 2013 I read just over 100 books so this plan should leave me plenty of room for random picks and book bullets!

Books read in 2014:

1. The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am Kjersti A. Skomsvold ****
2. Barrayar Lois McMaster Bujold ****
3. Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Robin Sloan ***1/2
4. Turned out Nice: How the British Isles will Change as the World Heats Up Marek Kohn **1/2
5. We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo ***1/2
6. The Encyclopedia of Early Earth Isabel Greenberg ***1/2
7. Longbourn Jo Baker ***1/2
8. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Sherman Alexie ****
9. Servants A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain Lucy Lethbridge ***1/2
10. Far From the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy ****1/2
11. Germinal Emile Zola ***1/2
12. Death Comes to the Archbishop Willa Cather ***1/2
13. The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri *****
14. The Testament of Mary Colm Toibin ****1/2

Books bought in 2014

1. Barrayar Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Longbourn Jo Baker (£7.99)
3. Servants A Downstairs View of Twentieth-Century Britain Lucy Lethbridge
4. The Last Runaway Tracy Chevalier (gift)
5. Flight Behaviour Barbara Kingsolver (gift)

And the prizes for 2013 are:

My five star reads:

Barchester Towers Anthony Trollope
The Garden of Evening Mists Tan Twan Eng
Tooth and Claw Jo Walton
The Unknown Bridesmaid Margaret Forster
The Lighthouse Alison Moore
The Ocean at the End of the Lane Neil Gaiman
Suite Francaise Irene Nemirovsky
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
Northanger Abbey Jane Austen
Salvage the Bones Jesmyn Ward

Least favourite reads:

Narcopolis Jeet Thayil
The Damned Busters Matthew Hughes
Perelandra C.S.Lewis

Favourite new series:

Mapp & Lucia E.F.Benson

Rhian - congratulations on your new thread. Nice way for me to sign off my own weekend by you starting anothe thread. xx

ETA From your last thread: Sorry to see that Germinal didn't really do it for you and not a little surprised. We share, as you know a mining background - my grandfather was a pit deputy, two of my uncles were miners; one in South Yorkshire and one in Ebbw Vale. So that can't be the reason. I just found it so realistic and so compelling.

Just marking my place, Rhian. That is a lovely painting of A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society.

Still keeping up with you Rhian, nice Landseer. Hope you are feeling better now.

Grabbing a seat on your latest thread, Rhian!

Checking in.

Starred for 2014

#6 Paul, I'd certainly have had ancestors working in mining at the time the book is set. In the 1861 census my great-great grandfather is listed as a collier, as was his son (my great-grandfather) after him, and when I was a child three of the children from that family (born in the 1880s and 1890s) were still alive. The one we saw the most often, my Aunty Peggy, who died in her nineties, was full of stories of her childhood and early life.

I agree with you that Zola includes a huge amount of what seem to be realistic details in relation to the mining industry, and the pit collapse at the end is truly horrifying. But for me there seemed to be a distance between the reader and the individual characters. Sometimes I find that a translation can create this distance (my French is nowhere near good enough to read this in the original) but I think that here perhaps it is the style used that just doesn't appeal to me. I just didn't feel that I really understood any of the characters as individuals. I did want to like it but it just wouldn't work for me.

Hi Nancy, Calm, Mamie, Helen, Morphy! Thanks for dropping by. I'm still coughing but it's (very) gradually getting better: I managed to take Daisy out for a walk today for the first time in weeks.

Hi, Rhian!

The question of whether Zola himself was at a distance from his characters or whether the translation has a distancing effect is an interesting one. I admit I always get a feeling when I'm reading a work in translation that I'm missing something...

Hi Rhian. Glad to know that you're getting better.

Hi Rhian! Are you becoming a Hardy fan?? Or were you one already?

Rhian, I love that painting and I agree that it's a quintessential Victorian canine painting.

Rhian, congrats on your new thread. The picture is fabulous.

Good review of Far from the Madding Crowd - I loved it when I read it some years ago - Jude the Obscure was too much misery for me - but Gabriel Oak was a solid, grounded character I instantly rooted for.

Just stopping by, Rhian. If I read more and checked threads less, I might read 100 in 2014 too.
This way is too much fun! I look forward to seeing what else you read of Victoriana (!) and WWI. I hope to finish the Pat Barker trilogy and read Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest. Then we'll see. And Dickens is calling me again.

Hi Rhian, Happy New Thread! I'm always amazed when I look at detailed portraits of animals, thinking in terms of how it was managed since most animals won't sit still long enough to allow for that sort of fine tuning. Very nice one by the way.

I certainly see why The Garden of Evening Mists was a favourite for you last year. I just finished it a couple of days ago; it's a 5-star read for me and as thus makes the list of favourites for 2014.

#14 Liz, I'm not sure whether it was the translation that was the problem or not here. I've got two weeks work to do on Zola and then have to do a 2000 word essay comparing his version of realism with Hardy's, so I will probably decide once I've done that.

#15 Hi Pat!

#16 Suz, I read a lot of Hardy in my twenties (Tess of the D'Urbevilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Return of the Native and Under the Greenwood Tree) and I pretty much enjoyed them all, if enjoy is the right word, but before reading this one it had been a while since I'd dipped into one.

#17,18 Hi Ellen, Barbara - Landseer did some lovely paintings of dogs and I had trouble deciding which one to pick. Newfoundlands always seem like a nice breed if not altogether practical for most people: I know someone who has got one and it is huge.

#19 Carsten - I do mean to get around to Jude the Obscure one of these days but everyone says exactly the same as you - that is is so miserable!

#20 Peggy, I've got the following books left in my course: Madame Bovary, The Woman in White, A Portrait of a Lady, Dracula, Heart of Darkness and The Awakening. And three more written assessments and then a written exam in June, just to keep me busy!

#21 Ilana, Mr SandDune has picked Tan Twan Eng's first book The Gift of Rain for his book club choice in the autumn so I'm looking forward to seeing what that's like. Personally, I would have voted for The garden of Evening Mists as Booker prize winner over Bring up the Bodies although I loved that one too.

Congratulations on the new thread, Rhian! So glad you're enjoying the Vorkosigan series. The books left in your course actually sound good. I particularly liked The Woman in White and Dracula. Some day I just have to bite the bullet and read Madame Bovary, I guess.

I loved The Garden of Evening Mists, too.

You're in for a treat, Kathy .. I loved Madame Bovary, The Woman in White, A Portrait of a Lady and Dracula. I didn't like The Awakening and I don't think I ever got around to finishing Heart of Darkness.

I loved The Garden of Evening Mists .. I'd have voted for that too over Bring Up the Bodies which I didn't think was as good as Wolf Hall.

That's an impressive reading list. I have a urgh, hmm & fab in that list that I've read. I love the idea of doing a course on or involving literature, but it's finding the time & mental space to commit to something. Hope you're enjoying the course as well as the reading. Sometimes you can over analyse a book or author, I hope it's not ruining any of them for you.

Well I've made it here, to admire the dog paintings and have a quick look at what you've been reading! That whippet on thread one did look very comfortable asleep with owner - and such a familiar shape, but to me how tiny he looked compared to Ty!

I read loads of Hardy in my 20s too, and loved them all. Far from the Madding was the first I read, as I recall. I think Return of the Native is about the only one I never read for some reason, but I now have the audio recording by Alan Rickman, part of my large backlog of audio books waiting to be listened to which I bought with monthly credits until I cancelled my Audible sub recently (I suppose that's the TBL hoard as opposed to the TBR mountain). So perhaps its time to bump that one nearer to the top of the hoard!

#25 Hi Caro, (It's Rhian by the way, not Kathy!) I've read Madame Bovary, Dracula, The Awakening and Heart of Darkness last year in preparation: I will probably have to reread any of the books that I have to do an assessment on. Of the ones I've read I absolutely loved Heart of Darkness but I didn't like The Awakening either.

#26 Helen, I find that studying the books tends to increase my interest level rather than decrease it, so it hasn't put me off anything so far. Out of the authors that we've studied so far, Jane Austen is my absolute favourite and I'm finding that looking at her techniques adds to the enjoyment I get.

Hi Rhian - Nice new thread. You have started off with a productive January!

I reread Heart of Darkness last year or the year before and also really enjoyed it. I'd have to reread Madame Bovary to remember it properly. Hoping to listen to The Portrait of a Lady this year.

Hi Rhian! Happy new (to me!) thread :)

Just passing through, mainly to make sure I don't loose track of you now you're on your SECOND thread for January! I've loved both dog pics so far, and I'm burning with curiosity to see what else you've got lined up for us!

Oops.. Sorry Rhian, you're right... my bad. I was talking to someone in my office named Kathy and must have had her name stuck in my head when I started posting on your thread.

I think of the classics, I'd never get tired of re-reading Jane Austen. She's one of my go-tos whenever I'm in a book funk.

Rhian, Victorian art is my favorite period of art. I enjoy the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, in particular Waterhouse. Thanks for posting the lovely painting by Landseer. I'll be sure to find more of his art.

Have you read the Christopher Wood art book titled Victorian Painting? If not, I highly recommend it.



I hope your day is a good one.

You're really moving along... and I'm impressed by your read / bought ratio.

What a naughty book jacket #34 has!!!!!

I'm impressed too!

#29 Beth, it's starting to slow down now. I certainly won't continue at the rate at which I've started.

#30 Nancy, Heart of Darkness seems to be one of those books that really splits people. Everyone seems to either love it or hate it.

#31 Hi Katie!

#32 Hannah I've been collecting dog pictures on
Pinterest - here is what I've got so far:

http://www.pinterest.com/sanddune1/dogs-in-art/

I may well substitute though if I find ones that I prefer. I really wanted a painting of a staffie, but haven't been able to find a suitable one. Being traditionally very working class dogs, they just don't appear in paintings.

#33 Caro, don't worry - I've done it more than once myself! I can read Jane Austen over and over again, as well.

#34 Linda to be honest I don't really know a lot about Victorian art. My best period is the Italian Renaissance, as I spent nine months in Florence after I finished University. I used to enjoy going to art galleries but that activity went on hold when J was small as he had a very low tolerance for looking at paintings: museums were generally fine, but art galleries were a definite no-no as far as he was concerned. Now that he is old enough to be left on his own I might be able to start this up again. There are such a lot of good exhibitions in London that I would like to go and see.

#35 Katherine, the books read/bought ratio is going to take a bit if a battering I'm afraid as I bought five books on Monday, but I haven't had a chance to list them yet! Four of them were for my course, so I didn't have a choice!

#36 Lucy, it is quite daring for a Victorian painting isn't it?

#27 Sorry Genny, I missed you out. Pictures of dogs and people asleep are very relaxing I think. Daisy would clearly love to sleep on our bed, but Mr SandDune is not keen even on having her in the bedroom, so she hasn't got much chance! I have a 2 credit a month account with audible but as I listen to audio books a lot I usually finish all my books before the new credits appear. At the moment I have three books not listened to, as I wasn't driving much over Christmas and then afterwards when I was ill.

I had an interesting discussion with a librarian in my local library this morning. They had a section marked 'Young Adult' which I had not noticed before and I was finding the selections rather strange: The Passage - OK; Skulduggery Pleasant - well I'd have put that more in the 8-12 year range myself; The Casual Vacancy - haven't read it but I wasn't sure that the subject matter would really appeal; and then Narcopolis: A Novel by Jeet Thayil which rather took me aback. For anyone who hasn't got around to this one it's the 2012 Booker Prize shortlisted novel set in the opium dens of Bombay containing graphic drug-taking, sexual violence and trans-gendered prostitution. Personally, I couldn't think of anything else that I would be less likely to describe as young adult. Here is my review from last year:

http://www.librarything.com/work/11771231/reviews/93049539

So I did query with the librarian what sort of age they were aiming their young adult section at, and he replied that it was for 18-25 year olds. (To be honest I still wouldn't have included Narcopolis in that category as I think the likelihood of finding any 18-25 year olds who would get to the end of it would not be great). So I said I wasn't sure that the 18-25 age range was what most people thought of when they thought of young adult books, and that I would have said maybe 13 or 14 to 18 (although I've certainly seen books aimed at a younger market being described as 'young adult'). The librarian's view seemed to be that if that were so, the rest of the world was wrong and the library was right, but it did seem to me that including the book in young adult was misleading about its content.

I don't agree with censorship, and I'm happy for books for teenagers to include sex, and drugs, and rock and roll or whatever, but I think a lot of adults would find Narcopolis heavy going. It certainly wouldn't be a book that I would hold out to a fourteen year old and say: this is what you should be reading. Teenagers are able to borrow books from the adult library, so there's nothing to stop them from borrowing the book anyway, but I did find the idea that it was particularly suitable for a young adult audience bizarre.

What do other people think?

Wow. Yes, that IS weird. The designations in publishing are approximately as such:

Middle Grade = 9-12 years old
Young Adult = 13-17 years old
New Adult = 18-25 years old (though this category is new and flexible)

I would never, ever, EVER put The Casual Vacancy under YA, because it's not YA. The librarian is obviously not paying any attention to the subject matter or publication information for the books they're shelving there.

It's strange that the library would ignore this. I'm also all for teens reading books from any section, but many readers know what they're looking for in terms of content in these categories, and it's not helpful to patrons to change the way things are done in these categories, well, across the world.

What a fascinating discussion, but what in the world is "New Adult"?

I first heard about "New Adult" last year, I think it was on "The Readers" podcast and, as Faith said, refers to the 18-25 age group. I haven't seen it used much in the US though. Rhian, it does seem like your library is targeting New Adult more than Young Adult with those selections.

#41 it's not helpful to patrons to change the way things are done in these categories, well, across the world
Faith, I definitely agree with that - to me 'young adult' is a fairly clear concept, and a quick google of the term showed that my understanding is fairly general. 'Young adult' books are largely those which are specifically written for a teenage audience, featuring topics which are going to be interesting for teenagers and while they can feature more controversial topics, they generally deal with them in a less explicit and more sensitive way than might be the case in an adult book. Or they can be books written for a general audience which has appeal to that age group.

It does seem as if the library is confusing the more established category of 'young adult' with 'new adult', but even then the choice of books seems very strange and inconsistent. I wouldn't have thought that Narcopolis or The Casual Vacancy qualified particularly as 'new adult' either. I noticed some other oddities as well but I can't remember the exact examples now.

#42,43 Becky, Laura - I hadn't heard of 'new adult' before but having googled it it seems to be fiction aimed particularly at 18-30 year olds.

I'll have to take a closer look at the YA section in our public library. I've browsed it some, and from what I saw on those occasions, it was aiming at 13-17. I've never thought of YA as 18-25! New adult, I can see that, but then make the distinction clear ...

That does seem to be a very odd shelving decision - and by being quite different to everywhere else there's surely a risk of people ending up with inappropriate material, or, at the very least, material they weren't expecting.

11. Germinal Emile Zola ***1/2
I read this now because: it's required reading for my OU module 'The Nineteenth Century Novel'

I'm struggling to know how to rate this novel. One the one hand I didn't feel that I got to grips with the characters as I have done with the two preceding novels on my OU course, Middlemarch and Far from the Madding Crowd and because of this I didn't enjoy it as much. On the other hand the last third or so of the book is very powerful. So I've plumped for three and a half stars, with the fact that I can appreciate the quality of the book in reading its rating over what my enjoyment level would warrant.

Etienne Lantier arrives at night at the coal mine of Le Veroux in Northern France. Despite being an engineer by training he is desperate enough to take any job and when an opening at the pit presents itself he jumps at the chance. Taken under the wing of Mareu, an experienced miner, Etienne's initial plan to stay only a day extends into weeks and then months, as he is sucked into the life of Village Two Hundred and Forty where Maheu's family live. And through Maheu's family Etienne (and the reader) learns the grinding poverty that is the miner's lot. Despite Maheu being accompanied underground everyday by his eldest daughter Catherine (15) and his son Zacharie (19), and even with his younger son Jeanlin (10) and his father Bonnemort also working above ground, with four younger children at home the family earns scarcely enough to keep themselves from starvation. So when a new price structure is announced by the company which will effectively mean a pay cut for the miners, the more educated Etienne encourages them to strike until pay is increased. But as times get more and more desperate Etienne discovers that he has unleashed a force that he cannot control ...

This is a bleak and uncompromising book, which unlike the books being written in Britain at the same period (it was published in 1885) does not resort to euphemisms when trying to make unpalatable facts clear to its readers. Apparently, Zola's first publisher in Britain was twice convicted under the Obscene Publications Act for attempting to publish his novels, which until 1933, were only available in the UK in highly expurgated versions. So the realities of life for a family of ten living in a one-bedroomed house are therefore not glossed over, nor are the realities of life in the mine where half-naked women and children toil alongside the men underground.

This is a very powerful book, albeit one which didn't quite work for me. This seems to be a minority opinion though, judging by the comments on the review page, so it's a book I would recommend people to try for themselves. Just don't expect a cheery ride.

#45,46 Hi, Nancy, Helen, YA being around 13-17 seems a generally held opinion everywhere other than my local library. All I can say is that anyone who picks up Narcopolis: the Novel excepting The Hunger Games or Divergent or something like that is going to be in for a bit of a shock.

New Adult is not a genre I have heard of! I find it a bit odd, actually. I would just call it fiction/non-fiction.

I sometimes have a look at the YA section at the library, but only because it is near the kids section where I am forced to stay because of watching my kids. I often see really good looking titles in YA and feel I do myself a disservice in not looking there more often!

Interesting discussion on Young Adult / New Adult. That librarian clearly has no idea about what is appropriate to that label or who fits under it. Very very odd choices of titles indeed. I haven't read either Narcopolis or The Casual Vacancy, though I've read enough reviews to know they clearly are NOT novels I would recommend for teenagers.

Loved your review of Germinal. I think we might have read that one in high school. I know we covered at least two, if not three Zola novels in French class, though my memory is so wretched that I'll never know for sure which they were. I didn't enjoy them all that much then, but growing up came to enjoy Nana quite a lot. I started out with the intention of reading the entire Rougon-Macquart series in publication order a couple of years ago, and was rolling right along but then dropped off after L'Assommoir, which I thought was brilliant, if of course incredibly bleak. I've got Nana waiting for a third reread among the tbr and hope to get to it within the next month or two so I can pursue this project. It'll be interesting to reread it now that I have all the context and background in order.

I'm very much enjoying the age group category discussion - I've been wondering just exactly what constitutes YA...

I think that library is going to have some pissed off parents!

7,8, and 9 are on my list. Where do you go to school, Rhian?

#49 Megan I hadn't heard of 'new adult' either before yesterday, and I don't really see the point of it either to be honest. Surely by the time someone is in their twenties their reading will be governed by whatever it is that they find interesting, rather than by their age, it's not as if there is any need to censor content for people that age. I can see that people in their early twenties might not feel that they have anything in common with families with young children, or divorced forty year olds, or retirees, but surely we shouldn't have to read about people that are like us all the time? Will there be a specific genre of books for people in their thirties and forties next?

#50 Thanks Ilana, I wish my French was good enough to read Zola in the original but that isn't likely to happen! I think I will try some more Zola at some time, as this is the only one I've ever read. I noticed today that Germinal was on the Daily Telegraph's list of the fifteen most depressing books (along with such cheerful tales as The Road and Jude the Obscure and I can see why. Here's the list:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10563431/Top-15-most-depressing-books.h...

#51 Amber, you'll probably have 'young adult' fiction coming up sooner than you expect: I have seen books that I would have considered suitable for 8 or 9 year olds described as YA before now. Although there does seem to be consensus on the 13-18 bracket everywhere except my library.

#52 Morphy I think you're definitely right. I'm fairly relaxed about this sort of thing and even I would have a shock if J turned up with Narcopolis. And a lot of parents are much more fussy than I am.

#53 Tamara, I am studying with the Open University which is a distance learning university in the UK. They provide all the study materials (which are very good) and we have monthly face to face tutorials with our tutor, who also provides support in between if necessary. I'm aiming for a BA in English Literature and so far have done the following modules : The arts past and present', 'Approaching Literature', 'Children's Literature' and now 'The Nineteenth Century Novel'. I need two more modules after this one to complete the degree and I will probably do 'Twentieth century literature' and 'Worlds of English'. Overall if you do one module a year if takes six years to get the degree qualification.

I think that this strange way of shelving is why I really don't like the term YA or New Adult. I've read YAs that I couldn't for the life of me see why they were labeled that way, and I totally agree with what you said, Rhian, in #54, I don't see the point in a New Adult label.

#56 Judy I'm not particularly fond of the way books for children and teenagers are graded, either. If a young person doesn't fit into an 'average' reader mould, then it makes it more difficult to know what they can read. I found it quite difficult at times when J was a bit younger, as his reading level and understanding were such that he wanted something a bit more demanding than was provided for his age group, but he wasn't ready for the more mature themes that the books aimed at the teenage marked dealt with. He now seems to be reading more adult books, and I find more and more that we're comparing notes having read the same book which is really nice.

I see that in my grandson, Rhian. He is 14 and reads pretty much what would be considered adult books, but I am loving that he often choses books that I have read and we get to discuss them. I think he is doing an excellent job of hunting down books that suit him, and I think that is an important part of one's reading process, learning how to choose books for yourself from the shelf.

We had our RL book group Christmas dinner on Tuesday - I know 22nd January is a bit late for a Christmas dinner but there you go. In the Secret Santa I received The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier which I've been wanting to read, and Mr SandDune got Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver. I thought that we had the last one already but on closer inspection I was mixing it up with Prodigal Summer. But unfortunately Mr SandDune, who was supposed to be calling into the bookshop to buy our Secret Santas on the way home from work, forgot: we had to raid the unread books on the shelves and so Ghana Must Go, which I bought a couple of weeks ago, has now gone!

Hi Rhian - Late Christmas is nice. I loved Flight Behavior. I also enjoyed The Last Runaway. Funny story -- will Ghana have to come back to your house?

Rhian, I'm going to have to get back and try Hardy again. I read some of his even before I was officially YA (an example of guidelines being suggestions rather than edicts.)

YA is to me so clearly a market for teenagers -- just look at the books explicitly marketed for that niche! -- that I'm at a loss to see why anyone would label a book they think a 20-year old or 23-year-old would read as part of that category. While I wouldn't stop a teenager from reading either The Casual Vacancy or Narcopolis, I think the idea of the latter, in particular, as being a YA novel is deeply bizarre. The former, at least, features a handful of main characters who fit into the YA demographic. I'm not a prude when it comes to reading, but Narcopolis certainly was more than I personally relish, even in the name of "literature verite" (sorry, can't do the accent aigu on this keyboard...)

My next book for the RL book circle is The Awakening. After several of the comments here, I'm ambivalent. That said, it's short, and I've never read it, so why not?!

I also have yet to read Tan Twan Eng's debut novel. I would have had a VERY tough time choosing btwn his second novel and Bring Up the Bodies although for sheer prowess with language and themes, I probably would give the edge to Mantel. In part, perhaps, because she's been at it that much longer.

#61 While I wouldn't stop a teenager from reading either The Casual Vacancy or Narcopolis, I think the idea of the latter, in particular, as being a YA novel is deeply bizarre

Suz those are my thoughts exactly! I do wonder if the librarian who selected those books had any idea at all of their contents, and it certainly shows a worrying lack of understanding of current publishing for the teenage market. I'm going to have another look next time I'm in there to see what other odd choices have been made. I wonder if we have a librarian along the lines of my SIL, who worked for the schools library service and was in charge of choosing books to send out to local schools. We once had a conversation where she told me that she hadn't finished a book since leaving school herself (she was in her mid thirties at the time). I mean if you don't want to read books then fine, but why on earth would you get a job as a librarian if you don't like books? I remember standing there with my mouth open! I found Narcopolis at the edge of my tolerance levels as well: I probably would never have picked it up if it hasn't been on the Booker prize short list.

The blurb on the cover of my copy of The Awakening refers to the main character's 'passionate quest for spiritual, sexual and artistic freedom'. Personally, I didn't find that she had a passionate quest towards anything very much at all, and was pretty dull to be honest, very much a spoilt little rich girl. I'll be interested to see what you think.

One of the reasons that I preferred The Garden of Evening Mists over Bring up the Bodies was that it dealt with a subject which was completely unfamiliar to me whereas the story of Anne Boleyn is just a little bit too familiar.

#60 Beth Ghana must go will certainly come back at some stage, but I've bought quite a few books over the last few days so it will have to wait.

#58 Judy at the moment I am sharing quite a lot of books with J as he is getting his adult books from my shelves. Currently he's reading Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore which I've just finished, and over the last couple of months he's read Inverted World by Christopher Priest, Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, and Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse by Jared Diamond. All books that I've enjoyed so it's been great to discuss them.

I love seeing the reader developing in my grandson, it makes me smile, I guess it's a little like passing on the baton to another generation.

Hi Rhian! Wow, you're certainly getting through those books quickly considering how many heavy ones you've read so far this year.

Happy weekend!

Horrible afternoon here today. We took Daisy out for a walk: the sun was shining when we left home but on the most exposed part of the walk we got caught in a torrential downpour, with thunder and lightening and hail, the works. Both me and Mr SandDune were soaked to the skin, and Daisy was completely miserable. When it started hailing (quite hard) she was clearly frightened, as well as it probably being very painful (it was quite painful for us even through our clothes), and she was torn between refusing to move and wanting to bolt. Mr SandDune tried to pick her up at one point but she wasn't having any of that either. And all the hailstones went down my boots and formed a little pool - ugh!

There is so much water just standing around at the moment. It seems to have rained and rained and rained for months.

#64 Judy it's nice isn't it? Despite all the doom and gloom of young people not reading any more there still seems to be quite a few keen readers about.

#65 Rachel I've slowed down now! It was just at the beginning of the month I was getting through a book a day sometimes as I really wasn't up to doing anything else but read.

Rhian, first of all, my commiseration on your most unlovely walk today. Getting caught in the rain is bad enough, but hail… I have gotten soaked but never pelted with hail. Yikes. I hope the rest of the week end is dry and cozy for you, your husband, and Daisy.

I enjoyed the YA discussion and was also surprised at that age range in the 20s. I have not heard of the "New Adult" term. I did try to read Narcopolis last year but got disgusted with the heroin dens. I saw that they would go on and on so I gladly gave it up. I don't quit many books but this one was beginning to make me feel dirty!

I got a chuckle out of the Ghana Must Go story. I do hope you get a chance to read it soon. I liked it.
Congratulations on your second thread. I will try to keep up better here. LT has been a busy place this month!

Rhian, what a terrible walk. I hope you won't have caught a cold.
I wish you a dry sunday

#68 Donna, we discovered that hail is surprisingly painful. Poor Daisy was very unhappy - as far as she was concerned the sky had just started throwing things at her and she didn't like it one little bit! I remember being in the car in a hailstorm once in the west of Ireland when an extremely heavy hailstorm hit us. It was so heavy we couldn't drive and so we had to stop and wait it out. We were convinced that our (new) car would be covered with little dents when it stopped, it seemed so heavy, but it was fine.

If I hadn't been absolutely determined to finish the booker prize short list last year I would have given up with Narcopolis too. It was very much out of my comforts zone, and it wasn't a book that I would have picked up at all in the normal course of events.

A 12 foot high wall of foam slowly takes over the river down the road this morning. Rumour has it it is soap: it looked liked the most gigantic bubble bath ever.

OMG your place had a lot to endure today. was this before or after the big rain?

Barbara, the foam incident was this morning before the heavy rain. I was going to my Open University Tutorial and when I came near to the river I saw foam blowing about in the bushes and trees, so I looked over towards the river and there really was what looked like a wall of foam coming towards the bridge. I didn't have time to stop and look properly but Mr SandDune took the photos later in the morning. You can see how thick the foam is in the first picture: the wooden pedestrian bridge in the first picture is well above the water level, and the foam is well above that.

The local newspaper's website is quoting the Environment Agency as saying that it is a leakage of soap from a bulk container which was then washed into the river by heavy rain, and then foamed up at the weir just above where this picture is taken. Our local paper is not known for missing a chance for a good headline: according to them the wall of foam was like 'a Stephen King horror story'. Hmmm - not sure about that one.

Rhian, that sounds really bad, I mean especially for the environment. It will take a long time before all this mess will be out of the ecosystem. Even though the pictures looks like from a fairy tale, the reality is shocking.

the wall of foam was like 'a Stephen King horror story I'm pretty sure King would find that pretty tame material. I'm sorry you've had such a frightful day but being pelted by hail has got to be the worst Rhian. Poor Daisy!

Interesting that your librarian thinks the rest of the world is wrong about the YA label. We are fortunate to have a very knowledgeable and approachable librarian but in the next town they have a librarian who believes it's his way or the highway and has alienated so many people that they have lost patrons. As an example, he decides which books their book club will read and he'll not listen to any suggestions from the patrons.

I knew there was a reason I never read Narcopolis and your description solidified it. I often opt for the dark side but there's a limit to what I'll tolerate. Above all I want to be entertained.

Good grief, you've had quite a day between hail and a roaring bubble bath! The same soapy thing happens to the fountain in our city park at least once every summer.

I'm with Bonnie re my purpose for reading: Above all I want to be entertained. Pass on Narcopolis, too, although I understand perfectly your determination to finish it -- I've done the same with others.

Oh, poor Daisy! I hope she has recuperated, perhaps with a comforting treat. The bubble bath is freaky.

Poor wee Daisy with her short hair coat! That must have stung awfully. What a day you had between the hail and the foaming river. I haven't read Narcopolis so can't add anything intelligent to the conversation but am bemused by the designation "new adult". As an old adult, or at least one who has been practising at it for a while, I am hoping like fury that I will continue to be able to read whatever I choose and don't get shunted off to the large print section with its extremely limited selection.

#74 Barbara, this morning the Environment Agency is saying that it was a spillage of a foaming agent of the sort that goes into bubble baths and shampoo (that's exactly what it looked like - a huge bubble bath) and that although it looked dramatic there have been no reports of dead fish and the oxygen levels in the river are sufficient to allow the fish to survive. So hopefully the effect on the river will be minimal once the foam goes away.

#75 Bonnie, the local newspaper is frequently very short of any interesting or dramatic news and likes to make things sound as exciting as they can!

#76 Nancy, I've seen the odd bit of foam in a river before but nothing like this. I think what made it more dramatic was that the weir was churning all the water up to make the foam but the bridge just below the weir was stopping the foam going downstream, and on the other side of the river there are lock gates which were stopping it getting through that way as well. So the foam was just getting higher and higher rather than floating away downstream.

#77 Katherine, she spent the rest of the afternoon on the sofa once she'd dried off so I think she recovered. She hasn't managed to have her walk this morning either as it is raining again and I really don't want to get wet twice in two days, but J has been playing hide and seek with her which gives her an excuse to charge around the house and get rid of some excess energy. His football match was cancelled at the last minute this morning for the third time in four weeks because of a waterlogged pitch: given the amount of rain we've been having I'm surprised that they even considered having it.

#78 Tui, that is one of the great thing about ebooks: you can have the print size whatever size you like so you can avoid the horror that is the large print section!

It must be one of the advantages of very small dogs, that you can pick them up and carry them in that situation. Mr SandDune tried to pick Daisy up as she was just refusing to move at one point, but she is too heavy to be carried if she's not cooperating which she was most definitely not doing yesterday. Her instinct was to run in the opposite direction from where the hail was coming from and when we wouldn't let her do that (it was exactly the wrong direction to get any shelter) she just refused to move at all and tried to hide behind Mr SandDune.

What a fascinating thread! I love the book categories discussion.

>47 SandDune:. I'm very interested to read your take on Zola's Germinal, a book that's been on my TBR shelf forever. Do you plan to read anything else by him? I also have Therese Raquin, one of his earlier novels, which the back-of-the-book blurb says is a "sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in the nineteenth-century." That's a much shorter book, but I don't know how representative an introduction it would be to Zola's work.

Have you read La Terre? I think it's something of a companion novel to Germinal, in that it depicts the rural working class, where Germinal gives a picture of the industrial working class.

I think I might be interested in reading the whole series, his Rougon-Macquart novels (I think there are 20 or so that make up the series). That would be quite a project, but maybe reading 1 or so a month, it would be do-able.

Poor Daisy, although dogs have such amazing recuperative abilities--mainly just sleeping it off, and then they're good to go again.

Happy Sunday to you!

Wow, Attack of the Foam & Hail! I hope things have calmed down a bit for you now...

#80 Becky I discovered in my tutorial on Saturday the reason that I hadn't warmed to Germinal as I'd expected. Apparently Zola's view was that in writing a realist novel an author should act like a dispassionate observer. So Zola's not interested in providing any psychological insights into his characters' motivations: in his view the characters are shaped by the external events that they go through rather than their own internal motivations. All of which explains why I so much an onlooker when I was reading Germinal, rather than involved wholeheartedly in the characters' lives. Now that I know more of what Zola was trying to achieve, I think perhaps that I can appreciate Germinal more: I was expecting it to be something that it's not. Germinal is the only Zola novel that I've read: I haven't read a lot of nineteenth century French novelists at all.

#82 Amber, I haven't ventured out at all today. It's been raining pretty solidly since 10am so I've stayed in the warm and dry.

As it's been so wet today we've been planning our family holiday. We had been intending to go to the Baltic States but Mr SandDune had second thoughts and wanted to go to Denmark instead, brought on mainly by a diet of Danish TV over the last few months (Borgen & The Bridge). And as J and me had our choice of holiday destination last year, Denmark it is!

My original thought was to get the ferry from Harwich (on the east coast of England) to Denmark so that we could take our car. But that idea took a serious battering when I discovered that the price of the ferry crossing on the dates we wanted was going to be around £1,000. Add on around another £300 for obligatory dinner and breakfast (£34 per person for a two course meal for dinner), and we have a total bill of around £1,300 which seems extortionate. So now we are flying to Copenhagen from the local airport for £229 return for the three of us, and another £250 or so for car hire, and it works out at less than half the price of the ferry. And as it's the (very) local airport we have no car parking fees and no overnight hotel costs.

Some new books to report. All the reading of classics over the last few weeks and months has made me want to revisit some of the authors that I've been reading. I had a nearly complete set of Thomas Hardy's Wessex novel but was missing Under the Greenwood Tree so I've picked that up second hand. And I also own some Folio Society Trollopes but not any of the Barsetshire Chronicles books, which I've been listening to on audiobook. So I decided I'd liked Folio editions of those as well: I'm particularly pleased with that buy as I got the first three Barsetshire novels as new in their slip cases for £20 which I thought was pretty good.

And I also had to buy the next lot of novels for my course: Dracula, The Portrait of a Lady, The Woman in White Madame Bovary. I've already got cheap kindle editions or audiobooks of all those but I needed the correct editions for my assessments.

Getting caught up here after a couple of weeks off the LT grid - Weird foam, crazy hail storm and unusual book category shelving in the library - interesting times over here on your thread, Rhian!

Wow on the ferry price! Living on Vancouver Island, I cringe every time we see rates increase but 1,300 British pounds is Ouch City! Just how long is the ferry trip, 12-16 hours? With those kinds of prices, I would fly and rent a car, too!

#82: As I have Germinal on my TBR shelves, I appreciate you sharing this insight. It may help me when I get around to reading it.

Hi Rhian! The images of the foam in the river are amazing. Soap? That can't be a good thing. Poor fishes and ducks and things..... And poor Daisy for getting pelted by hail! Sheesh.

Oh, and I was underwhelmed by Narcopolis.

Outrageous ferry prices! But Denmark sounds like a fabulous destination, Rhian. I'd love to see that country. (eta: Borgen and the Bridge sounds like TV I would enjoy; but alas our Netflix does not have it).

Love that you're re-visiting so many classic authors. The Portrait of a Lady has been on my radar, too, for some time. Think I'm going to listen to it.

#85 Lori The ferry is 18 hours overnight, so quite long, but I've travelled on long-distance ferries quite a bit (including this route back in 2005) and it was way more than I was expecting. There were a lot of comments on Trip Advisor about the high price of the route, and in particular the prices for cabins (which are obligatory) seem very high. And the comments were also saying that the food at £34 a head is poor, drinks are extortionately priced and there are far less facilities than are found in other comparable longer route ferries. This is the only ferry to Denmark so there is no competition and they seem to be marketing it as a freight route rather than a holiday route.

#86 Ellen, when I actually get around to reading the chapters on Germinal in my course text book then I may have some more insights, who knows! I have a friend who did English Literature at university and the experience seems to have put her off reading for life but I'm finding exactly the opposite: the more I understand about what I'm reading the more I get out of it and the more I want to read.

#87 Nancy, if either Borgen or The Bridge do come your way then snap them up as they are both very good, but of the two I would have to vote for Borgen, which is about Danish politics. But whoever knew that Danish politics was so fascinating! We've just finished watching the third and final series of Borgen and we're watching series two of The Bridge now, which is more of a Scandicrime thing but with great characters. We were booking a holiday home yesterday for the middle week if our trip and they all do look like the ones that we've been watching on TV. There's a definite Danish feel to them: very minimalist with huge windows and lots of light.

What a lot I've missed the last few days! Hail is dreadful indeed - we usually have several hail storms in the summer, just as the weather shifts from hot hot hot to cooler in August. And the attack of the foam!!! The good thing, I expect, is that it foamed up helping the soap gases (or whatever they are) to evaporate into the air partially, not stick around in the water. Still, what a sight. At first I thought maybe you'd had some colossal disaster with your washing machine and had a photo of your deck -- what was I thinking?

NEW Adult???? Are you kidding me??? Young Adult is bad enough. I can't stand all this categorizing. And so what does that make me OLD Adult, soon to be ANCIENT Adult???? Are they going to section of the library by age groups??? I think it keeps the precocious readers out of moving on into adult fiction at 12-13 as they ought to, as I did. That librarian is stuck on 'the latest bandwagon' syndrome, I'm afraid, not able to think things through.

Okay I'm foaming at the mouth now!!!!!

Oh, I envy your trip to Denmark.

#90 At first I thought maybe you'd had some colossal disaster with your washing machine
Lucy it would have had to have been a very colossal disaster with the washing machine! The amount of foam that was in the river would have filled every room in our house and still spilled out the door!

I think I would be OLD Adult as well - this classification of what people should read by age just seems a bit silly. And I don't think our librarian was so much jumping on the bandwagon as getting her bandwagons completely mixed up. I think that maybe she'd seen something about this new 'new adult' genre but got confused with the old 'young adult' genre.

We've booked our flights and our holiday house now.
We fly to Copenhagen, spend four nights there, then hire a car and drive to North Jutland where we've rented a house for a week, then back down south to an as yet undecided location for three nights and back home. I've not visited Denmark before, only driven across it in 2005 when we took the ferry to Denmark and then drove to Sweden. So I'm looking forward to it.

This is the house we've booked:

http://www.dancenter.co.uk/denmark/rental/northern-jutland/the-skagen-area/lodsk...

What is a technique room?

#92 Morphy I hadn't noticed that - I haven't the faintest idea what a technique room is! I suppose we will find out when we get there. It only seems to be accessible from outside so maybe it's a room for keeping tools or bikes or something? It's not a sauna as they were shown separately, and our house doesn't have one although an awful lot of them did. The big advertising point with all the houses that we looked at seemed to be that they have a whirlpool bath: I've never quite seen the attraction of whirlpool baths myself but they seem to be a big thing in Denmark.

Edited to add: maybe it's where they keep the boiler or heating system?

Wonderful vacation home, Rhian!

>71 SandDune:: Good grief!

Quickly catching up. Growing up, there wasn't any Young Adult. Really, New Adult seems redundant.

#94 Nancy I hope so. Although Denmark has a reputation as an expensive country the price of the houses seems cheaper than you would pay in the UK which is good. We need to sort out our hotels in Copehagen and elsewhere and car hire and then we will be done.

That looks like a perfect spot to chill out, Rhian. I would very much like to see Denmark one day too.

#95, 97 Hi Nina. yes I think I agree with you on that one. Although speaking of what teenagers read when they first start reading adult books, if anyone has any good suggestions for J they would be very useful. He's just coming up to 14 (9 Feb) and for the last six months he's probably read more books aimed at adults than not. He likes fantasy and science fiction in particular but he's ready for something more complex than is generally offered by the 'young adult' genre. He needs to find himself a whole new list of authors that he likes in the adult world, which takes a little time.

#97 Tui, Copenhagen has been on the list of places that I really want to go to for some time. And the north of Denmark has lots of sand dunes which are always a hit with me! And for once, we can fly from our local airport, which is only about eight miles down the road but we always seem to end up traipsing to Heathrow or Gatwick which are on the other side of London.

Rhian, do you think he'd like The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson? It's about some Vikings who go on multiple journeys having grand adventures and plundering Europe and England. It has a comic element so it tones down the violence and I don't remember it as having a lot of (or any) explicit sex scenes. It might be fun for him to read since some of it takes place in North Jutland.

>89 SandDune:: Rhian, I have friends who have talked about being English Lit majors and how it "ruined" reading for them. This makes no sense to me. I mean, I guess it might be harder to just lose oneself in a trashy mystery novel, but the more I learn (and LT has played a big part in that), the more I enjoy reading! I have always loved reading but I feel like I'm "getting more out of it."

I worked at an ice cream shop for a summer and that didn't ruin ice cream for me, either, although friends warned me that it might.

Happy vacation! The home looks lovely!

#100 Pat The Long Ships is a great idea, and it has the advantage that it's on my wish list so if he doesn't like it I can read it! J's never been brilliant at finding new books if they are not part of a series that he's already read, and at the same time he can be resistant to trying new books, so I try to provide him with quite a wide range of suggestions of what he might like. It's frustrating sometimes as there are books I'm almost certain he'd like but because of way the front cover looks or something in the blurb he takes against it and does not want to try. He resisted the Percy Jackson books a few years ago for about eighteen months until he succumbed and of course discovered that he loved it.

He's just started 1984: we're talking about having a family book club and each picking a book in turn. Whether it will come off or not I don't know but 1984 was my suggestion as a book to start with.

#100 I have friends who have talked about being English Lit majors and how it "ruined" reading for them. This makes no sense to me.

Ellen, the only explanation I've thought of was that their interest in books was quite mild to start with and was easily killed off by an excess of books to read!

#101 Linda, well it's going to be quite a while till July, but we might try and have a few days away at Easter.

We have finally made some progress on getting the bathroom floor fixed. We had some more people arrive yesterday and they have moved the bathroom fittings, taken up all the floor tiles and laid new boards. Then the electrician is coming today to redo the underfloor heating, the tiler is coming tomorrow to lay the tiles and the first lot of people are coming back on Friday to put the fittings back. At the moment the toilet is in the shower and the sink unit is in the spare bedroom. The irritating thing was that apparently the toilet is not connected to the mains at all but to the water tank in the loft, so the people who came the week before last and said they couldn't do anything because they couldn't turn the mains water off were talking rubbish. Apparently you don't have to turn the mains water off, just turn off the outlet from the water tank. And that is the normal way of doing things, apparently.

Anyway, at least it feels like we are making progress. And they have removed all the floor tiles without damaging the wall tiles at all which I was a bit worried about so that is good. It will be nice to have the underfloor heating working again as the only other heating in the bathroom is from the towel rail and it has been a bit chilly at times over the winter.

Update on bathroom - the electrician has now been here four hours. Apparently the wrong size of underfloor heating mat has been ordered and it is causing complications. Sigh ...

Sorry to hear that, Rhian :-(

>104 SandDune: Bummer.
I love the idea of underfloor heating in the bathroom. I hope they can figure it out and make it work. And soon!

Hi Rhian! Just chipping in to say I loved the list of depressing novels. It helped confirm that I was right to steer clear of The Road. I love post-apocalyptic as a genre, but that one just sounded too grim. I'm with them on Jude the Obscure, that was bleak as heck, but I enjoyed We Need to Talk About Kevin, despite its very difficult subject matter.
I'm wracking my brain, trying to think about what books I read as I transitioned into adult reading (which I did at about the age J is now - I didn't hang around going for any of that YA stuff, really). Hmm. If he likes books with animal protagonists, the Duncton Wood books by William Horwood were favourites of mine at his age. The later ones in particular have some quite heavy, adult themes (war, religious persecution and the like), but with moles as the main protagonists, so it's all one step removed from being too terrifying. I should be some help with SF, but I'm drawing a bit of a blank. I'll get back to you on that one...

#105, 106 Hi Diana, Ellen. Well the underfloor heating is fitted and works, but we can't switch it on for eight days after the tiles have been laid to allow everything to dry. And we can't switch it on at all until we get a new fuse fitting, which is apparently a legal requirement now, but nobody told the electrician there wasn't one already so he's going to have to come back to fit it, although it sounds a very quick job. Underfloor heating is very nice: we have it in the hall and kitchen and it does mean you can walk around on the tiles barefoot without your feet getting frostbite.

#107 Hannah, when I was a teenager I was starting to read a lot of classics which don't appeal to J at all. And I did read some sci-fi, but I haven't read much between then and the last couple of years so I haven't got a huge backlist of things I can recommend. I've seen those Duncton Wood books but I've never read one.

Rhian, finally getting round to wish you a happy 2014!

I hope the bathroom floor and underfloor heating gets sorted soon.

Rhian, checking in. Poor Daisy! And that foam is weird. I've heard of foam issues in rivers and lakes with certain kinds of fish/frog etc, but a soap spill? Yikes!

Re: New Adult discussion- to me it is just a cash cow for publishing industries. .or maybe a dumbing down in a way of transitioning to "adult" material. (Don't get me wrong though, I love a trashy or short fun novel just like the rest of us). Does seem redundant. In college etc I would check out YA and no one thought it was weird or anything. Even now, of course.

mmm, underfloor heating. That sounds well worth 4 hours of fitting. At least it's done. Even if I'm not sure I;d have the willpower not to turn it on for 8 days!

I wonder if part of studying that puts people off is that it's not just reading, its the dissecting of the book, the poring over every word to extract the meaning. That seems to me to be the antitheses of reading for enjoyment.

#110 Hi Heather. The floor tiling is done. All we need is for the men to come back tomorrow, put back the toilet and basin, and put the door back on its hinges and we will be done. It's only taken five months.

#111 Tamara, I like YA novels as much as the next person, but 'new adult'? Just weird.

#112 Helen I think it took him nearer five hours in the end and it shouldn't have taken anything like that long from what I can gather. The underfloor heating comes in a sort of mesh that has the electric wires flowing through it: the idea in simple terms seems to be that you just unroll it and then connect the ends to the electricity. But apparently the guy who came to survey the room didn't measure it for the underfloor heating precisely enough and there was too much mesh or it was the wrong shape or something. So the electrician had to take the wires out of the mesh and lay them on the floor individually: they have to cover the entire floor but they can't be nearer than 5cm to each other at any point or you get not spots. He didn't seem very happy about his boss who had done the measuring!

I actually enjoy the 'poring over a book' part! There are books that you can get such a lot out of by doing that, but others you just want to read and enjoy the story. With my friend it seems that she's lost the ability to do one without the other.

Reminder to self: boy waving cricket bat about and dog in the same room is not a good idea! J has just managed to bash Daisy with his cricket bat while waiting for Mr SandDune to take him to net practice. I think she was more shocked than hurt (and to be fair to him I think she rather ran into it) but she is giving the cricket bat a wide berth.

>114 SandDune:: ...she is giving the cricket bat a wide berth."

Poor Daisy. She perhaps didn't need another misadventure this week.
But at least she can do one-trial learning. :-|

Your Danish holiday plans sound wonderful, Rhian!

#115 Hi Ellen. She doesn't seem to be suffering any side effects this morning - luckily he was only swinging it half-heartedly! We had quite an embarassing lunch with friends once where both boys were playing cricket and J managed to swipe their son above the eye with his cricket bat in a fairly dramatic fashion: there was quite a lot of blood and a couple of stitches were needed. Luckily our friends realised it was a complete accident, and once J's friend had got over the initial shock he seemed quite pleased at a fairly impressive black eye to show off at school!

#116 Hi Roni - I'm hoping so. I think the deciding factor will probably be the weather: it can probably be quite variable just like here. But being as we had plenty of heat last summer we're all willing to risk it!

Rhian -I loved your link to the 15 most depressing novels. Read and enjoyed quite a number of them too.

One of the wonderful parts of parenthood is to see the nascent adult appearing from the child and being able to see in that appearance plenty of things you find attractive and praise worthy. A love for good books is a great start. J will do great.

Bathroom is finished! I'm very pleased about this, although it still seems slightly unbelievable that to redo the floor of one small bathroom has taken four different tradesmen on four different days'

12. Death Comes For the Archbishop Willa Cather ***1/2
I read this now because: January author for the American Author Challenge.



Let me start off by saying that this is a good book, probably a very good book. But it doesn't speak to me as personally as it clearly speaks to others. There are parts of it that I love and parts of it that I definitely do not love. Overall, I'm glad I've read it but having read both this and My Antonia in the last few months I have come to the conclusion that Willa Cather will never be one of my favourite writers, as she is for many people.

Based on the true story of Archbishop Lamy, the first Archbishop of New Mexico, Death Comes to the Archbishop tells the story of Father Jean Marie Latour, from his appointment in 1850 as Vicar Apostolic of New Mexico, a time when that territory was newly annexed to the United States, to his death as the retired Archbishop many years later. With no overriding plot to speak of the book consists of a series of vignettes of Father Latour's life and more that anything presents a moving picture of his friendship with his fellow Frenchman who has accompanied him throughout his missionary work, Father Joseph Vaillant.

The strength of this book for me lies in the way that Cather paints the landscape of New Mexico. Her descriptions are at times extremely evocative and almost poetic:

From the flat red sea of sand rose great rock mesas, generally Gothic in outline, resembling vast cathedrals. They were not crowded together in disorder, but placed in wide spaces, long vistas between. This plain might once have been an enormous city, all the smaller quarters destroyed by time, only the public buildings left - piles of architecture that were like mountains.

The description of the landscape was a strength in My Antonia too, but I found that landscape described in that book hostile, a landscape that I could not imagine growing to love. The landscapes described in Death comes for the Archbishop has the opposite effect: I can begin to understand the love that the Archbishop comes to feel for his adopted country. And here the isolated one-family homesteads of the prairie are replaced by Indian pueblos, small Spanish villages and towns where the churches are old enough to have fallen into ruin. It's a country with a patchwork history which I found fascinating.

But holding back my overall rating of the book is Cather's portrayal of her characters. In dealing with her minor characters, at times it seemed that rather than dealing with individuals she was presenting them as archetypal examples of 'the Mexican peasant', ' the Pueblo Indian' and so on. And while at times she gives glimpses into the motivations of Father Latour and his affection for Father Vaillant, I found the narrative was often more flatly descriptive of events with little insight into the feelings of either character. So neither of the main characters really came alive for me in the way that the landscape did.

Hello Rhian - stopping by to say hello! Slowly getting caught up on the various threads after having been 'off the grid' for a while.

Lively conversation going on here, especially over YA and New adult. Huh? I truly appreciated the commentary about how important it is to learn to choose books for oneself from the shelf. Didn't have these categories when I was coming up.

Congrats on the completion of the bathroom!

Appreciated your review of Archbishop. I'm still only about 75 pages in. Not sure it's for me. Maybe it's that the American Southwest never held much appeal ....

#118 Paul I've read Never Let Me Go, Germinal and The Bell Jar from the Telegraph's list. I had to stop reading The Road as it was all just too bleak: it was Mr SandDune's RL book club choice a couple of years ago but unfortunately most of the other members had the same reaction as me!

J certainly seems to have inherited the reading bug. I did wonder at one time if he would be more of a non- fiction reader as that was his reading of choice at one time but currently his reading is split more equally between fiction and non-fiction. I think it's interesting looking back how early certain traits appeared! J was a foodie at two and is even more of a foodie now! Today is a bit of a big day for him actually as he is going out on his first date. When I say date, I think they are going to wander around town for a couple of hours after school as far as I can tell, but it seems to be an official date in the minds of all concerned. I've had my suspicions that this was on the cards for a couple of months, but it obviously took him a while to pluck up the courage to ask her!

#121 Marianne, no YA for me either when I was growing up. I went straight from children's books to a mixture of classics (Tess of the D'Urbevilles, Pride and Prejudice etc), science-fiction and fantasy (John Wyndham, Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne McCaffrey), and lighter adult fiction (James Herriot, Gerald Durrell).

Actually the location of the American South West is one that works well for me. It's the Nebraska location of some of her other books that I find difficult. I find something deeply worrying about the idea of living on an isolated farm in the middle of all that emptiness, it's just too lonely, and that's before I even start to consider the hardness of the life.

Rhian, I wish you a fantastic weekend

Interesting perspective on Death Comes for the Archibishop. I've read a few Cathers and enjoyed them although I'm not wild about her books. However, I just picked up the VMC edition of *Archbishop* because of the buzz here. And, well, it's a Virago.

Catching up on your thread Rhian. The YA and New Adult categories discussion is interesting. I thought YA was to bridge the gap and honestly once you are 16-18 if you are going to read adult books you probably already do.

Have a lovely weekend. I hope poor Daisy has no more mishaps.

I hope that February is kinder to you and your clan than January was, Rhian!

>122 SandDune:: Oooh, the dating age. I'm not looking forward to that, I'm afraid. Ha!

Wishing a good weekend for you, Rhian!

13. The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri *****

I read this now because: my RL book club is reading all the 2013 Booker Club Shortlist for a meeting in March.



The Lowland is the story of two brothers, the cautious and reliable Subash and the adventurous Udayan who despite being the younger is the one who takes the lead in all their activities. Born to a relatively poor middle-class family in a suburb of Calcutta, the boys are inseparable as children, but as Udayan becomes involved in a revolutionary movement in early adulthood they begin to grow apart. And so for the first time in his life it is Subash who makes the first move, to leave his family and India to go to America to continue his studies in Oceanography. And as Subash comes to term with his new life in Rhode Island, Udayan's life also changes as he secretly marries the studious Gauri, to the shock of his traditional parents who had expected to arrange their sons' marriages.

But it is Udayan's death in the early stages of the book which is the pivotal event from which the rest of the book flows, with the ramifications of a decision that Subash makes after his brother's death following him and his family down the years. And it is here that the book really comes into its own and becomes a beautiful and heartbreaking portrait of how decisions taken with the best of intentions can have tragic and unforeseen consequences.

The language with which Lahiri tells her story is beautiful: listening to this in audio I felt at times that I was hanging on every single word. She can create a heart-breaking scene with very few words as here when Udayan asks Subash to reconsider his decision to go to America:

'You're the other side of me, Subash. It's without you that I'm nothing. Don't go.

It was the only time he'd admitted such a thing. He'd said it with love in his voice. With need.

But Subash heard it as a command, one of so many he'd capitulated to all his life. Another exhortation to do as Udayan did, to follow him.'

The narrative weaves back and forward over seventy years, with events seen through the eyes of first one and then another participant. But at no time did it feel rushed. And at no time did the characters seem anything over than very real people living the lives which were so different from the ones they had expected to lead. Highly recommended.

Enjoyed your review of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Rhian; I've yet to get to Cather, but she's on the list. I'm delighted that you enjoyed The Lowland so much; this is one I'm hoping to get to sooner than later, and I've read mixed reviews. Good to read one that is glowing!

#124 Thanks Barbara hope you have a great weekend too.

#125 Laura, I did enjoy Death Comes For the Archbishop - until about half way through I was intending to give it four stars rather than three and a half. But it was never going to be a read that I loved and I can't quite understand why other people respond to her in such a positive way to be honest.

#126 Hi Roberta. Hope you have a great weekend too. We are out to lunch tomorrow: J's football has been cancelled due to a waterlogged pitch ( for the fourth time in five weeks) and it has left us with a free day. January has apparently been the wettest January on record, and it wasn't exactly dry before it started, so there is just water lying about everywhere.

#127 Darryl we are all healthy at the moment so that is a good start. Just wish it would stop raining!

#128 Amber, I think J is quite late to the process! From what I can gather though, his friends have a fairly flexible approach to what 'going out together' means. A couple seem to be able to be 'going out' together without actually going out anywhere at all!

#130 Nancy The Lowland certainly worked for me whereas other sure fire winners that everyone seems to have loved (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Death Comes to the Archbishop spring to mind) haven't quite hit the right note). Still we can't all like the same thing.

January Summary

Books read: 12
Favourite book: Far From the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy
Least favourite book: Turned Out Nice Marek Kohn

Author nationalities:
U.K 5
U.S.A 4
Norway 1
France 1
Zimbabwe 1

Format:
Audiobooks 3
Paperbacks 3
Hardbacks 3
Kindle 3

I'm glad to see you enjoyed The Lowland so much. I thought it was excellent.

Hi Rhian! I'vebeen absent for the better part of the last week and am slowly getting caught up. Lots of activity here - hail storms, foaming rivers, vacation plans, etc. etc. As usual, I've enjoyed it. And though I liked Death Comes for the Archbishop more than you did, your review is excellent. Your point about secondary characters being more "archetypes" than anything else struck a chord with me. I think you are right about that.

Anyway, happy February! Hope you dry out some over there...

De-lurking to say thanks for the great review of The Lowland, which is on my TBR. Yours is one of the few really glowing reviews I've read. I've loved Lahiri's short story collections in the past, but haven't read her novels yet.

Do you think your son might like Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card? I'm not a big sci-fi reader, but I loved it, and the students in my grade 9 classes (14 year olds) who read it raved about it. The other author who grade 9 boys seem to like is Michael Crichton, particularly for Jurassic Park and The Lost World (which I haven't read, just going on recs from my students).

#134 Laura The Lowland is sitting firmly at the top of my ratings for the three Booker prize shortlist books I have read. So far I have:

The Lowland
A Tale for the Time Being
We need New Names

We have our discussion meeting in March - each year it gets later and later. As long as we get it done before they announce the next shortlist!

#135 Katie I found similarities between Zola's writing (from my last book Germinal) and aspects of Willa Cather's writing, in that they seem to stay on the surface of their characters. And I think it is this that I have a problem with.

It's been dry last few days but I think it is just a temporary blip. They've decided now that it has been the wettest January since 1767!

#136 Cait, I'm definitely going to be searching out some of Lahiri's short stories. Thanks for the recommendations. J read Ender's Game and the next two or three books in the series last year and did enjoy them a lot, although he thought the series petered out a bit after that. Michael Crichton might well work - I hadn't thought of him. It's just such a long time since I was that age!

This evening we have been watching the finale of series 2 of The Bridge, which was seriously, seriously depressing. But highly recommended if it comes your way.

Rhian, We are watching the American version. I wonder if we could check out the Swedish/Danish version. I enjoy watching Swedish shows so I can pick out the Swedish. :P

#140 Tamara, I hadn't realised there was an Anerican version.There is also a British / French version called The Tunnel which is based on a murder in the Channel Tunnel. We did watch the first episode of that, but it seemed so very similar to series one of the Swedish / Danish version, with just the location changed, that we gave up.

The American version just wrapped up the first season, but the "bridge" is between America and Mexico, which of course changes the tone of the show completely.

Just finished The Testament of Mary, and liked it a lot. Review to follow tomorrow.

Glad you liked The Testament of Mary! Shall look forward to your comments.

I've just started watching a potentially interesting older TV series, The Ambassador, featuring Pauline Collins as English ambassador in Dublin. From the 90s, I think. Free on Amazon Prime & my Roku!

Copenhagen is great, but I'm stunned at the ferry expenses. Had it been that pricey to cross to the continent when I was a kid, I would never have seen it at all! As it was, I managed to get to Denmark 3x, in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Clearly, overdue for a return trip...

I liked The Testament of Mary a lot, too, Rhian. Look forward to your comments.

#144 Suz, there used to be overnight connections to Norway and Sweden as well as Denmark. We went to Bergen on a ferry from Newcastle almost 20 years ago and it was a great trip. The Harwich to Esbjerg crossing is the only one left so there is no competition. To be honest if we were more flexible about our dates then it would be cheaper, but we needed a Friday night sailing to tie in with the house that we've booked. Cross-channel ferries , even the longer ones, are much cheaper and we did look at getting the ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, but it would leave us with a very long drive. I would have preferred to take the car, as we could have taken so much more stuff, which is always useful for self-catering (and also when you at going to a country with less reliable weather) but it just wasn't worth it.

Daisy's second birthday today. Here she is when we went to choose a puppy, at six weeks old:



And on her first day at home at eight weeks:

Happy birthday, Daisy!

Happy Birthday Daisy, such a sweetie:)

Rhian The Testament of Mary was my final book of 2013. I enjoyed it.

Daisy is so adorable.

Happy birthday, Daisy! You're a sweetie!

My audible credits have come through today, together with suggestions for future audio books. For some strange reason all the suggestions based on my prior reading seem to be for Hindi speakers learning English as a second language. I'm really not too sure how they arrived at the conclusion that that would be something I would like to buy....

14. The Testament of Mary Colm Toibin ****1/2
I read this now because: my RL book club is reading the 2013 Booker Prize shortlist.



I can't decide whether this 104 page book actually counts as a novel, but it's a beautiful piece of writing nonetheless. As Mary reflects on the events of her son's life many years after his crucifixion her recollections conflict more and more with the accepted stories of the gospels. And her version of events is not what the men who were her son's followers want to hear as they write their accounts of those times. Her son's followers tell her that her son was the Son of God come to save all mankind, but Mary sees them as fools and misfits, an opinion that is confirmed when she stays at the house in Jerusalem where his followers are the night before Jesus's crucifixion:

'No question asked, I knew would elicit a straight answer. I was back in the world of fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers, all of them hysterical now and almost out of breath with excitement even before they spoke. And within this group of men I noticed that there was a set of hierarchies, men who spoke and were listened to, for example, or whose presence created silence, or who sat at the top of the table, or who felt free to ignore me and my companion and who demanded food from the other women who scampered in and out of the room like hunched and obedient animals.

Above all this is a tremendously powerful account of a mother grieving for her son, and for the life that she expected to lead that has gone for ever. A normal life where her son would marrry and give her grandchildren and care for her in her old age. Nothing that her son's followers tell her can assuage her grief for the son and that life she will never know. Mary's grief is timeless, and it is this that gives the book its strength.

Hi Lori, Calm, Roberta, Nancy - here is Daisy today, much bigger, and trying to prove that her new ball isn't as indestructible as it said on the wrapping:

Aww ... Happy birthday Daisy! She's so precious.
I also enjoyed your review of Testament of Mary. I've been tempted, and you've convinced me I would like it.

>154 SandDune:: I love her ears.
Good review of the Toibin book, Rhian. That one has been tickling my peripheral vision.

#155 Laura - if you do get around to The Testament of Mary I'd leave it until you've got time to read in one sitting. It's 104 fairly small pages, so it's a feasible project. I split it in two, and it took me a little while to get back into the feeling of it.

#156 Tui, Daisy's ears are very expressive! When they're upright but turned over at the top like that it means she's happy and quite interested in what's going on. Playing with her ears is my number one relaxation activity!

Thanks for the advice, Rhian. Maybe I should just skip work and all other obligations for a day. Do you think I can get away with that?? Seriously, maybe during a holiday period ...

#158 Laura, it doesn't need a day - just an afternoon. Or an evening if you start early! It's definitely more of a novella.

Touching on a couple of things that we were talking about in the last week or so:

I noticed today that the foamy river made the front page of our local newspaper (as expected, J always complains that nothing ever happens here) with the headline 'Bridge over bubbled water'

I had another look at the 'young adult' section in the library and am now even more puzzled. There are six shelves of books in this section and of those probably at least one shelf (twenty-one books - I counted) are Penguin Classic editions of Ancient Greek and Roman writers or study guides to Ancient Greek and Roman writer, with the odd one of two about classical art. So they have Homer, Virgil, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Tacitus and several others I had never heard of. I may be wrong but as far as I am aware there is not a current up swelling of interest in Ancient Greek texts among the 18-25's that they think they are catering for? There is a notice saying that the books have been suggested by a panel of young adult readers: obviously one of them at least has an extreme interest in classical literature but surely the librarian ought to exert some sort of moderating influence?

*sigh* Something tells me your librarian is either asleep on the job, or fully incompetent. There must be someone you can lodge a complaint/concern with?

So many much more depressing books that weren't even considered! I think Ethan Frome rates a mention as well as, really, anything by Kafka, my own most depressing list would be different. Also I don't think Beloved belongs there - redemption, grace whatever you want to call it lurks under the surface of it. Flannery O'Connor is both depressing but also.... same thing.... The most depressing book I ever read was a very short novel set in Malaysia where the protagonist, a poor but so far making it rice farmer, steps on a thorn. With no antibiotics his death is inevitable and his entire family goes down with him. It was the most precisely illustrated picture of how close to the line many people live, one of those books that had a profound effect on me and I have no idea what it is called! And where is Chinua Achebe? Coetzee? Ah well.

Your trip to Denmark will be so fine! I loved the Rose Tremain novel set in the court of King.... oh gosh....Christian.....17th century. An English musician ends up working in his court. Let me run off and look it up. I'll be back! It's called Music and Silence. I loved it.

Ancient Greek texts? Funny, I've not noticed an upsurge of young adults scrambling to read same here in Canada either!

Re: Classical texts in the 18-25 section - could it be a response to those texts being required reading for late HS/college courses?

Also, Daisy is *beautiful*!!

#161 Faith, I'm tempted to email library services at the local council who are responsible for the running of the library. I wouldn't hold out much hope for getting any sense out of them though. I have quite a few dealings with the local council as part of my work and have come to the conclusion that it's generally run by a bunch of idiots.

It does seem to me that the choices they have made for books are more likely to put off any genuine 'young adult' readers for life, than encourage them to try new things. Eighteen year olds who have a burning desire to read Greek classics are generally the type who would find them anyway in my opinion.

154: Love those ears!
160: the books have been suggested by a panel of young adult readers
Well, that's a bit encouraging; at least the books have come from somewhere other than one librarian's imagination. And I can see it being helpful for a library to have featured books. The trouble is as you say, the label and the absence of moderation, with confusing results.

#162 I'd agree on Ethan Frome Lucy, that's one of the saddest things I've ever read I think. But a couple of things that spring to mind for me are Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura, the story of a desperately poor Japanese coastal community who use the bounty that the occasional shipwreck brings to keep themselves from starvation. And also When I Was Otherwise by Stephen Benatar which starts with the discovery of the remains of two elderly women in a house in London, one of them having being dead for over a year, and then tells the story of how they came to be there. But obviously neither of them are particularly well known books so unlikely to make a list like this

#163,164,166 Nancy, Amber, Katherine. I don't even think that the Greek classics are needed for study purposes. Classical studies is a very unusual choice for 16-18 year olds in the UK and Mr SandDune is pretty sure it isn't offered by any local schools. Even if it was the books would be provided by the school. And we don't have a college locally: any college student that relied on the town library would be in serious trouble anyway.

Judging by the very different choices on their 'young adult' shelf I think they probably have about three people on their panel who all have completely different tastes. It's a shame, as I was looking at the shelves for suggestions for adult books for J to read - but the one book that they had that he might have been interested in (1984) is coincidentally the one that he's reading at the moment.

Daisy, by the way, celebrated her birthday by eating Mr SandDune's flip-flop. Not a good girl! She has been getting less exercise that usual as it is just so muddy on the fields where we usually walk that I have been sticking to lead walks on pavements, and I she obviously had some excess energy. So today we braved the mud and the gale that was blowing so she could run around.

#169 - Poor Daisy, misbehaving on her birthday. When I saw you mention it was her 2nd birthday, I thought to myself, "She's just coming out of the puppy stage". I guess she backslid into puppydom when she chewed the flip flop.

#169 Judy, to be honest Daisy is very puppy like still when she is out and likes to charge around in a very excited manner but in the house she is pretty quiet and well-behaved. She could have chewed up those flip-flops any time over the last four or five months as they are kept by the back door, so the only reason I can think of why she chose to do it yesterday was because she had too much excess energy having not had enough off-lead walks. The weather here is still abysmal: rain and storms and it's so muddy walking our normal routes that it's no fun at all.

Daisy's a beauty! What a sweet girl (destroyed flip-flop not withstanding...)!

I've decided the 'Ypung Adult' shelf is really the clever boondoggle/resting place for books the librarian can't be bothered to shelve.

I'm wondering if someone at the library is thinking that the classics are what a young person should be reading and is putting them there through some kind of perverse idea that it will urge them in that direction?

My mil's schnauzer at both of my flip flops when she was a puppy. They are eminently chewable.

#171 Katie - I'll forgive Daisy a lot! The worst thing she ever did was to chew up a blue felt-tip pen on our new cream carpet! I burst into tears when I saw that. But then the stain proof carpet lived up to its name and I managed to get the stain out completely, so no harm done. To be honest I was more cross with J for leaving the pen on the floor where she could get at it. And she did have a thing about chewing holes in the wall in the hall when she was a puppy! When she was little she'd discovered some small holes in the wall where we'd had a radiator taken off the wall and decided it would be a fun thing to make them bigger. And when we sprayed that area with anti-chew spray she decided to make herself some new holes elsewhere. But since the hall has been decorated she's only done it once (and that was about eight months ago) and I managed to do a pretty good job sorting it out with some filler and the remaining paint, so you can't actually see where it was.

#172,173 Marianne, Tui, our library isn't great to be honest - it's quite small for the size of the town. But there is a lot of cost cutting in UK libraries at the moment with many being closed or having their hours cut drastically, and our library still has reasonable opening hours so at least that's something. Something that irritates me is that virtually all the new books, at least all the ones I'd be likely to read, go into their 'hot picks' section first so can only be borrowed for one week and can't be renewed, which I would never fit into my reading schedules.

I'm lucky enough to be able to borrow from anywhere in the state (a blessing that Rhode Island is small enough to make that feasible!) so I'm drawing on the resources of lots of libraries from lots of areas, including more affluent communities. I'm not entirely sure how the budget is allocated; whether it's by community or by the state.

My first thought was that there was some kind of course for which those books might be reserved, but your point seems valid & it's unlikely that would be the reason. I think the only conclusion to be drawn is that your librarians are deeply absurd.

Daisy is so sweet -- but chewing the walls????? Good heavens.

Read a story here about three elderly nuns who went to an animal shelter and asked to adopt the dog that no one else wanted. There's a wonderful pic of the 9 year old pit bull mix nestling up against one of them in the shelter... http://www.today.com/pets/elderly-nuns-adopt-9-year-old-pit-bull-no-one-2D120624...

Rhian, your Daisy is a looker, so cute. Thanks for sharing those pictures.

#176 Suz we can order books from other Hertfordshire libraries for a reservation charge of 50p, or elsewhere in the country for a bit more. My main problem with my library is the way they organise their ebook collection, but that's a county-wide thing, not specific to my library. Basically, everything that isn't romance, historical fiction, thriller or sci-fi & fantasy falls into the catch-all category of 'classics and modern-classics' which seems to mean everything else. It includes everything from Les Miserables to The Luminaries to books by Terry Pratchett, Sophie Kinsella, Biggles books and chick lit. It makes browsing very difficult. And while you can limit your search to children's books only, there's no way to limit yourself to adult books only, so a search in Sci-Fi & Fantasy for example will bring up books aimed at 7-8 year olds among the adult stuff.

Daisy seems to have grown out of destroying the walls now, thank goodness! Staffies do love to chew though, and she is very good at it! That's a sweet story about the nuns and the pit bull: in the UK it's the staffies that are left in the dog's home as pit bulls are illegal.

I have to confess that it's only since reading The Lowland that I've been completely clear where Rhode Island is. I thought I knew, but I've realised I was getting it mixed up with Maryland. Sorry.

#177 Barbara, this is my favourite photo of Daisy. I posted this on my thread last year - she has captured Mr SandDune's slippers:

Oh, the cuteness! The adorableness!

>178 SandDune: I'll bet she wished she was in Maryland these wintry days!

#180 Amber, she is cure isn't she? In the UK staffies can have a reputation as dangerous dogs, but the problem is that they seem to attract the wrong sort of owners who train them to be aggressive or keep them in appalling conditions so that they are traumatised and frightened. Left to their own devices they are the sweetest dogs who absolutely love people, and see themselves as overgrown lap dogs. They don't even make good guard dogs: most of them would be too busy trying to lick the burglars.

#181 Marianne, I don't know about Suzanne and the snow but I'm certainly wishing I lived somewhere less wet. I've just spent a couple of very fruitless hours trying to get to work and have failed miserably because of roads shut due to floods. It just rains and rains and rains.

>182 SandDune:: The same is the case here with Pit Bulls. Very sweet-natured dogs, but they get a bad reputation for how they tend to be raised cruelly to make fighting dogs. Poor things.

Amber, sorry I missed your comment here. I do feel so sorry for all the staffies that fill the rescue centres that nobody wants. When we went to a rescue centre to get our first dog, Lulu, I thought exactly the same thing, I wasn't too sure about them (not that I had really come across any) but I was so completely converted by Lulu and now Daisy that I wouldn't want another breed of dog. And they do have a reputation of being aggressive with other dogs, but we have never had a problem with another staffie when we have been out for a walk, and if another dog is aggressive with Daisy she just retreats immediately and looks confused.