SandDune's 2015 Reading - Part 2

Welcome everyone to my first thread of 2015, and to my fourth year doing the 75 Book Challenge. I'm a 53 year old accountant working part-time as the Finance Manager of a local charity, after spending most of my career in the City of London. I live about thirty miles north of London with my husband (aka Mr SandDune), who is Assistant Principal at a local secondary school, and our 14 year old son (aka J), who attends the same school. There's also our (nearly) 3 year old Staffordshire Bull Terrier Daisy, and 12 year old cat Sweep, who have an uneasy relationship in which Sweep permanently has the upper hand. I'm originally from Wales rather than England, so I do have an interest in all things Welsh (although I can't speak the language - at least only a few words) and I tend to get huffy if people call me English rather than Welsh! I read mainly literary fiction, classics, science-fiction and fantasy and tend to avoid horror, detective fiction, chick-lit and thrillers. All the family are avid readers, although Mr SandDune doesn't get time to read as much as he would like: J has inherited a love of reading science-fiction and fantasy from me and a love of reading history from Mr SandDune so our books are increasingly shared. I read hardbacks, paperbacks, on kindle and listen to audio books particularly when driving or walking the dog. Apart from reading I love travelling, eating out, going to the theatre (not so often as I'd like but I've made a resolution to remedy that this year) and I'm doing a part-time degree with the Open University which keeps me pretty busy.

This month's picture is by William Dyce (1806 -1864) 'Pegwell bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858 1858-60. I've chosen this one as in its preciseness it is such a contrast to last month's painting by Turner. And as it was the pre-Raphaelite style of painting such as this that was in fashion at the end of Turner's life, you can see why his works were less popular. I also like the way the painting shows people just 'poking about' on the beach - one of my favourite activities!

My reading plans for 2015 are quite structured. I intend to participate in Paul's British Author Challenge as well as Mark's American Author Challenge. I belong to a RL reading group which meets monthly, as well as reading the Booker shortlist sometime in the spring. I'm also doing an Open University (OU) course in Twentieth Century Literature.

In between that I want to read rather more non-fiction than I've been doing of late, and of course keeping up with the science-fiction and fantasy. Here are my tentative choices for the various challenges a well as my OU reading:

British Author Challenge

January : Penelope Lively Ammonites and Leaping Fish
January : Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day
February : Sarah Waters The Paying Guest
February : Evelyn Waugh Decline and Fall
March : Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca
March : China Mieville Embassytown
April : Angela Carter Heroes and Villains
April : W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage
May : Margaret Drabble The Seven Sisters
May : Martin Amis Einstein's Monsters
June : Beryl Bainbridge An Awfully Big Adventure
June: Anthony Burgess Earthy Powers
July : Virginia Woolf A Room of one's own
July : B.S. Johnson Christie Marley's own Double-Entry
August : Iris Murdoch The Sandcastle
August : Graham Greene Our man in Havana
September : Andrea Levy The Long Song
September : Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence
October : Helen Dunmore The Siege
October : David Mitchell Cloud Atlas
November : Muriel Spark Memento Mori
November : William Boyd The Blue Afternoon
December : Bernice Rubens A Five Year Sentence
December : P.G. Wodehouse The Inimitable Jeeves

American Author Challenge

Carson McCullers- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Henry James- The Turn of the Screw
Richard Ford- Canada
Louise Erdrich- The Round House
Sinclair Lewis- Babbitt
Wallace Stegner- Angle of Repose
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Wizard of Earthsea
Larry McMurtry- Lonesome Dove
Flannery O' Connor- A Good Man is Hard to Find and other stories
Ray Bradbury- Farenheit 451
Barbara Kingsolver- Flight Behaviour
E.L. Doctorow- Ragtime

Open University Set Books

Pat Barker The Ghost Road
Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot
Bertolt Brecht Life of Galileo
Anton Chekov Five Plays
Philip K Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca
TS Eliot Prufrock and Other Observations
Lewis Grassic Gibbon Sunset Song
Allen Ginsberg Howl and other poems
Abdulrazak Gurnah Paradise
Seamus Heaney New Selected Poems, 1966-1987
Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories
Manuel Puig Kiss of the Spider Woman
Poetry of the Thirties
Virginia Woolf Orlando: a Biography

My ten favourite reads for 2014

The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri
The Wall Marlen Haushofer
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
Selected Stories Katherine Mansfield
Elizabeth is Missing Emma Healey
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Claire North
The Testament of Mary Colm Toibin
Framley Parsonage Anthony Trollope
Jhereg Steven Brust
The Undertaking Audrey Magee

And my five least favourite:

What I Loved Siri Hustvedt
A Society Clown George Grossmith
The Awakening Kate Chopin
J Harold Jacobson
Wild Strawberries Angela Thirkell

Books Read in 2015:
1. Ammonites and Leaping Fish Penelope Lively ****
2. The Life of Galileo Bertolt Brecht ****
3. Orlando Virginia Woolf. ****
4. Why Be happy when you Could be normal? Jeanette Winterson ****1/2
5. Please Mister Postman Alan Johnson ***1/2
6. Where I'm reading From Tim Parks ****
7. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers ***1/2
8. The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro *****
9. To Rise at a Decent Hour Joshua Ferris **
10. Trouble with Lichen John Wyndham ***
11. The Turn of the Screw Henry James
12. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Philip K. Dick ****1/2
13. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier ****1/2
14. Decline and Fall Evelyn Waugh ***
15. The Paying Guests Sarah Waters ****1/2
16. How to be both Ali Smith ****
17. Embassytown China Mieville ****
18. Touch Clare North ****
19. Mort Terry Pratchett ***1/2
20. Canada Richard Ford ***
21. Phoenix Steven Brust ***1/2
22. The Aftermath Rhidian Brook ***
23. Heroes and villains Angela Carter ***
24. The Painted Veil Somerset Maugham ****1/2

Planned Reads for February

Hi Rhian - Great new thread - it's fun to see what you read in January, and your February reading plans look equally impressive.

*bump* and wave

Nice opening painting, Rhian!

I plan to join you for The Paying Guests and Turn of the Screw.

Happy new thread, Rhian!

I'm joining you for The Turn of the Screw. Welcome to February!

Happy New Thread, Rhian.

I finished already The Turn of the Screw and quite enjoyed it and I started listening to The Paying Guests and I will join you in reading Decline and Fall which has been sitting on my TBR for at least *cough* 10 years+.

Happy New Thread, Rhian.

I finished already The Turn of the Screw and quite enjoyed it and I started listening to The Paying Guests and I will join you in reading Decline and Fall which has been sitting on my TBR for at least *cough* 10 years+.

Checking in on thread number 2!

Happy new thread, Rhian. Your plans for February look excellent. I *loved* Decline and Fall when I read it a while ago.

Great plans for February. I'm very impressed as I'm useless at making plans for my reading! I'll keep trying though. I hope you enjoy them all.

Happy New Thread, Rhain!

I need to get round to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - I've only read one of his but I really loved it. And are you getting a head start on the March Du Maurier? I'll be reading Rebecca for that one, too, and I'm so excited because the movie is one of my very, very, all-time favorites!

Happy new thread, Rhian. I love this painting.

Nice new thread you've got here, Rhian!

Looks like some good reading ahead :)

I finally made it over here Rhian. You've done some great reading already this year. I hope to start on Jeannette Winterson myself fairly soon as I downloaded one of hers recently. I may read The Paying Guests this month if I feel the urge. I've had an ER copy on my shelf since August.

Happy new thread, Rhian! You are off to a great reading start this year. I have several of your picks for this month in the stacks, so I'll be watching to see what you think of them - perhaps you'll inspire me to get to them sooner rather than later. And no book purchases for the year so far - excellent will power!

Woot! You've got some great reads planned for Feb, Rhian. I still haven't gotten to Narrow Road, but I will this year, and I'm curious about The Paying Guests, too. Rebecca I read a few years ago and very much enjoyed.

Wow, what a list! I read some of those and have others on my watch list, so am looking forward to your comments.

>7 BLBera: >8 tiffin: >9 kidzdoc: >10 lkernagh: >11 ronincats: >12 drachenbraut23: >13 drachenbraut23: >14 alcottacre: >15 susanj67: >16 lunacat: >17 scaifea: >18 Ameise1: >19 katiekrug: >20 brenzi: >21 Crazymamie: >22 lit_chick: >23 Deern:

Wow - loads of visitors! Apologies for not doing individual replies but I'm doing an assessment this week, so you might have been waiting a long time! Great to see that there is going to be a lot of shared readings this month - it was so interesting last month when there was so much difference of opinion about Moon Tiger (although I didn't read it last month I have read it before and enjoyed it hugely so I was able to appreciate the discussions). I actually managed to complete my planned reading last month so I'm hoping that I can do the same for February. Rebecca is required reading for my course - this section compares popular and canonical books - and so I need to read it this month, so I'll be ticking this one off early on the BAC.

I'm listening to Turn of the Screw at the moment and enjoying it. I really didn't like Portrait of a Lady when I read it last year but I thought I ought to give James another chance, but maybe not too long of one, hence my choosing the very short Turn of the Screw.

Happy new thread Rhian! Hope your OU assessment goes well. Is Rebecca counted as a popular or a canonical book for your course? I could see an argument for either really.

>25 souloftherose: Well I have written 500 words so far. The essay is supposed to be 2000 words in total, but I also have to do two 600 word summaries of the two academic articles that I have decided to use. In theory the summaries are supposed to be done first, and then I should use those to write my essay, but I'm really bad at formal essay planning, and I like to keep it very fluid, so I am writing the essay first, and I will prepare the summaries to match when I have finished that.

Rebecca is down as a popular book I think, as is Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep

I loved both Rebecca and Do Androids Dream of Sheep, Rhian. Hard to imagine two more different books, but they're both excellent. (I'm a sci-fi and Philip K. Dick fan. He's nowhere near as good a writer as Daphne D. M., but he has fascinating ideas and can tell a good story).

>27 jnwelch: I've read Rebecca before, and enjoyed it, but probably wouldn't say that I loved it. I'm really loving Do androids dream of Electric Sheep though. I love the fact that electric sheep actually do figure in the story - don't remember Harrison Ford having one of those in Bladerunner!

I'm getting behind with my reviews: I spent all day yesterday working on my assessment but didn't get as far as I'd like. I've written 1650 words out of 2000 so far, so I should get that finished this morning. But then I've still got my article summaries to do.

I had a rest last night to watch one of the major sporting events of the year (in our household at least). The annual Wales vs England rugby match which this year kicked off the Six Nations Championship. As Mr SandDune strongly supports England and myself and J strongly supports Wales this is always a noisy event. Daisy got quite worried (I think she thought Mr SandDune was cross with her) and did her usual worries thing of climbing all over everyone in reach, trying to put her head as close to our heads as possible. (I don't know why she finds this comforting but she does). But as usual, having a Staffie clamber all over you trying to stick her head under your chin is not helpful for watching sport. Unfortunately for me and J, the final result was Wales 16 - England 21, Mr SandDune's shouting obviously having paid off! Especially disappointing as Wales started as favourites and led for a large chunk of the match.

We got into the pub after ringing last night to find the rugby on in the room upstairs. From the noises that were coming through the ceiling, either there's an unknown Welsh enclave in the heart of England, or England won. >;-)
Having spent the day with the other two matches, I'm about to catch up and watch the England match. Knowing the result doesn't bother me (although it annoys my husband big time). I find it takes the stress out of watching a sporting fixture - it's not the result, it's the journey that becomes important.

You'd better worry about the assessment first, and the reviews second! We can wait and won't mark you down for delivering late.

>30 Helenliz: Hurrah, someone who agrees with my assessment of sporting events - I'd always rather know the result first and be able to watch and appreciate the performance, rather that the horrible nail-biting and stress. Plus, if the result isn't what I wanted, I can avoid watching! No one else around me understands.

10. Trouble with Lichen John Wyndham ***

I've always been a fan of John Wyndham but had never read this one before. And unfortunately, I've discovered that there was probably a good reason for that, as it's not one if his better ones.

The brilliant young biochemist Diana Brackley joins the prestigious research company owned by Francis Saxover. Accidentally discovering that spoilage of milk is presented by an extract from a certain lichen (shades of Alexander Fleming I think) she discovers that the lichen has the unique property of retarding the ageing process. Human lifespans can be doubled or even trebled. But Diana soon realises that Francis Saxover must have come to the very same conclusion that she has, but is saying absolutely nothing about his discoveries ...

This started off well - female characters aren't John Wyndham's strongpoint but with Diana the initial focus there was a strong female lead who was not just there for the love interest. Unfortunately, the expectations that that created were not borne out In the second half of the book. And the story seems to peter out as well, nothing very exciting happens at all. So OK, but not one I'll be revisiting.

>30 Helenliz: We got into the pub after ringing I'm trying to decide what the ringing was. Do you mean you rang the pub or do you do bell-ringing or something?

I've had a not very productive day when it comes to my assessment. I've finished the essay but I'm still doing the article summaries, and I'd really hoped to have finished it all by today. It's one of those questions where they're obviously trying to get people to acquire good study habits and I hate those. I like to be told what's needed and left to get on with it the way I want to do it. Wasn't helped by the printer deciding to give up the ghost - at least it is refusing to print anything in black, despite me changing the black cartridge.

>30 Helenliz: >31 lunacat: I can sort of see what you mean! but not quite. The tension is all part of the enjoyment somehow!

>33 SandDune: The second. I am, for my sins, a church bell ringer. It is traditional to finish the practice with a visit to the pub. It would be a shame to break a longstanding tradition, now wouldn't it?

Urgh. I don't envy you the assessment if it takes that form. Like you, I'd prefer to answer the question in my own style. I'm due to be starting a management training course in the spring that will require essays. It's been a while since I had to write like that, so I have no idea if I still have the knack...

Happy new thread, Rhian.

I read somewhere that the movie 'Blade Runner' had it's inspiration from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I still haven't read this. I really do need to move this up in my OWL so I get a copy sooner rather than later.

Some strong planned reads for February, Rhian. Hope that you manage it while trying to get your assessment sorted.

Have a lovely Sunday.

>34 Helenliz: Well - I've finished the assessment - I was so fed up of the whole business that I submitted it straight away.

>35 cameling: Yes Bladerunner is based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and it does start off in quite a similar vein, although as I said earlier there was a distinct lack of sheep (electric or otherwise) in the film version. But they do end up in quite different places. I've always found Bladerunner the film to be quite confusing - probably due to the fact that I saw it dubbed into Italian at a time when my Italian wasn't that good!

>36 PaulCranswick: Hi Paul! Hope you'd had a great weekend.

11. The Turn of the Screw Henry James ***

I've come to the conclusion that perhaps Henry James isn't for me. I didn't enjoy The Portrait of a Lady last year, but I thought The Turn of the Screw might be a safer option - shorter at least - but while it started off reasonably I rather lost interest.

A new governess is sent to look after two orphans at a remote country house. Her two charges, Miles and Flora, are breautiful and seemingly angelic children, although doubts are raised when Miles's school request that he not return after the summer holidays. Soon the children's previous governess and the the valet of the children's uncle start to appear to the governess. All very well except both are dead. Are they ghosts or is she going mad?

I found that this ghost story failed to chill me satisfactorily. Perhaps part of the problem is that we do not generally see beautiful children as so unquestioning angelic as the late Victorians seemed to. And the evil of Miss Jessel, the hinted at sexual relations with the valet Quink, just doesn't seem so very evil in today's society. So didn't really work for me.

>34 Helenliz: Helen, have you read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis? Bell ringers play a key role ...

>32 SandDune: Too bad; sounds kinda interesting. But I haven’t read anything by John Wyndham and there are obvious other choices for a starting point.

I have been reading a lot of mixed reviews of The Turn of the Screw and I have come away with the impression that James fell short with this one. It is a tell when readers come away unsatisfied or, as some reviewers have commented, confused about what is going on. The Turn of the Screw would have been the first James book I would have turned to as it seems to be more commonly known, but now I am thankful for the great reviews like yours that are making me re-think my next James' read.

Henry James didn't work for me this month either, Rhian. I read Daisy Miller, which is short but not very interesting, I'm afraid.

I was going to read The Turn of the Screw but your review and others have decided me to read The Aspern Papers instead, which came in the same volume from the library.

I listened to The Aspern Papers via audiobook last year; I seem to fare better with shorter Henry James works. I also liked Washington Square and The American was reasonable. I've tried Portrait of a Lady three or four times and keep getting bogged down.

The Turn Of The Screw is meant to be ambiguous, but it tends to get promoted as "a ghost story" and I think people come to it with certain expectations that aren't necessarily met.

>39 scvlad: not read that one, no. Not something that's in the library, so I may have to find it or cope without. Trouble with stories including bellringers is that there are certain examples that get the details wrong, and once you've seen they've got that wrong, you start wondering what else they've got wrong. I imagine any story with a specialist subject that you know about poses the same potential issue.

>38 SandDune: >45 lyzard: I've found that myself. Once the author starts getting details wrong then you start to query everything.

>39 scvlad: I've really enjoyed The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes, and The Day of the Triffids. They've all got much stronger plots than Trouble with Lichen.

>40 qebo: >41 lkernagh: >42 lauralkeet: >43 ronincats: >44 Chatterbox: I think it's James's characters that I don't like - they just seem far too flat. Laura, I think you said on your thread recently that you couldn't get any emotional engagement with them, and that's how I feel as well. I can see that the story is meant to be ambiguous - are there ghosts or not - but I think for part of it at least you've got to see through the governess's eyes and be horrified, and I wasn't. As I say, part of the problem was the different moral values of the twentieth century. I can see intellectually that in the late nineteenth century a governess who engages in sexual activity with a servant would put herself completely beyond the pale, and be the lowest of the low, but I think in order for the novella to work for me I'd have to believe that emotionally as well, and of course I can't help looking at that with my twenty-first century values! And I do find James's portrayal of children rather irritating! And I also don't like the structure: it's as if James started out writing one sort if story and ended up writing another.

I'm sorry to hear that the James didn't work for you, Rhian. He doesn't seem to be working for very many of us, does he? I haven't started mine yet - I'd better get cracking!

>32 SandDune: I really like John Wyndham too, but I've never heard of this one either. I like the title though! Interesting that he attempted to create a strong female lead, not just there for love interest purposes. Too bad he wasn't quite successful. I always say when discussing him that at least he's not as obnoxiously sexist as most other 1950s male sci-fi writers. He's at least polite. I mean, that's not saying much, but still...

Hi Rhian - finally caught up on your threads, I'm also a fan of John Wyndham though Trouble with Lichen doesn't particularly appeal.

Oh I love your bio at the top of your thread! It is so interesting to a little more about who we ' read " with! I'll try to keep in mind that you are Welsh, rather than British! I'm reading Washington Square right now and very much enjoying it. Perhaps it is best that it is about 200 pages. You are such an organized reader. I tend to read what grabs me, though I do consider the challenges.

Happy new thread, Rhian! Lovely thread topper. I can almost feel the sea breeze and taste the salt in the air. Pegwell Bay has an interesting history, as well, associated with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, being thought the landings of the Saxons/Jutes Hengist and Horsa. (Like MrSandDune, I'm a history buff. ;)

I agree with your assessment of James's TotS, with its unreliable narrator and WTF ending, though I remember enjoying it when I read it.

Just catching up, Rhian! Hope your February is going swimmingly!

I think I'm probably not a very critical reader when it comes to Wyndham's books because I really enjoyed The Trouble with Lichen and generally like his female characters.

So no to The Trouble with Lichen then - good to know, so thanks for that! I did like Day of the Triffids. And I have Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and I keep meaning to get to that one. I quite liked the one that the movie Total Recall is based on - is it "We can get it for you Wholesale"? or something like that.

Happy Saturday to you!

Oh dear - really behind again! Last week was such a busy week. After spending all last weekend on my assessment I was then out on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings, which is way too much for me to cope with! Then I am still working on Fridays and on Saturday we went to Cambridge for Mr SandDune to do some shopping. So after all that I was feeling shattered! I realised how tired I was when I forgot to feed Daisy on Friday night - something that I never do. I could see that she was fretful about something and I was trying to work out what she wanted, but the thought that she just wanted her tea never crossed my mind! She eventually got it several hours late when my brain kicked into gear.

>48 scaifea: I don't think I'll be reading any more James! Nothing I read his month has convinced me that I'd find any of his other books any better.

>49 DorsVenabili: >50 avatiakh: >54 souloftherose: I think my major problem with Trouble with Lichen was the way that the primary market for the drug was presented as women who wanted to preserve their looks. Men don't seem to have too much use for it (the implication being that they are too sensible) but women go into a frenzy.

>57 SandDune: Well, I just started my James yesterday (The American) and it's wonderful so far...

I was in Cuba for a bit and am just catching up with everyone. I was a big Wyndham fan back in the 70s and remember liking all of his books, although in varying degrees. Wonder how England will do against Ireland in the Six Nations? Sorry about Wales' loss. The bell ringers in The Doomsday Book were a hoot, scvlad. I like some James, Rhian, but have to be in the right mood for him or it can seem like an entire book where nothing happens.

>51 vancouverdeb: I will answer to being British - I just won't answer to being English! It's funny that J has very much decided that he supports Wales in terms of sports, despite never having lived there.

>52 Storeetllr: I didn't know that about Pegwell Bay. To be honest it's not really part of the world that I know well, as I think the beaches in South-East England leave a lot to be desired compared with other parts of Britain. I do like the painting though.

>53 LauraBrook: Hi Laura!

>55 Crazymamie: I will definitely be reading some more of Philip K. Dick's books. They've been on my TBR list for ages but somehow I've never quite got around to them. I found the book more satisfying that the film Bladerunner -there are certain elements of Bladerunner that I always found slightly confusing.

>58 scaifea: Amber maybe we'll just have to agree to differ on James!

>59 tiffin: lucky you! Cuba is somewhere I've always wanted to go to but never quite got there. A friend of mine did a sponsored walk across Cuba last year and I was very envious (well not actually of the sponsored walk part but of some of the places she got to see).

At rugby Wales beat Scotland yesterday and England beat Italy the day before so we were all happy. Everyone but Daisy that is, who seems to have acquired a rugby phobia. She was frightened last week when Mr SandDune shouted at the TV, and yesterday as soon as the rugby started she went into 'worried' mode, trying to clamber around on people's laps to get as close as possible, and panting. She'd started that in the first few minutes before anyone shouted at anything on the TV at all. We had to send her upstairs to sleep on J's bed as a special treat, to get her out of the room.

Hi Rhian: Your story of the shouts made me laugh. We had the same experience with little Scout. My daughter and SIL took her to his family's home to watch American football, and she started to cry when they yelled at the TV. After, my daughter said, they were all trying to cheer in normal tones, which she found hilarious.

I'm with you regarding James. Let others read him.

>62 BLBera: they were all trying to cheer in normal tones - We started off trying to do the same thing. It's very, very difficult!

My cat HATES football night. She dislikes loud noises at any time, but shrieks of agony and bellows of abuse - cheers are, alas, rare in my family at the moment - tend to drive her from the room (after much dark scowling and other signs of disapproval).

Oh dear I have been missing in action for a couple of weeks! I've generally been very busy and we've had illnesses of one shape or another. J started us off by going down with a cold last week, which he have to Mr SandDune on Saturday and me on Sunday. And then Mr SandDune's illness took a much more dramatic turn on Tuesday when he went down with a violent vomiting bug which lasted all day Wednesday. By the time I got home on Wednesday afternoon at 5pm he was clearly very poorly with a splitting headache, and hadn't been able to keep anything down since the night before. I wasn't quite sure what to do: phoning for an emergency appointment for a vomiting bug seemed excessive, but he seemed unusually ill. So I phoned our GP, and by the time he phoned back after his surgery Mr SandDune had started complaining that the light was hurting his eyes. So I think we both thought 'meningitis', and the GP sent an ambulance round pretty quickly. The paramedics were fairly certain he didn't have meningitis though, but thought they'd take him to hospital anyway. And after a few hours of intravenous fluids, painkillers and anti-emetics he was feeling much better. So we eventually got back home past midnight on Wednesday night. He's still feeling quite wobbly though although the vomiting has stopped, but he's managed to strain loads of muscles in places he didn't know he had them with all the vomiting.

Too much detail I know!

Was missing you around the threads Rhian and had wondered if all was well. Give my best wishes to Mr SandDune and I am sure that he'll be fine with enough rest.

Sorry to hear of your and MrSandDune's travails but glad to hear you are all on the mend. Hope to see you around again soon.

Yikes! I hope Mr. SandDune continues to improve and that illness leaves you all alone for a while!

Get well soon, all of you. xx

These flu bugs now are so virulent. Poor Mr. SandDune! I hope he didn't try to rush back to class: I have heard these things have a nasty rebound if not treated with respect and circumspection.

I hope all are now well or at least recovering in the SandDune home.

That's a nasty bug indeed. I hope he continues to improve.

Oh, dear, Rhian! So sorry to hear about Mr SandDune. That's a violent dose! Glad he is feeling somewhat better and hope he continues to do so.

What a nasty bug! Hoping you can all recover well over the weekend!

>65 SandDune: Was delurking to say how much I envied your OU reading - guided read round the classics - and then saw that you and your family have been unwell. Hope that recovery continues.

Sorry to hear that you've all been unwell, and poor Mr SD in particular! I hope he begins to feel much better soon, and those strained muscles start to recover.

Thanks for all the messages of support. Mr SandDune seems to be on the road to recovery now, and I think he'll be back at work on Monday. All this sickness has been at the worst possible time for my workload. I've been at that borderline between staying at home and going to work on a couple of days this week, and I think certainly on Tuesday I might have stayed home if I hadn't been so busy. But rather than my normal four days this week, I'm still working five days at the moment, and then we had a strategic planning day today as well, so that was six days in total which has been a real shock to the system!

12. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier ****1/2



Well I was pretty sure that I'd read Rebecca, but having read it this month I'm not 100% sure that I have. Perhaps I've only seen a TV series, or a film, or heard an adaptation on the radio. So while I knew the basic plot the details that I thought I remembered were slightly different. And it was all much, much better than I remembered too. But it may be that I read it when I was younger and more romantic, and I came to it expecting a different sort of book. But on this reading I enjoyed it enormously.

Most people probably have some idea of the plot. Rich widower Max de Winter, owner of the magnificent country house of Manderley in Cornwall, marries the young and inexperienced (and nameless) narrator, a girl without money or family. But her attempts to follow in the footsteps of Rebecca, the first Mrs de Winter are thwarted by the antagonism of Manderley's housekeeper Mrs Danvers, who idolised Rebecca and who seems to be determined that she will never be supplanted. And how can the second Mrs de Winter compete with her predecessor, who was as beautiful as she was intelligent, and was so seemingly successful at all she did until her untimely death?

Highly recommended.

Another reason that I've been busy is that I've been doing quite a bit of my Family tree, which I attack with an occasional burst of energy from time to time. I've been loading up some family photographs to Ancestry, and that's made me think about how much older people did look in the past. This is my father with my grandparents. I would guess my father can't be much more than 12 or 14 in the photo, which would mean that it was taken about 1933-34 at the latest. So my grandparents must actually be younger than myself and Mr SandDune are now. But they look so old ...

Glad to hear Mr SandDune is back on the mend. That doesn't sound like a very nice bug at all. Illness never seems to come when you've got time for it, you're either busy or it's the first week of a holiday cold (or is that just me!)

>79 SandDune: I know what you mean. I can't decide if it is two fold - as I get older, so what I consider old grows older ahead of me. Maybe it's an age version of the Australian outback always being "over there". Is it also related to the nature of our lives now - they are a lot less physically hard now. My great grannies were little old ladies for as long as I knew them. They were in their 70s at the time and seemed to do nothing but sit in a chair, drink tea and forget which of us was which. My Grandma was still doing meals for the old people when she was in her late 70s - she was also older than some of the people she was doing lunch for! It wasn't until she was late 70s that she started looking old in the same way that the previous generation had looked old. Similarly, Mum in her 60s doesn't act as old, physically, as I remember Grandma being when she retired. Here's hoping it means I'm in even better shape should I ever get that old. In my head I'm still in my mid 20s - no way am I actually mid 40s!

Excellent review of Rebecca, Rhian! I really liked it too, when I read it a few years ago.

You're right about our ancestors looking so much older than they were. This was true with all of my grandparents. My parents, on the other hand, were always "young" looking to me by comparison: I suppose they looked at 50-60 more like I expect people of the same age to look today.

I think our ancestors really did look older, faster. They led harder lives, for one thing. If your hair went grey -- well, it stayed grey (if you were a woman) and you didn't get into dieting and all that stuff. Some older women ended up looking like a breadbox and others like a rolling pin. True, it would depend on the class you belonged to -- so an older woman in the 1930s who belonged to the aristocracy would look like, well, like Queen Mary did. But nobody had plastic surgery or went around looking like Jane Fonda. Or trying to look like Jane Fonda does.

A friend of mine (whose birthday it is today) and I were doing our weekly grocery shopping run when she told me she has just been told that she is now knock-kneed. She was horrified, but it's because now that she is about 61 (I think), the muscle tone in her upper legs is weaker and starting to change. We can be as glib as we want about getting older being better than the alternative, but those inevitable changes to the body are disconcerting, even when we have things we can do about them that our grandparents didn't (or might not have thought had value in the way that we do.) In my mother's case, it's hard to tell. She has had so many health problems, that what she looks like isn't necessarily age-related. She has Bell's palsy, for one thing, which has affected half of her face. I'm accustomed to it, but this has been something that she has had for nearly 20 years now, and probably has made her look older than she is. But now, in her late 70s, she is starting to move like an older woman, too. She has never had a tremendous amount of physical energy or walked briskly, but it's about the way she walks. So, yes, I'd say that even though she has dressed carefully and elegantly (in contrast to the leisure suits or housedresses that her mother or grandmother might have worn), physically she looks her age.

I'm sorry that Mr. SandDune was so ill, and glad you had it checked out. The odds favor it being just a nasty bug, but even so, so much simpler to have the pros stop the violent vomiting rather than wait for it to stop on its own. Although the last time I had something like that, they insisted that they thought it was appendicitis, for some bizarre reason, and if I didn't let them do some (expensive) test, they were going to hold me for a psych consult (also expensive) because clearly I didn't know my own mind. ARGH. US health care system.... That bill came to $3,500, and they had to admit I had some nasty flu bug, which is pretty much what I suspected -- it was just that I couldn't stop vomiting and needed something to help with that and to replace lost fluids quickly. Sigh.

Rebecca is a classic. Have you read other du Maurier novels? I can't remember...

I have photos of my grandparents but I don't know how old they are in them. They always looked old to me, but they really were, I think. They worked so hard at everything, without the time and energy saving things we take for granted, so their idea of a good time was a cup of tea and a biscuit, not heading off to the gym for a workout.

>79 SandDune: That's an interesting question, Rhian, and some thoughtful responses. It does seem true, though, that people looked so much older 100 or even 50 years ago. I don't know why I look younger than my ancestors did at the same age, or why I don't have any perceptible wrinkles, but I think my mom's genes have helped. She died young, but before she had her first stroke, she didn't look as old as she was (55). When I was little, I had cousins who were already in their 20s and 30s, and they looked (and acted) twice as old as my 30-something daughter ever did or does now. I'm about the same age as my grandmother was when I was born, and I have to say that, though she looked much older than I do at this age, she was a lot more active and energetic than I am. (I blame that on the fact I had a desk job for 30-odd years and was never much into physical activities like sports or gym classes. I'm trying to change that now, in a last-ditch desperate attempt to stave off the crippling effects of arthritis and lax muscles.)

>78 SandDune: I re-read Rebecca sometime in the last couple of years so I have chosen to re-read one of her other books this time. I loved them all back in the 1970s.

Interesting discussion about aging grandparents.

>80 Helenliz: Looking at my grandparents I think it's very much to do with the fact that their lives were much harder. My grandfather was a stonemason, so a hard physical job, and my grandmother had 7 children between 1906 and 1920, so without modern medicine or labour-saving devices. But saying that they both lived to a reasonable age: my gran was in her eighties when she died in the mid-sixties and my grandfather died in the 1950's at seventy one.

They were both actually old enough to be my great-greatgrandparents: it's not that I'm secretly a lot older than people think!

>82 Chatterbox: I'm so glad we haven't had to pay for our health care with everything that we've had to have done in the last year! We've all needed treatment of one sort or another. And I was very pleased with the way our GP (family doctor) responded. We moved from a much bigger practice to a smaller one a couple of years ago, and I'm so glad we did. Our current practice seems to have much more of the personal touch. All GP practices are now inspected for the overall quality of their patient care, and our old one seems to have an unusually poor rating.

I've read Jamaica Inn and Frenchman's Creek previously (a long time ago). My recollection is that I enjoyed both of them but wasn't blown away. Rebecca seemed to have a lot more depth ...

>79 SandDune: Fascinating picture. Seven children. I can't even begin to imagine how much work that must have been. My grandmother was one of 8, where the eldest girls were easily old enough to have been mothers to the youngest. We have a studio portrait from around 1910, but I wish there was an 'informal' shot of them all to see more of what the relationships might have been like. Your father and his parents look close from this picture.

>65 SandDune: Sorry to hear about Mr SandDune's health scare. I'm glad he's feeling better now.

>83 tiffin: >84 Storeetllr: >85 thornton37814: >88 charl08: I always get a shock when someone in a nineteenth century book is described as an 'old lady' and seems completely decrepit with one foot in the grave, and then I realise later that she's probably not much older that I am now.

>89 souloftherose: Well me SandDune has recovered ... But J has gone down with it now and has had three days off school. At least it was a slightly milder version so no ambulances this time.

14. Decline and Fall Evelyn Waugh ***



The studious and respectable Paul Pennyfeather is sent down from Oxford in disgrace for indecent behaviour after a prank by another student of which he is the innocent victim. As his intended career, the church, is no longer open to him, he follows the advice of the college porter, and obtains a job as a school-master at Llanabba Castle in North Wales. With the staff ranging from a prospective bigamist to a clergyman who has 'Doubts' with a capital D, it is perhaps not an ideal introduction to the teaching profession. But Paul is soon to be spirited away by the widowed mother of one of his pupils, and his life takes a series of unexpected turns ...

This didn't quite grab me as it might have done. I felt that I'd have enjoyed it a lot more in audio book format surprisingly - a good narrator would have really brought the humour out. Or I'd have enjoyed a TV adaptation. But in book form the humour was very elusive - I could see it lurking in the corners, but never quite caught up with it. I might try something else by Waugh if it came my way, but I'm won't be in too much of a hurry.

Too bad the Wyndham was disappointing, the lichen plot itself didn't seem so bad as an idea.

Let me see, glad Mr. SD is better. Fascinating discussion about how we look compared to our forebears (now that wd is looking funny, as if I spelled it wrong, but I don't think I did, well, never mind!). I think it does have to do with the subtle things we take for granted -- dental hygiene is a much bigger factor than we realize -- keeping your own teeth, that is. Also, pain. Physical suffering really does cause one to look older. Can't get around that. But I would also add that attitude is also important. If you can reasonably expect to live to be 80, you might not feel 'old' at 60 or 70. Just thoughts.

Glad you loved Rebecca too, I reread (listening) last year and loved it all over again.

Too bad about Waugh. You are right about the humour and its elusiveness.

>92 sibylline: I thought I'd post another picture of 'old' looking relatives. this one must have been taken about 1923. My mother is the tiny girl sitting on the chair, and then going anti-clockwise my grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great grandmother. The very old lady looks at least a hundred but she was born in 1849 and so can't have been more than seventy-four when the photo was taken



Something that has suprised me doing my family tree is the number of my ancestors that actually did survive to a ripe old age, once they'd got past the dangers of childhood (and childbirth for the women of course).

And here's another family photo that I like. This one I guess taken about 1920 or so of my father' older brother and sisters who were born between 1906 and 1913. It's a bit blurry as it's a copy of a copy. Three out of my four aunts survived into the 2000's. My youngest aunt is in the left in her white dress and the other three aunts all have matching dresses, but the second from the left has a lace collar added on as well. I was looking at this photo with my surviving aunts around 2005 and even after all that time it was clear that that lace collar still rankled. That sister had been informally adopted by my great aunt and her husband who were childless, and who had more money.

Hi Rhian, thanks so much for sharing all those family photos. I wish you a lovely weekend.

>93 SandDune: 4 generations - what a great photo to have on hand!

Rhian, how lovely to have those old photos. The lace collar story is very funny, particularly the other aunts remembering after all that time!

Love the family photos, Rhian, and like Susan, particularly the lace collar story. You're right that your GG grandmother who is 74-ish looks 100. Another reason I think people looked so old then is that they sometimes had no teeth. I remember one of my grandmothers had none; she had dentures but did not like to wear them, so of course her face always was "sunken."

Enjoying the sepia tinted stroll through your families pictorial past Rhian. My mum's family photos only include individuals born after 1860.

Have a lovely weekend. xx

I can feel the siren song of working my family tree as well. Like you, it comes and goes in spurts, but in looking through some family photos of my Dad when he was young, it reminded me that I have much to do with my ancestors.

Thanks for sharing your wonderful photos!

Great family photos, Rhian! Thank you for sharing them with us.

>95 Ameise1: Thanks Barbara -lovely flowers.

>96 qebo: I've got another 4 generational one around somewhere - very similar to the one above - but taken about 25 years later with my sister as the baby. I'll see if I can find it.

>97 susanj67: I think there was a fair amount of resentment built up in their childhood. I don't think adoption was really regulated then, and it seems to have been an informal arrangement, but being brought up as the only child of a rather more prosperous family, rather than as one of six in a less prosperous one, meant that that particular aunt had a lot of things that her sisters didn't. And the two families lived very close together with the children attending the same school so they would have seen each other every day.

>98 lit_chick: I think that it wasn't uncommon for poorer people to have all their teeth taken out to save any bother with them later on. But you are right that it does age someone considerably if they have no teeth.

>99 PaulCranswick: Thinking about it the great-great grandmother in the photo (whose name was Mary Price) by the way, is the earliest born relative that I have a photo of. The earliest photo that I have is probably from about 1900, but I have quite a lot from that period just before the first work war.

Love the old family photos!

15. The Paying Guests Sarah Waters ****1/2



Frances Wray and her mother live in a large house in a genteel part of London, but despite their upper-middle class origins their income is virtually non-existent following Mr Wray's mismanagement of the family money. Both sons have been killed in the First World War and, with jobs for a woman of Frances's class hard to come by, she has taken on the work of the house herself, replacing the two or three servants who once ran the house. One solution seems to be to take in lodgers (or 'paying guests' as Mrs Wray euphemistically refers to them), and so Leonard and Lilian Barber come into the Wray's lives, renting three rooms on their first floor, a recently married couple on a definitely lower rung of the middle-classes than the Wray's. Leonard is a brash young man who Frances immediately finds irritating, but despite initial misgivings her friendship with the unhappily married Lilian deepens into a full-blown love affair.

So the first half of the book is foreshadowed from the start, this being a Sarah Waters book after all, but half-way through it takes on a much darker and more grisly tone. (Any readers who are not good with blood might want to give this one a miss). Frances and Lilian's world comes crashing down and their relationship is tested to the limit.

What I particularly liked about this was the period detail: the class-ridden but changing world of the early 1920's was captured beautifully. The Barbers are 'clerks', a class to be despised by Frances and her friends, even if they have more money. 'Frances has her own little clerk now, and her own little clerk's wife' explains Frances's friend Chrissie to her flat mate. And the way that both Frances and Lilian are trapped by their circumstances was wonderfully captured. It isn't a quick read and takes quite a long time to get going, but well worth the effort.

16. How to be Both Ali Smith ****



George's mother has just died, leaving the teenage George and her much younger brother to cope with their grief with little help from their father, who is using excessive alcohol as a anaesthetic against his own feelings. While George struggles with her day to day life she reflects on the last trip that she took with her mother: a few days spent in Ferrara in Italy, specifically to see the frescoes painted by the real-life Francesco del Cossa in the Palazzo di Schifanoia, an artist with whom her mother has become fascinated.

That's how my book started .... other versions start with the long dead Francesco del Cossa finding himself resurrected as a ghost in the middle of the National Gallery in London, where George is spending her days gazing at his portrait of Saint Vincent Ferrer. As Francesco continues to follow George, he reflects on his own life in fifteenth century Ferrara, as well as on the strangeness of the new place in which he finds himself. Is it purgatory, heaven, hell or somewhere else entirely?

This is a book full of uncertainties: gender, sexuality, and even life and death. Was George's mother really being watched by the security services as she believed, or was it a figment of her, or even George's, imagination. I'm not 100% sure what it all means to be honest, but I enjoyed the experience. Oh, and it's left me with a burning desire to go to Ferrrara, somewhere I have never been.

I might give "Paying Guests" a try. I haven't been a Waters fan so far but you and several others have given it high marks.

Rhian, that is a fabulous review of The Paying Guests. I've been watching this one, and your review has convinced me that I must read!

A couple of great reviews there Rhiah. Today we are going to a concert by a Renaissance ensemble with the theme, "At the Court of Ferrara". Thanks for reminding me why Ferrara sounded familiar !!

>106 SandDune: I loved the experience of reading How to be Both too, having never read anything else by Ali Smith now thinking about going and finding everything else she's written. It never occurred to me that the people watching her mum might be in George's head - reading too many new stories in the news of people being tracked by all their devices I guess. The art galleries / churches in Italy did sound incredible - and to be there with someone who clearly knew a lot about the art too I think, was some of the appeal for me.

>107 tiffin: >108 lit_chick: Sarah Waters can be a bit hit and miss for me, I didn't care for The Night Watch much at all, but this one worked. The one thing that I was unsure of was the historical accuracy of the plumbing arrangements in the Wray's house! I know that must sound very pedantic, but the plot is driven along rather by the fact that there is only an outside toilet, and baths are taken in the scullery: the lives of the characters are necessarily brought together more than their would otherwise be as they must encroach on each other's space to make use of the facilities. I'm not convinced that a family such as the Wray's wouldn't have a proper bathroom: they are very short of money by the time the book is set but that hasn't always been the case, and I can't help thinking that the arrangements wouldn't have been acceptable in a house of that type. I keep meaning to refer to The Victorian House (which is around somewhere) to check.

>109 lauralkeet: >110 charl08: I once spent ten months in Florence, so I did pick up a fair amount about Renaissance art, although I have forgotten most of it. But Ferrara is somewhere I have never been. After reading this book I even went so far as to look up the price of flights: looks like I could get a flight to Bologna quite cheaply and then a train ride. Perhaps something for the autumn?

This is the second Ali Smith that I have read (the first was There But For The) and they both generated a slight feeling of confusion together with pleasure in the reading. I think I'm going to be seeking out more of her work. (Actually I don't think I'll have to seek very hard as I'm sure we've for some of her earlier books hidden around the place somewhere).

You liked the new Sarah Waters book slightly more than I did, Rhian. I think I kept comparing it to Fingermith which is my favorite of hers. I do like her writing and enjoyed reading The Little Stranger for the BAC. Ali Smith is on the radar… Lots of good reviews here and some great family photos!

Rhian, I've never read any Sarah Waters, but I definitely want to get The Paying Guests after your review :-) I was out today and saw a Staffie puppy, which made me think of Daisy.

Well here's a more recent 'family' photo which some people will have seen already on Facebook. We bought Daisy a new bed last weekend, but it was immediately taken over by Sweep, who seems to prefer it to her own bed. As well as it being Daisy's, it is over a particularly warm spot in the underfloor heating which clearly appeals a lot! So this weekend, we had to buy Sweep a smaller version of this one for her very own ... so far so good ... in order to stop her pushing Daisy out all the time!

I love your painting up top, by the way.

Love the photo of Sweep in Daisy's bed, Rhian. What wonderful characters Daisy and Sweep are! Will be curious to know if Sweep will sleep in his own bed, or whether he'll prefer Daisy's … just because.

Busy, busy, busy again this week. We've been preparing for a Board meeting at work presenting next year's budget which is the first one that the new CEO has been involved with, so he's got different views as to how it should be done, and it's taken longer than normal. And J's not been well. But looking forward to a relaxing week coming up as we are off to Portugal tomorrow. Lisbon for a few days and then Evora which is more inland.

Great photo of Sweep... typical cat, taking over Daisy's bed. Doesn't Sweep realize cats are supposed to enjoy small, tight places, like boxes one size too small for them? ;-)

Hi Rhian, I've finally got time to visit your thread. I wish you a lovely weekend.

Portugal should be lovely, Rhian.
Wishing you a wonderful birthday and please give my best wishes to the two main men in your life. xx

Happy Birthday, Rhian! I hope you're having a splendid day in Lisbon. I hope to see you in June!

Happy Birthday, Rhian!

Happy birthday, Rhian!

Happy birthday Rhian!

Happy birthday, Rhian. Portugal sounds lovely! Enjoy!

Feliz aniversário, Rhian!

Thanks everyone for their birthday wishes! As I said we are in Lisbon at the moment - first time for us all in Portugal in fact! I'm not quite sure how we managed that - virtually everyone I know seems to have been to Portugal loads of times. We have four nights in Lisbon (today is our last night) and then we have three nights in Evora to the east. We have an apartment in the Alfama, which is the oldest area, and we've been doing all the touristy things: a day in Central Lisbon on Sunday, a day trip to Sintra yesterday, and looking around Belem (a suburb of Lisbon today).

Only problem so far is that Mr SandDune had his credit card stolen yesterday and in the couple of hours before he noticed they'd managed to run up about £3,000 on it. A bit alarming until we were reassured by the credit card company that we weren't liable for it!

>129 SandDune: Happy birthday! Portugal seems an excellent place to celebrate, despite the credit card nuisance (and I'm glad it's apparently no more than a nuisance).

Here are J and Mr SandDune looking slightly weather-beaten at the Castelo dos Mouros in Sintra yesterday, with Mr SandDune blissfully unaware that his credit card was stolen when he bought the entry tickets:



And here is the Palacio da Pena, also at Sintra, a fairy tale castle if ever there was one:



The Palacio da Pena is on top of the first hill that the wind hits when it comes in off the Atlantic: I was seriously worried about being blown over on the wall walk at one point!

And here is the Monasterio de Jeromimos, built to celebrate Vasco de Gama's discovery of the sea route to India (and built with the profits from the voyage apparently), the cloisters of which are truly beautiful.

>132 SandDune: Oh, so incredibly beautiful. I'm getting shivers.

And lastly a Lisbon tram, which are trundling up and down the street about 20ft from our apartment door:

Wow, those are very beautiful photos. I've never been in Portugal but it looks gorgeous.
So sorry to hear about the credit card issue. Enjoy your trip.

Beautiful photos, sorry about the credit card hassle but fortunately as you said you're not liable. Hope you enjoy the rest of holiday despite the mishap!

Happy Birthday, Rhian! Looks like you're in a good position to celebrate.

Great photos, Rhian! Thanks for posting them here. I'm sorry to hear about the theft of your husband's credit card, though. How did that happen?

Oh, my! Very beautiful photographs, Rhian! How was the language barrier? Did you encounter many English speakers?

>135 Ameise1: >136 lauralkeet: I had a panic initially that we were liable for any losses, but the credit card company said it was a clearly fraudulent pattern of use (a number of high value transactions very close together). Apparently, in order not to pay up the credit card company must prove that we have been fraudulent or grossly negligent, and they have to prove that we were, rather than us proving that we weren't. But as we reported it very quickly (a maximum of two hours of the theft they said everything should be credited back on our account automatically, and for us to get back to them if anything was missed.

>138 kidzdoc: It must have happened when my husband was buying the tickets. They also got the PIN number, so they must have been watching when he did the transaction (it was a small busy ticket office) and got the card shortly after). Not sure how - he wasn't approached by anyone -no obvious scams- but it was just that card taken.

Rats about the credit card theft. We are warned in Canada not to use credit cards at tourist attractions when we travel but to bank at a known safe bank, withdrawing cash to use because of the increase in fake credit card machines (skimmers) at tourist spots. They even insert them in ATMs, and can get your credit card info and PIN when you use your card. I'm so glad you aren't going to get nailed for the charges.

I hope your holiday is enjoyable despite this theft.

Sorry I missed your birthday, but your trip to Lisbon looks great, not including the card theft. Glad it got sorted and you're not liable for the loss.

Hi Rhian, I hope you're still enjoying your holiday. I wish you a wonderful weekend.

Beautiful travel photos, Rhian. Looks like a great trip.

My sympathy to Mr. Sand Dune. Credit card problems are so aggravating. We just got our new one and had to immediately replace it after we used it in a bar (where my wife was performing) and someone working there apparently stole/sold the number.

Oh, gorgeous pictures, Rhian! So sorry to hear that Mr. Sand Dune had his credit card stolen! What an aggravation. And they even got the PIN number! Well, I hope you still enjoyed yourselves and glad to hear that you will not lose out on any funds. Belated Happy Birthday!

Happy belated birthday, Rhian. Thanks for sharing the photos. Too bad about the credit card. I hope the rest of your trip is uneventful.

We're back home now, having landed at 11.45pm last night. The good thing about living close to the airport is that we were home and in bed by 12.30am. What I hadn't realised until yesterday though, was that this is the day that daylight saving time starts, and so we couldn't stay in bed quite as late as we would have liked this morning as J had football, and we needed to pick up Daisy and Sweep. A very excited Daisy when she saw me, but Sweep looked remarkably disinterested, as cats do!

>139 lit_chick: We found most people in Lisbon that we had any contact with spoke some English, but we did encounter a few people when we went to Évora for the last few days of the holiday who did not. But we picked up the Portuguese for 'ham' and 'cheese' and 'toasted sandwich' which were our main lunch requirements and so we managed. Portuguese looks so similar to Spanish when you see it written (and so I can pick up a few words here and there when I see it written down) but it sounds completely different: almost like Russian.

>141 tiffin: >142 lunacat: >143 Ameise1: >144 jnwelch: >145 vancouverdeb: >146 BLBera: I'm not really one for carrying a lot of cash around with me. At home, if I've got as much as £40 that's a lot, and so I don't like doing it on holiday. I'll certainly be more wary of using a credit card in that sort of environment in future.

Here are some (very) brief thoughts to catch up wth my reviews:

17. Embassytown China Mieville ****
A strange story about a human outpost on the alien planet of the Arieke, where language itself is a very different concept to the one that humans understand, and where human political manoueverings threaten to unwittingly destroy the whole Arieke civilisation. A good read (if complicated) but not as enjoyable as The City and the City or Railsea in my opinion.

18. Touch Clare North ****
A second novel by the author of The first Fifteen Lives of Harry August, at least when she's writing under the Claire North pseudonym. Not a sequel, but having a similar feel to her first, this one deals with beings whose conciousness can flow into another body by means of a touch. The unnamed narrator fights for his existence as he is confronted by an organisation striving to destroy all of his (or her, we never really know) kind.

19. Mort Terry Pratchett ***1/2
Thought I'd try another Terry Pratchett after not being impressed by The Colour of Magic years ago. Suprised that I quite enjoyed this story of Death getting rather tired of being .., well ... Death ... and taking on the apprentice Mort.

20. Canada Richard Ford ***
I may be being too harsh on this one, as it started out well, but it really lost me half way through. Dell's parents deal with a financial difficulty by setting out to rob a bank: a decision that changes both his and his sister's life for ever.

>147 SandDune: Your trip sounded wonderful except for the credit card part. Loved the pictures. Strange that your clocks just changed today, ours changed March 8. Maybe that is one of the reasons I can never figure out what time it is in the UK!

Welcome home Rhian. While you were away we got a puppy. Stop by my thread for photos!!

Glad you're home, Rhian. Thanks for the info on language barrier/English speakers in Portugal.

>149 Familyhistorian: Ours usually change last week in March and back again last week in October. I think most of Europe changes at the same time.

>150 lauralkeet: Oh I've seen your puppy - she looks adorable!

>151 lit_chick: The worst place I've been for language difficulties is Northern Spain where we only encountered a couple of people who spoke English in the whole two weeks. I can get by in French or Italian, but my Spanish is minimal! Meal times were a problem there too, with restaurants not opening before 9pm and pretty much no one (apart from us) eating before 10pm!

Talk about March coming in like a lion, and going out like a lamb: there has been a gale blowing all day here! But the good news is that all the several thousand pounds of spending on my credit card from when it was stolen has been credited back to my account. I know they said it would happen, but it's nice to see the balance back down to normal proportions.

>154 SandDune: Rhian, it's good to hear that everything is settled. We had an awful stormy day, too. It was quite violent.

Happy Easter, Rhian! Have a great weekend.

Hi Rhian, I wish you Happy Easter.

Happy Easter!

Here's a little treat



Glad you had a good holiday, though it's not great about the stolen credit card. Hope you're having a lovely weekend.

Hi Rhian - I loved the photos from Portugal, but not the story about your husband's credit card.
Glad you had a good time and that the money is all sorted out. And a very late happy birthday, while I am here!

I also haven't been to Portugal before but you make it seem like an attractive proposition.

Hope you are having a lovely Easter weekend.

Hi Rhiane, I wish you a fabulous weekend.

Lovely trip photos. Ugh credit card problem, but good that no harm came to you of it, just inconvenience.

Your thoughts on recent reads dovetail with mine almost exactly although if anything I was much harsher about the Ford. What makes the terribleness of it so interesting is that this happens when he writes from the pov of child/younger man (he's never written in the pov of a women that I can recall) - his least successful stories and this book and now a newer one. Whereas his Frank Bascombe books (starts with The Sportswriter are brilliant and get better and better. The third one is a masterpiece - capturing mid-life male anomie or whatever you want to call it!

Felt the same way about the Mieville too - almost too complicated at some points, but then totally worth it when I 'got' it.

Hi Rhiannon; just dropping by quickly. What gorgeous photos of your Portugal holiday (although what scarily steep hills!) though I'm sorry to hear about the credit card theft. I'm glad you didn't let it spoil the trip.

Extremely belated birthday wishes. 😁

>156 lit_chick: >157 Ameise1: >158 nittnut: Thanks for the Easter wishes. I am being very neglectful of my own thread at the moment. For one reason and another I am not finding enough time for LT at the moment, not being helped by Wifi problems and the IPad playing up!

>159 cushlareads: >160 PaulCranswick: Portugal was really lovely. Didn't get quite as much reading done as expected but can't be helped.

>162 sibylline: Perhaps I ought to have started with The Sportswriter - that's actually what I intended but the first few pages of Canada drew me in.

Some reading done although fairly slowly at the moment. I've finished Phoenix by Stephen Brust - another great outing into the world of Dragaera. The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook was my latest RL book club book: I found this slightly disappointing but most of the other members of the group enjoyed it. But I think I'm going to give up on The Plague of Doves by Louise Edrich at least temporarily: I'm not finding it at all easy to keep track of who is who while listening to the audiobook but I think I might enjoy it in another format.

Just waving hello. Glad the credit card stuff is worked out. We had ours stolen a few Christmases ago, and were unaware until a very odd assortment of things began arriving at our home. 5 lbs of plain brown m&m's, a massage tool from one of those gadget stores, a subscription to Cigar Afficionado and a membership in PETA, as well as to some kind of "adopt an inmate" fund. Whoever had our card had completely lost the plot. It was sort of entertaining once we had convinced our credit card company that we hadn't ordered any of it. Every day I would phone them and give them the latest list of "you won't believe what came today" items. Huge pain.

>166 nittnut: Wow that's weird! I thought the whole point of stealing a credit card would be to spend the money yourself, not to buy random thing for the account holder!

What a very strange story! More of an attempt at a prank, I guess, but not a very nice one.

22. The Aftermath Rhidian Brook ***

Shortly after the Second World War ended Rhidian Brook's grandfather was in charge of the reconstruction of the devastated city of Hamburg. Rather than displace a German family from the large house that was deemed suitable to his position, he decided that he and his wife and family would share the house with its owners. Despite initial misgivings, the two families eventually became close, and it is this experience that Rhidian Brook draws on in The Aftemath.

Colonel Lewis Morgan is allocated the requisitioned house of Stefan Lubert, a prosperous architect who has lost his wife in the firestorm that engulfed Hamburg. While Lubert is prepared to make the best of the situation when Lewis suggests that the house can be shared, his teenage daughter is not, and desperately resents the situation in which she finds herself. Meanwhile, Colonel Morgan's wife Rachael and eleven year old son Edmund are on the ship bringing the families of the British forces to Germany. 'You must keep clear of Germans.' says the official information booklet 'You are going to Germany' ' You must not walk with them , or shake hands, or visit their homes'. How can Rachael reconcile this advice with the news that she will be sharing her house with a German family, especially when she has not recovered from the death of her eldest son in a German bombing raid. And will she cope with living again with a husband after such a long period of absence.

The Aftermath started out well, but having set up a really interesting scenario the book seemed to rush to its conclusion far too fast, and there was too much focus on increasing the drama of the situation by introducing a plot to kill Lewis. I didn't get a feel for the characters really living in the 1940s either: too many twenty-first century attitudes seemed to be creeping in. And characters were introduced at length who then seemed to go nowhere. So this book didn't really work for me, although many people in my RL book club really enjoyed it. To be honest, I think I would rather have read a non-fiction account of Brook's family's experiences.

21. Phoenix Steven Brust ****

Phoenix is the fifth in Brust's Dragaera series featuring Vlad Taltos: a wise-cracking assassin making his way up the organised crime hierarchy of the Jhereg. The events of Phoenix follow on pretty much immediately after the events of Teckla, the third book in the series (this is a series that jumps around a lot, both within and between books), and Vlad's wife Cawti is still involved with a revolutionary group who aim to overthrow the Dragaean empire. Vlad meanwhile is approached by the demon goddess Verra to assassinate the king of a neighbouring island. But things don't go well: the assassination has unexpected consequences, and Vlad finds himself having to make some very difficult decisions indeed...

It took me a while to get into this one: initially it didn't seem to be moving Vlad's story forward and was more of a straightforward adventure story with Vlad's friends once more rescuing him from a very tricky situation. But by the end it had taken Vlad into a very different place indeed and it'll be interesting to see where the character goes from here. I'll be moving into the next one in the series very quickly.

23. The Plague of Doves Louise Edrich ***1/2

Well I think this would have had a higher rating if I hadn't been listening to it on audiobook to which it is not overly suited. In fact, it seems an ideal book to read on kindle: with so many different and inter-connected characters it would have been really useful to be able to do a search when each one reappears to double-check when they have featured before. As it was, I found the book's interlocking stories rather more confusing than I should have done.

At the core of the story is the murder in 1911 of a white homesteading family in North Dakota, on the outskirts of what becomes the town of Pluto. A group of Native Americans is hanged for the crime by vigilantes, and the ramifications of that act haunt the town for generations. The grandfather of the book's first narrator Evelina, was the only one to escape, and survives to tell the story to his grandchildren fifty years later. Characters come and go in this book, which spreads over a hundred years or so since the town was first settled. Evelina appears as a child, with a crush on the descendant of one of the vigilantes who teaches as a nun in her catholic school, and again as a young adult. There is a charismatic preacher married to a snake handler, who invents his own religion. Men give everything up for love, but also for stamps.

I can't quite decide what is my overall opinion of this book. I will certainly try another by the author but I'm not sure that I would have found it completely satisfactory even if I had been reading rather than listening. There wasn't enough closure to several of the narratives in my opinion: they just seemed to stop and the book moved on to something else which I found less than satisfactory. And I found it hard to engage with the characters when the key characters of the narrative were constantly changing. So I'm reserving judgement on Louise Edrich, I think, until I've read something else of hers.

Right - I'm all caught up with book reviews. I'm undecided as to what to read next. I should read The cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith my next RL book club choice, but it doesn't appeal at all to be honest. I don't really like crime, or the look of this one in particular, and Mr SandDune has just finished it and is telling me not to bother. Anyone ever read it?

Have just spent the last hour helping J learn various bible verses for his RE exam next week to illustrate the biblical view of homosexuality, the place of women, and other similar topics. Not a very cheerful way to spend an evening!

Hi Rhian! I'm visiting for the first time in a while! Glad you enjoyed Portugal despite the theft. I saw a film based in Lisbon a while back (I forget the name - it had Jeremy Irons in it and was mildly good) which really made me want to go there - all those white washed walls gleaming in the sunshine!

Returning to some earlier points: you really should watch Bladerunner again! It's my very, very favourite film ever! I just recently fulfilled a life-long ambition and saw it in the cinema, which thrilled me deeply. I am a very visual stimuli based person, so what I chiefly love are the mind-blowing visuals, (and the soundtrack by Vangelis is phenomenal too) but actually I love the story as well. It is a little confusing the first few times you watch it I guess, but personally I think it's worth the effort. Do give it another try! Strangely, loving it as I do, and being a Philip K. Dick fan as well, I haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I think I love the film so much I don't want an alternate version. Does that seem weird?
Also on the subject of films, the Hitchcock version of Rebecca is a great film. Maybe you've already seen it? That's another one where I've seen the film but not read the book, but in this case I do mean to rectify that someday.

Nice review of The Plague of Doves, Rhian. I'm now halfway through it, so I'll have to see if my opinions mirrors yours once I'm finished.

>168 sibylline: Hi Lucy! It is a strange story isn't it? The whole credit card incident has made me a lot more cautious about cards and banking in general, these days. I'm a lot more conscious who's around me whenever I'm using my card.

>174 HanGerg: I have seen Bladerunner since, several times, it's just my initial confusion was caused by seeing it in Italian at a time when my Italian was not very good at all, and I've never quite got over the sense of utter bewilderment. And it was obviously in the days before the internet so I didn't have any idea of what the plot was supposed to be! I'm definitely going to be reading some more Philip K. Dick, though.

>175 kidzdoc: I feel a little disappointed as so many people clearly seem to love Louise Erdrich, so I was expecting to be rather more gripped than I was. Part of the problem may be that short stories aren't usually my thing (with some notable exceptions, Alastair MacLeod being the obvious example), and although a novel it clearly owes a lot to the short story genre.

Hi Rhian, I wish you a relaxed weekend.

Louise Erdrich's first book Love Medicine is a five-star. A couple after that come close. . . but nothing else has ever grabbed me as totally as the first one. My guess is that it is 'the' one of her oeuvre that will last a long time.

I took this photo of Daisy and Sweep this morning. This is Daisy's preferred spot, but Sweep likes to look out of the window too, at times. They'd both found themselves nice sunny spots and were very toasty.

Beautilful! Thanks for sharing it, Rhian.

>171 SandDune: Men give everything up for love, but also for stamps. That line really tickled me. Lol.

And look. Sweep is being nice to ignoring Daisy. ;)

>180 SandDune: Lovely photo!

Rhian - I think The Plague of Doves is far from Erdrich's best. IMO, her best work is the early stuff: Love Medicine, Tracks(my favorite) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse are my top three.

Oh, that is an adorable photo of Daisy and Sweep, Rhian. They look so calm and peaceful.

>181 Ameise1: >182 nittnut: >183 scaifea: >185 lit_chick: They are gradually getting on better!

>179 sibylline: >184 BLBera: Sounds like Love medicine is the one to try!

I'm slightly annoyed this afternoon as I seem to have developed planter fasciitis (at least that's what I think it is given my search of symptoms on the internet). My foot's being playing up for a couple of weeks in retrospect but it's only in the last couple of days that I've realised that there is something actually wrong. The annoying thing is that I am supposed to be doing a sponsored walk next weekend, which I think is probably the wrong thing to be doing. Didn't someone on LT have this recently (or not so recently)?

Rhian, I had (very mild, I think) PF a couple of years ago. I bought a brace-type thing at my drug store/pharmacy to wear on my foot while I slept and within a couple of days, it went away. It also helps to roll your foot over a tennis ball or something similar. Again, mine was pretty minor - hope yours is, too!

Rhian, I'm sorry to hear about your foot. I think Mark might be the LTer you're thinking of ...

I had this a few years ago. One of the symptoms is when you first put weight on your foot after a night in bed, sharp pains shoot through your foot. While a boot at night can help, an orthotic insert in your shoe provides the most relief in my experience. And the stretching exercises and tennis ball can help too.

>189 ronincats: One of the symptoms is when you first put weight on your foot after a night in bed, sharp pains shoot through your foot. That's what I've got! And it hurts as well when I get up after sitting down for any time. In retrospect it's probably been coming on for a few weeks: I've read that one of the very first symptoms is to feel that there is something stuck in your shoe, and that's exactly what I've been feeling. I've been poking about a certain pair of shoes wondering why they suddenly seemed so lumpy when they used to be so comfortable. And my foot was hurting a bit last weekend but I put it down to going on a longish walk in my normal shoes rather than my walking boots or trainers.

>187 katiekrug: >188 lauralkeet: I've found several exercised on line to do. I'm also going to buy a new pair of trainers that provides more support (my current ones are old and were pretty cheap in the first place). Sounds like I need to look into the brace and the inserts as well.

>180 SandDune: Oh dear. And there was me thinking everything was sweetness and light! I was just sitting on the same sofa with Daisy curled up by my side, half-asleep, when Sweep comes along. Oh isn't this sweet, I think, Sweep wants to curl up on my lap next to Daisy... Then Sweep just swipes Daisy's nose with no provocation whatsoever... Sigh ...

Laura's right; Mark had plantar fasciitis late last year. As you said, rest is very helpful, along with foot exercises, anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), and corticosteroid injections for refractory cases. I hope that it gets better soon.

>191 SandDune: Ah, love...

The dreaded PF. I hope you can get through it quickly. There was some good stuff about it in my Chi Running book . . . I just reread it. One cause can be worn out shoes.

Dreyer recommends taking smaller strides, being careful not to stride with your heel striking first - mid-strike being the best, avoiding hills and trails as much as you can while it's bad, stairs too, work on flexibility of calf muscles and Achilles tendon. (he gives exercises, too much for me to put here.) Bad flare-ups - he recommends massage (I would run asap to a reflexologist), twice daily 5-10 min. soaks in ice cold water, ibuprofen, orthotics, and, interestingly, walking barefoot on gravel!

Ah yes, when those pet moments happen I always think it's partly because I was thinking these 'aren't they sweet' thoughts!

>180 SandDune: What a tantalizing glimpse of your garden, Rhian. And Daisy and Sweep looking so contented.

I had a mild case of plantar fasciitis a couple of years ago, which my doctor told me would take 6 - 18 months to get rid of. Mainly, I used the exercises and orthotic inserts - I bought several pairs over time, for different shoes. Apparently it's better than swapping one set through different shoes.

I guess there's an epidemic of the PF around here. I had it last year too, and it took about 18 months to get rid of. Shoes, stretches, lots of ibuprofen, gentle walks - no hills. I also took a water bottle (cheap filled ones you get in big packs at the store), froze it and used it as a rolling ice pack. I'd roll my foot back and forth over it. It was nice. That was my second bout with PF. The first time I got it, it lasted only a very short time, maybe 4 months. I got one cortisone shot, and it was worse than the PF. That time, I also had a nifty sock with a velcro strap that went from the toe to the top of the calf and held my foot in the flex position when I slept. That helped with the stretching part. Wonder where that sock went?

Sorry. Hope it's not severe and goes away soon!

24. Heroes and Villians Angela Carter ***

Well, this was a strange book with echoes of fairy tales in a strange dystopian landscape.

Marianne lives in a tower made of steel and concrete within the fortified compound of the Professors. Inside the compound is an orderly world where people are divided into Professors, Soldiers and Workers. Outside the compound is a world ravaged by nuclear war, from where the Barbarians, launch periodic raids. And even worse than the Barbarians are the Out People who are hardly human at all ...

When Marianne helps a Barbarian trapped in the village following a raid, she puts herself outside the world of the Professors for ever. But the Barbarian world is very different from what Marianne imagines, and Marianne herself is very different from the heroine of a fairy tale...

This started off very well with its mixture of dystopia and fairy tale. But as Marianne gets more and more involved in the life of the Barbarians it becomes less and less clear where the book is going, and it was ultimately unsatisfying.

>192 kidzdoc: >193 sibylline: >194 humouress: >195 nittnut: Thanks for all the tips! I am going to get some new trainers this afternoon and I will get some inserts for my normal shoes as well. It's a lovely day today, and I've tsken Daisy out for a short walk but I don't want to overdo it until I see some signs of improvement.

Rhian, I wish my thread was as organized as yours.

Happy day to you. Thanks for the comments re. your last read and the un satisfaction. I hate when I've read a book to the end, and I have that feeling.

Hi Rhian, get better soon. A PF is so awful. I wish you a relaxed weekend.

Oh pooh about the plantar fasciitis. Really good support in shoes is worth its weight in gold. It's the one thing I won't cheap out on: good runners, good walking shoes, good regular shoes. We don't realise what we ask of our feet until they start grousing about it.

What a sweet picture of Sweep and Daisy! What a wonderful name Sweep is! A name one does not often hear. No advice on PF. I used to run from the age of 13 til my early 40's at which time I felt my knees were crying out for me to walk. My sister has suffered with PF though -but I'm pretty sure her PF cleared up without to much trouble. I hope yours does too!

>198 Whisper1: I'm not sure about organised Linda - I seem to have spent most of this year getting very behind with everything on LT!

>199 Ameise1: Thanks Barbara, lively flowers.

>200 tiffin: I'm blaming my Ugg boots personally. I tend to live in Ugg boots all winter and have now discovered that they are bad for your feet. It never occurred to me as they just feel so comfortable. And the trainers I have been wearing are ones that J grew out of some time ago, and that I have been wearing ever since. (The last time I remember having the same size feet as J was on holiday in Croatia in 2009, as for some strange reason I remember being in our hotel room trying on his shoes. So the trainers are probably at least six years old). Still, now I have nice new snazzy trainers, so hopefully they will provide more support. And I've stopped walking barefoot on our tiled floors (we had underfloor heating put in precisely so that we could walk barefoot on the tiles floors - perhaps we should have saved our money).

>201 vancouverdeb: Sweep had a sister called Sooty, who was rehomed separately, although it seems a slightly strange name for a cat, as the original Sweep was most definitely a dog.

I had to google what Ugg boots are. Agreed that they look comfy but sure aren't good for the feet. Glad you found trainers which give you the support needed.

Nooooo! Don't tell me Ugg boots are bad! If we ever live in a cold country again, that would be my first investment; I have the worst circulation, and my feet get cold really easily. Then, of course the rest of me follows.

I've still got the inserts in my shoes, even though when we came back to Singapore I switched to a more open style. It probably looks a bit odd, but maybe I can take them out now.

I assume you have the exercise where you find a convenient step or wall (or any 90º surface) and flex your foot agains it? That was the one I used if I was out and about and my foot felt painful.

Good luck with getting rid of the PF. I hope it heals soon!

>203 Ameise1: Do you not have Ugg boots in Switzerland? Here are my Ugg boots, for anyone who is not familiar with them. Actually mine are rather more battered but this is what they looked like originally:



>204 humouress: Well, I don't think that I will be weaned off my Ugg boots completely, but I'll get some inserts and wear them a lot more selectively in future. My winter wardrobe is currently rather skewed to what looks good with Ugg boots, so I'll have to change that! I've always loved wearing boots but having always had quite chunky calves, combined with small feet, so taller boots have always been a bit problematic: Ugg boots seemed the perfect solution.

Rhian, we do have Ugg boots but I didn't know the name. My dauthers tryed them but only once because they got wet feet in this kind of boots. I guess with all the snow and slush we need other boots here.

>196 SandDune: That sounds like a truly weird book. Ha.

I love my UGG boots. Only they aren't really UGG. Just knockoffs. I wore them all the time in Denver, maybe the dry air kept them from getting soaked. Who knows. I find them a trifle too warm here in NZ, but great for stuffing my feet in to run and get kids at school on chilly, wet days.

Sorry to hear about the foot pain woes. I'm really not surprised to hear Ugg boots are bad for you. I often see people wearing pairs where the sole seems to have eroded so unevenly that they are walking on the side of the shoe almost. I have to resist the urge to tap them on the shoulder and point it out to them, as it looks so uncomfortable, but they seem perfectly happy - I guess it happens so gradually you just get used to it. Having said that, that might be just the cheap knock-off ones. Uggs are expensive, so it's hard to imagine them being so flimsy. Might be worth checking the wear pattern on yours though...

22. The Painted Veil W. Somerset Maugham ****1/2

Kitty Garstin, a spoilt, pretty and (not so) rich girl marries the bacteriologist Walter Fane in a fit of pique when she realises that she is never going to make the brilliant match that her mother has been preparing her for, and horror of horrors, her younger and plainer sister is about to be married before her. Arriving in Hong Kong, where Walter is based, and immediately bored with her life with married life, Kitty embarks on an affair with the handsome and successful Charles Townsend. When Walter discovers her infidelity he volunteers to accept a position as medical officer in a city in inland China where a cholera epidemic is raging, and offers the unrepentant Kitty the choice of accompanying him or of being divorced.
Kitty is more than happy to divorce Walter herself, especially as she believes that Townsend will of course marry her, but when she discovers that Townsend has no intention of leaving his own wife the thought of being divorced as the guilty party, and of coping with the ensuing scandal, is too much for her to countenance. Believing that she goes to certain death she therefore accompanies Walter to the cholera ravaged city ...

At this point in the book the plot seemed to be going in a very clear direction, and a fairly cliched ending looked to be in store. But having set up these expectations the book veered off in a rather different direction from the tragic (or not so tragic) love story that I was expecting, and was a much better book for it. A much more rewarding and interesting book than I had anticipated, and I'll definitely be reading more Somerset Maugham.

What a great review of The Painted Veil. It is now on the trb pile.

>209 SandDune: ooh, that sounds tempting. Great review.

Wonderful review of The Painted Veil, Rhian. The movie is fabulous, too!

Ugg boots don't hold up a day in our winters so they are only popular in the pre-snow autumn. Well, not exactly popular either as there have been several articles in the news about how bad they are for feet, so only the young 'uns wear them as fashion items. They are terrible for people who pronate.

Oh, hang on; I was thinking that Ugg were the indoor boots. I've never really had a chance to investigate them.

Intriguing review of The Painted Veil; I might read it some time.

>209 SandDune: Great review!

Nice review of The Painted Veil, Rhian!

>210 Whisper1: >211 lauralkeet: >212 lit_chick: >214 humouress: >215 nittnut: >216 kidzdoc: The Painted Veil was much, much better than I was expecting. For some reason it hadn't appealed over much, but I wanted to keep up with the BAC and I didn't think I could fit Of Human Bondage in. But I really liked the way that Maugham made both Kitty and Walter fairly unappealing characters at the beginning of the book.

>213 tiffin: >214 humouress: It hardly ever snows here so the Ugg boots are perfect winter footwear, or so I thought. I don't think I've ever heard of 'indoor' boots though? Before I had the Ugg boots I had Fitflop ones which were similar but not quite so pretty: Fitfliop footwear is advertised as being good for your feet so perhaps I should have stuck with them. But those particular boots came to a sorry end:

>217 SandDune: Oh, no!

>217 SandDune: Oh dear. :(

>217 SandDune: oh dear indeed!

>217 SandDune: Oh, NO!

>218 kidzdoc: >219 nittnut: >220 lauralkeet: >221 Ameise1: Well, that was two and a half years ago when Daisy was very young and very chewy! She's much better behaved now. She still likes to collect shoes (I think she finds them reassuring when we're out because they smell of us) but she doesn't actually do anything with them.

Oh, my! Just another reminder that we need to puppy-proof our house again before the first week of June! All potential chew toys out of reach!

>217 SandDune: A long time ago, I dated someone briefly. I discovered he was a rather strange fellow and his idea of social skills did not match mine in any way. He had a fit when he found my puppy heading for his shoes. Mind you, the puppy did not chew the shoes. That was indeed the last time I saw him. I would have stopped the dog from actually getting the shoes, so his reaction was quite over the top.

I have a different style of Uggs - I think they are less 'bad'? I hope so. I wear them lots! I'll go find a photo and bring it back here.


I have them in black, but there are other colours.

LOVE the photo of Daisy chewing up yr. old boots! Naughty!

>224 Whisper1: dogs just know things.

>217 SandDune: Oh!!!

>222 SandDune: How sweet. :0)

>225 sibylline: Those are cute. I bet since they have what looks to be a hard sole, they aren't so bad. I know mine feel more like slippers than shoes.

>223 scaifea: I was going to say that staffies are particularly keen chewers, but then I remembered a friend who had a Labrador puppy at the same time as we had Daisy and who ate all sorts of inappropriate things (a solar powered light from their garden was the one that sticks in my mind). Daisy was very keen on Lego, and I had to fish mangled bits of Lego out of her mouth several times a day at one stage! (It's seems funny to think that the stage when J was playing with Lego most days was only two to three years ago - he wouldn't dream of it nowadays).

>224 Whisper1: >226 humouress: Well, I always wanted Daisy much more than I wanted the boots so I was quite calm about it! I blamed myself for leaving the boots in a place that she could reach them rather than blaming her for chewing them.

The only problem with her shoe collecting habit is that the only shoes she can usually get at are the ones left by the back door, which are frequently muddy. Then she puts them on the sofa!

>225 sibylline: >227 nittnut: Those do look better. I'm going to be needing new boots for next winter, so I'm going to have a much better look around for something supportive.