Please use 2007 March Rose list. Thank You, Ron S

Please use new listing, thanks. Ron

" I've always gone in spurts with my reading." Me, too, although there is always an undercurrent of at least one book going on. My Biggest Reading Year was 2009. I read 147 books In the last seven months of that year. Part of that mania was getting my first kindle and being able to get books at any moment. I downloaded books in the middle of the night, just because I could. I was like a drug addict in a full police evidence room. Part of it also is that I was taking classes at Oxford that summer and had to read like a maniac just to keep up. For every sentence spoken in a class, you could tell there had been at least five books read on the subject....that's why I quit my book club for awhile afterwards, I could not bear to hear anyone say pettishly, "Well, I just didn't like it, that's all, no reason I can put my finger on really." That frenetic pace slowed down in 2010 when I went back to work full time (and more). This year I am reading even less as we can finally connect our movie screen directly to Netflix and I am catching up on 20 years of BBC and ITV episodes and shows---Foyle's War, Inspector Lewis (which they filmed at the Randolph when I was in Oxford), Spooks, even Pie in the Sky (hanging head here). We havent had tv since 1998 and never had cable so this is all new to me :-)

Just finished Everything Under the Sky by Matilde Asensi. Set in the 1930's, a Parisian woman (who was born in Spain) heads to China to tidy up the affairs of her recently-deceased and long-estranged husband. When she arrives she finds things are not as she suspected. Her late husband collected Chinese artifacts and one of them is extremely important in Chinese history. Unfortunately, to settle her late husband's debts, she must embark on a journey to solve the riddle of this artifact and hope to find the treasure at the end. But the bad guys want the treasure, too. It reads like an Indiana Jones/American Treasure movie set in China. The author explains a lot of the Chinese philosophy in depth: the I Ching, Five Elements, Feng Shui, Taoism, martial arts and so on. It is also laced with long paragraphs of Chinese history. I personally loved the philosophy and history in the book. As a martial artist and martial arts instructor, I enjoyed seeing the main character "on the path" although she had no idea she was on it. PAM