About 25% of the book. Though there have been occasions when I have enjoyed the book up to the halfway point and something then happens that totally POOFS! the magic feel, and I will fasforward to the ending. This is mainly for closure. If the ending is just horrible I then toss the book, but if it is intriguing, I will go back and skim to the finish. Woodnymph, I have both Hilary Mantel's novels and am having the same problem as you. These are books I should enjoy but somehow I'm missing the bus. I havent given up yet though. Re: Garcia Marquez - I really x3 tried with One Hundred Years of Solitude, but was just baffled. I hated it. It was for book club so I did manage to get through the whole thing but decided that this type of magic realism is not for me. :)

I finished Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates over my "girls escape to the mountains" weekend. I enjoyed it very much - very creative, interesting twists, and the historical tie-ins were well done, I thought. During this "escape" weekend, my friends and I hiked through some snow/slush, down to spring wildflowers, then re-entered summer by heading further "down the hill" a ways, into the little goldrush town of Murphys - where, to our delight, we found a "used and new" bookstore! It was even air-conditioned - critical, since it was 103F. All 3 of us picked up various biographies - all of our DDs need to read bios for "summer reading" before high school starts. I found several good buys, including some early editions of some favorite childhood books, which, of course, I had to sit down and read immediately upon our return. I also picked up a Jonathan Stroud (of the Bartimeus trilogy ) called Buried Fire. It concerns an ancient dragon sleeping, and then waking deep below a hillside next to a small English town, and the effects on some local boys. I'm sure glad I read this after we had our Mid-summer fest! I have quite a TBR list and stack, but a friend just loaned me Dan Simmons Olympus, sequel to Ilium. So of course, I have to re-read the latter to read the former. Not that I mind - it's great the second time around, too! take care, litlbit

I really liked the Beatrix Potter books and saw nothing strange re the animals wearing clothing, as a child. After all, when we were kids, we used to dress up our pets like dolls. I can recall being given one of those old dolls which were half black and half white, according to how you flipped them upside down. Recently, in the downtown old market of Charleston, I saw those dolls for sale. I would have thought they would have been banned, due to P.C. I remember loving "Little Black Sambo" as a child, but when I went to the USSR in the 60's, it was pointed out how this racism was a flaw in the American value system, and that of course, we Soviets, with our pure intents have no such values.... My parents took me to see the movie "Uncle Remus" when I was a child growing up in Atlanta, GA. I remember being driven by the former home of Joel Chandler Harris on the other side of my city. I thought the film charming and was shocked that it went out of circulation, when the P.C. police took over.... My grandmother gave me the Milne books in the 1940's. I loved the poems and could recite by heart the one about "My teddy bear is rather fat, " for years.

ullis - it's The Shadow of the Wind. I gave Joan Didion's book to my mom for Xmas, and was very happy to see that both my parents are reading it now. My father, who doesn't read, is 100 pages into it. He went to see King Kong in the afternoon on his birthday last week (my mom was working and in any case was not interested in that movie), and while he found it novel to be at the movies by himself, because he was reading that book he found himself wondering about life without my mom, and how he would feel, and I actually think this book is bringing them closer. They have been empty nesters for a year now, and there have been some rocky times as they are still learning to relate to each other without mediators........................................................................ I also gave my mom Oprah's 50th anniversary DVD, and there are some very moving interviews on that (with Nelson Mandela, for instance).