Sheri.....I really liked Delicious ! also and decided to read her other books.

Just reading by " Sweet Tooth" by Ian McEwan an English author I like very much. He reminds me a bit of Graham Greene that I used to read in my teens. Both of them can conjure beautiful stories and plots with a vivid psychcology trait of the main characters. Even if this one is supposed to be an espionage novel, the main thread is the description of the main actors that get life to the story

Merryworld, I read your post quickly and noted your mention of Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World -- And Why Things Are Better Than You Think. You provided a link to info about the author Hans Rosling's TED Talks.

You also mentioned two other books that unfortunately I did not follow up before your post disappeared, like Carolyn's and Annpan's above, down that mysterious rabbit hole. I can only hope that it will resurface in a day or so! It was all very interesting.

The only reason I can think of for why so many posts might be flitting around is editing. Did you happen to edit yours? At any rate, I'll check back for the next couple of days to see if your post does eventually show up again between one by Yoyobon and one by Sheri, dated on Wednesday.

Today I finished The Canterbury Sisters by Kim Wright. When I started it, I though "chick lit" and doubted that I'd stick with it. But it grew on me and I ended up enjoying it. The protagonist is a middle-aged single woman who, following her mother's death, decides to fulfill her mother's request to take her ashes on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. She flies to London and joins a group of eight women who are walking to Canterbury led by a classics professor with the Broads Abroad program. The book describes their journey.

I do sometimes edit a post so that could cause a delay.

Re the sleeping sickness, I asked around and was told it was referred to as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This summed it up perfectly.

I have just finished Into the Blue by Robert Goddard and really, really liked it. I have read a few of his books; this one was written in 1990. The main character is hiding from his past by house-sitting for a friend on Rhodes where he has befriended a young female house guest who disappears. It's a fat book with lots of detail about his search to find her, including his return to England and a few murders. I gave it four stars on Goodread.

Annpan, I've heard of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I never made the connection between it and sleeping sickness. Fatigue seems to be a multipurpose symptom, and its cause could come from just about any disease humans suffer. I suppose that's why medicine is sometimes described as 'not entirely science'.

Some posters on other forums say that it is a common Houzz 'bug' that editing causes posts to vanish -- sometimes for a few hours or days and sometimes they are gone for ever. Many times the original posters can still see their posts with the edits they've made, but no one else does. It probably confuses them when no one responds and are possibly ignoring them. I wonder: how many times does that happen?

Freidag, I edited my post shortly after I posted because I forgot to bold the titles. Here it is again and I will delete the original:

I finished Factfulnsess: 10 Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. This was a book club pick and I found it very interesting. The basic premise is that our view of the world is static and too heavily influenced by our penchant for the dramatic and our need to simplify and generalize, and that when you actually look at data, it presents a very different view of how the world really is. The book is thought provoking, informative and entertaining, written in a simple, straightforward style. Hans Rosling has given a number of good Ted Talks and you can get a taste of this book through those if you are interested. I was sad to learn the author has since passed away, though this is a recent book. I also think his message is important in trying to navigate our current drama and misinformation loaded world. I read this on the kindle which I don't recommend as there are graphs and charts which I could not see clearly on my old kindle. Hans Rosling Ted Talks

I've started reading another book for work, Early Coins of America written by Sylvester Crosby in 1875. The writing is certainly less simple and straightforward than the above book, but it is no less interesting and basically tells the history of the American colonies through coins. It's also one of those nice, big old books with heavy yellowed paper, so an altogether different reading experience from Factfulness.

On my nightstand is A Thousand Days in Tuscany by Marlena di Blasi. It's a memoir of her time living in Tuscany with her Venetian husband, much like Under the Tuscan Sun or A Year in Provence without the house renovation (yet) and not as many entertaining characters, though there are recipes. It's a good winter bedtime book.

Merryworld, thank you so much! It's good to read your entire post again. I've already ordered Factfulness by Rosling because of what you wrote:

I also think his message is important in trying to navigate our current drama and misinformation loaded world.

You make a point that has provoked my mind a lot these days.

Frieda, I also loved Eleanor. I listened to it, and the narrator was Scottish, which added to my enjoyment. At the end there was an interview with the author, who said she got the idea from the book after reading about the epidemic of loneliness, which is not restricted to older people at all. The main characters are all well drawn, there is a lot of humour, but it was also very thought-provoking. I particularly liked the ending, which wasn't contrived in any way.

I have just finished The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which didn't draw me in as much as I expected. I found the characters a bit flat and the story not as well constructed as I would have liked. I should say that I know very little about classics and didn't have any set ideas about it, not even knowing the basic story.

Merry.....I really enjoyed all of Marlena di Blasi's books about her life. I believe there are four? or maybe five in the series which needed to be read in order.

Freidag, you're welcome! I hope you find it useful and entertaining.

Yoyo, oh no! This is the first one I'm reading. She refers a lot to her time in Venice, I should probably have read that one first, but I got this at a book sale without knowing. Oh well, I love pretty much any book about Italy and food. I assume her two Thousand Days books are the first two, in what order should the others be read? I see there is one about a summer in Sicily and two on Umbria and then a novel and a few others.

Merry, I use Google a lot to get books listed in the order in which they were written. Google knows everything, you know.

Today I'm reading The Flesh Tailor by Kate Ellis, one of her Wesley Patterson, detective and archaeology major, series. I do love British mysteries. This one is a bit gruesome involving digging up skeletons on a farm from the 15th century as well as one from the WWII era.

"Google knows everything, you know." -- Hahaha!

Rose....then we fill in the gaps !

Carolyn....your book title sounds like a bio of Hannibal Lector ( sp ?)

Kath, I didn't care for Song of Achilles, either. I didn't really like either of the main characters, so I didn't care what happened to them. :)

Donna

Last summer I visited a travelling exhibition on the work of the Great Bardfield school of artists who had lived and painted in the then remote Essex village during the 1930's to '50's.

On the strength of this I have just read Three Cheers for Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood, wife of the artist Eric Ravilious. She came from a conventional family and met her husband at the Royal School of Art where, despite realising he was 'not quite a gentleman' married and settled down in London and in Essex where they shared homes with a 'community' of water-colourists, decorators, engravers etc.

The books is written in a very easy almost school-girlish style, with much gossip about friends and family, so rather difficult at times to follow who is whom. In the manner of the leftwing 'arty types' of the period there was much bed-hopping, dallying with communism, trysts in cornfields etc!

Eric Ravilious was killed when serving as an official War Artist when his plane disappeared over Iceland in 1942 leaving Tirzah to bring up three small children on little more than fresh air. She died in 1951 after a long illness and her daughter has put together her writings and art work.

Great Bardfield Artists

I had never heard of this artist, but it looks, from her paintings, that she had an enormous amount of talent. The set up you describe reminds me of the Clive Bell group, along with Vanessa, et al. There was a formidable film about that "commune" a few years back.

I finished a thorough re-reading of David Starkey's "Elizabeth." In terms of detail, he leaves no stone unturned, although he ends his biography at the pinnacle of the Queen's popularity and success. In some ways, her reign seems almost miraculous, given her background and visissitudes in coming to power.

The Canterbury Sisters ...enjoying it very much so far.

The Poet by Michael Connelly. It isn't a Bosch book but for some reason was in my list as the next to read and is quite good. A reporter brother is looking for a serial killer who killed his twin policeman brother and others, leaving brief quotes from Edgar Allan Poe's poems as supposed suicide notes.

Rosefolly, I'm sorry that Birds in Fall affected you in that manner. I was the poster who praised it so much. My sympathies for all the unhappiness you're experiencing and I hope you find a more suitable read for you right now.

Rosefolly, I am in the same place as you. The only survivor of both the families I grew up with and married into. I am as an old tortoise might feel sometimes when I recall people and times and realise they must have gone by now!

It could be depressing if I think about this too much. Thankfully I have i'net friends and my "young" family to chat to but no one who can recall the old days any more.

It is good to have friends of a variety of ages, and I am grateful that this is the case with me. I'm not going around in a state of perpetual mourning, but do find it important to focus more on the happy than the sad.

Skibby, please don't worry. Not every book works for every reader.

Ann, you have shared many of your stories of your younger days here, and I suspect others have enjoyed them as much as I have.

Rosefolly, thank you for that.

I think I have had a varied time, partly because I married an interesting man!

I sometimes wonder what other paths I would have taken by making different choices, like not going to Australia or perhaps marrying a man I met on the ship.

He was a divorced man with two sons around 10 and 12 and at 22 I wasn't that keen on the idea of a ready-made family! Especially as I only met him once! He was so upfront about re-marrying for the boys sake that I was instantly scared off!

Woodnymph/ Mary Yes the artists at Great Bardfield had much in common with the Bloomsbury Group of writers Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, E M Forster etc with their idea of overthrowing Victorian 'moral values' and doing their own 'thing' although I think the BG's would have considered themselves far superior, higher class and better-off. It doesn't seem that any of them really had to earn their own living . . . and when not writing just sat about b*itching about each other and/or changing partners of whatever sex.

A Dorothy Parker quoted "They lived in squares and loved in triangles"

A picture below of their country house, Charleston, deep in the Sussex countryside.

Charleston country home of the Bloomsbury Group

Yoyobon - As soon as I read that you are liking The Canterbury Sisters, I thought, "Why yes, it is the kind of book that would appeal to Yoyobon." The photo of you and your friends on bicycles with helmets and tattoo sleeves came to mind.

Kathy.....yes, and I am enjoying getting to know this group of diverse women in the story . A strange assortment for sure, yet it seems all women are a kind of sisterhood .

I finished Serpent's Tooth by Faye Kellerman last night. As usual, Pete Decker and his team solved the case. :)

Now I've started The Perfect Couple by Elin Hilderbrand. I've only read two chapters but like it so far. A "floater" is found in the ocean off Nantucket - she is the maid of honor at a wedding scheduled to take place at the house where she drowned.

Donna

I just finished Kate Atkinson's Transcription. It follows Juliet, a rather flat main character as she's recruited by M15 during the early days of WWII and falls into several unpleasant adventures thereafter. Quite frankly, I didn't enjoy it much. And though I found the historical bits somewhat interesting, the characters were flat and somewhat interchangable and I had no idea what drove any of them. To make matters worse, in the end I was not quite sure what exactly happened or why. The spies, double-agents (and potentially triple-agents, I guess) simply left me confused. I have liked her other books, so this was a disappointment.

Here's hoping the next book I pick up is better than the last three I've slogged through.

Sheri....have you read Eleanor Oliphant ...? It's a different kind of story which I found very engaging.

Also , I really liked Golden Hill. Did you say you'd read The Golem And The Jini ?

Sheri, I rather felt the same with Transcription and thought Juliet was a character in some sort of limbo. She just existed 'at work' and there was little background beyond this strange sub-spying world she inhabited and there was no follow-up to/with her strange boss . . . who, after the War pretended not to know her.

Yoyo, I loved Eleanor Oliphant and The Golem and the Jinni. Both were excellent. I have not read Golden Hill, but I will add it to the TBR list.

Vee, I'm delighted I'm not the only one who felt that way. I really couldn't figure out the whole spy game thing, and so many threads were left hanging.

I have two library books waiting and I'm hoping for good things: Finding Camlann by Sean Pidgeon (recommended by Reader In Transit) and The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped In an Ikea Wardrobe by Romain Puertolas, a book one of my friends picked up when her library did a "blind date with a book" promotion. She hasn't told me if she liked it yet, but just based on the title I knew I would have to at least give it a try.

Fingers crossed!

Sheri_z6, so sorry to hear Transcription is not up to Kate Atkinson's usual standard, but thanks for reviewing it. I look forward to hearing about the very intriguing titles you're picking up at the library.

My book club picked Dreamland: the True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones for our next read. We seem to be on a non-fiction kick, but I don't expect this book to be hopeful like the last one. Still, it gets excellent reviews, and I'm interested to learn more about this issue.

Vee, the Bloomsbury Group's house is lovely. Thanks for sharing.

You're welcome Carolyn. Having see photos of the 'inside' of the property when the place was lived in by those literary/arty types I think they must have had a host of servants to wait on them, cook and clear up the mess. They seemed to think nothing of daubing the walls with murals leaving trails of paint on the floor and generally behaving like spoilt, over-indulged children.

Merryworld, I just checked Factfulness out from the library. I probably won't give it a book club level read, but I am intrigued. Thanks for mentioning it.

I'm half-way through Finding Camlann and enjoying it. Thank you Reader In Transit!

Sheri,

You read fast! Good to hear you are enjoying it. When you finish it, let me know what you think.

I read Suspicious Minds yesterday, second of the Harry Devlin series, by Martin Edwards yesterday. I really enjoyed his Lake District books, written later than this set. Harry is a solicitor and has a difficult client being questioned about his missing wife.

Picked up Headlong, the latest Bill Slider, at the library this afternoon and am looking forward to starting it later tonight.

Running for the Hills by Horatio Clare is the story of his growing up with writer/journalist parents and a younger brother on a broken down hill farm high in the Brecon Beacons in Wales, bought by his Mother on a whim as none of them know anything about rearing sheep, Clare recounts the difficulties of no running water or electricity in a vermin-infested ramshackle building with a leaking roof and damp-sodden walls.

The parents 'play' at farming for a few years, travelling from London at w/ends and holidays and leaving the 'real' work to a farm labourer. But the strain of this breaks up the marriage and the boys are left in Wales with their Mother who does her best to cope.

Lots of descriptions of the blood and guts of lambing, infestations of maggots, crows pecking out the eyes of new born lambs etc. No wonder Horace seems a mass of twitching nerves who cannot rest if he doesn't know where his Mother is and tries when only seven years old to be the 'man of the house'.

His is good on 'nature' and has written many books on natural life but this book has rather too much of his parents political 'Guardianista' views without seemingly realising they are living the life so despised by trendy intellectuals . .. ie outbidding local farmers to acquire the farm then requiring the considerable help of the same 'locals' to keep them going, all the while slightly mocking their neighbours for their lack of education. Despite this attitude the boys are sent to the village school and provided with free meals. Their educational progress is found to be two years behind fashionable London schools, at which point they are packed off to expensive boarding school; so the so-called poverty seems rather questionable.

Finished The Canterbury Sisters and really enjoyed it ...however I did not care for the way she ended it . A bit cliche' .

After reading two books about "deep" thoughts of the characters I needed a comfy book and chose A Rule Against Murder ( 4th Three Pines novel). The moment I began I was immediately into the story and felt like I had come home again. I really love the way Louise Penny writes .

Yoyobon - I agree with you about the ending of The Canterbury Sisters. And speaking of endings, A Rule Against Murder has a rather far-fetched one in my opinion - but the book is indeed a pleasant outing with the Gamaches.

Whoever mentioned David Reich's book on ancient DNA, Who We Are and How We Got Here, thank you! I just finished it, and found it quite interesting, and full of lovely maps and figures! I get so tired of wordy science books written by journalists who can't seem to conceive how useful figures are. I have to admit that I couldn't always follow Reich's statistics-based logic (statistics were never my strong point), but this is a fascinating blend of history, archaeology & anthropology. A good companion to some other books I've read in the last few months, one about the development of language and another on European mythology.

Bon, is A Rule Against Murder the one where the Gamaches are on holiday at the hotel in the country? That was my most recent Louise Penny read.

Donna

Yes, that's the one.

Reader In Transit, I finished Finding Camlann and really enjoyed it. I have always been fascinated by Arthur and Stonehenge and archaeology (although I have made only a superficial study of all three subjects) so the book had all the right ingredients to make it work for me. I enjoyed the way the author explained the history of the various legends, as well as the Welsh connection to Owain Glyn Dwr, a historical figure I had never heard of before. I was tripped up several times by Welsh names, but I at least had a nodding acquaintance with the geography and some of the history so I was able to immerse myself in the story. Thanks again for the recommendation.

Well, I am at my wit's end. Life as we know it has ended, or at least it has met a major bump. My pettest pet peeve with our local paper's House of the Week presentation on Saturdays of consistently spelling mantel as mantle has turned up in the erudite and beloved Cynthia Harrod-Eagles' new Slider book, Headlong. What to do? What to do?

Poor Carolyn! I feel that way when otherwise literate authors use words incorrectly, like prevaricate when they mean procrastinate.

I usually yell!

I have some to add before we turn the page of the calendar. Juliet in August by Dianne Warren. I liked this very much. Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate. This is a book club selection and I purposely didn't look at anything about it beforehand. I did accidentally see a pop-up somewhere that said "Blockbuster hit!" which made my heart sink just a little. :) This had me turning pages very quickly though and it was only when I was half-way through did I look at the book jacket to discover that the orphanage operation was based in fact. DH remembered reading about the scandal but it was news to me. I had to put it down by 2:30 a.m. since my concentration was failing but I finished up promptly with my morning coffee. Really liked this book and look forward to the discussion at March's meeting.

My visit to the library this week: Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson. I'm looking forward to this since there were many here who spoke about it favorably. Also, Endurance: Shackelton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander. I've started this one and so far, so great. I need to be in the mood to savor the details and look up places and terms that I don't know. The photos are excellent. There is one shot of the Captain's quarters that shows full bookcases. I'm so curious what's in there... Lastly, thinking I might need a break from all this catastrophe I picked up On the Same Page by N.D. Galland. I know nothing about this except that it takes place at Martha's Vineyard.

Sheri,

I'm glad you enjoyed Finding Camlann. From the historic point of view, I found the book very interesting. Compared to that, IMO, the personal story of the characters was weaker, though I loved all the drives Donald takes on the backroads.

I wish the author had written an "Author's note", explaining a little about the history with which the novel deals. As you, I had never heard of Owain Glyn Dwr.