Ginny, I always find 'true' history of ordinary people as interesting, if not more so, than that of lords, generals. politicians etc. In the same way when visiting 'stately homes' over here I prefer looking round the kitchens, stables, laundries rather than the stiff and formal rooms and wonder how anyone could have been comfortable in those surroundings.

On the reading front I have just finished The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid. I imagine many of you read it years ago but if not, it is the 'story' told by a narrator to an American who is visiting Lahore. He talks about his youth in Pakistan and getting a scholarship to Princeton and his subsequent employment with a top US firm. The attack on the World Trade Center happens at this time and he finds his attitude towards the US changes as does that of his fellow-workers towards him. As his tale unfolds there is an increasing air of menace around the American and you feel something bad is about to happen . . .

Ginny, which screens are you getting in? Here, that would mean flyscreens for the windows and doors. We have a fine variety of flying insects to keep out. This does not always work and tonight I had to deal with a large cockroach and got bitten on the forehead by something!

I get large lumps from bites and have to deal with the effects quickly or they get nasty.

Annpan, The window and door screens are for flying insects like mosquitoes, flies etc. And for birds and bats, I suppose. I was so surprised the first time I went to England and saw no screens. Funny the things you assume are everywhere.

And Vee, you are right about "downstairs". I enjoyed Downton Abbey so much but it certainly was a highly rose-colored view of servant life.

Ginny, we went to a display of Canadian goods once and asked about a flat piece of plastic which turned out to be an ice scraper for the car windows. Not something to need here!

My grandmother was "in service" from age 14 until she married. She told us some funny stories about what the servants got up to as well as how hard they were worked by some employers.

She would stay for one year and then leave, go home for a month, then try a new place.

Once she went to the Channel Islands on a long working holiday with an employer and his family and could have married a smitten local man but would miss her own family.

She would have been stuck, occupied by the Nazis there but instead was in the London Blitz!

I still have her two Guernsey coins that she had made into a souvenir brooch.

I’m about halfway through The Spellman Files and am thinking about quitting. Is it supposed to be funny? I’m finding the main character, Isabel, tiresome and her weird family stories aren’t funny to me, but I think they are supposed to be. Also, I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen.

Donna

I did enjoy the first couple of Spellman books but gave up on the third. This was a while ago so I don't recall why.

The same with other series that amuse me at first but the characters get tiresome and predictable. Humorous themes are hard to continue and not many authors can manage this.

I've been in an unprecedented reading slump for the last several months, but hopefully that has changed: since the beginning of April, I've read This is How You Lose the Time War, A Sorceress Comes to Call, The Serviceberry (don't bother!), Travel Light, All the Light We Cannot See, and finally also got to The Wind in the Willows for the first time. I have to admit that as a senior citizen without the childhood nostalgia attached, I found The Wind in the Willows a bit too cutesy (Mr Toad was especially tiresome), but I'm glad to have finally read this children's classic. Of the rest, I think the Doerr book was the best, but I enjoyed all of them (except, obviously the Kimmerer book). I read Travel Light becuase it was mentioned twice in Time War, and for those who like fantasy, I definitely recommend it - a very different book. It was published in 1952, so it can be hard to find. Fortunately my library has it. It begins in a mythic time with baby princess Halla cast out by her father and new stepmother, rescued by her nursemaid who turns into a bear, raised by a dragon, and then is told by Odin to cast off the burdens of the past and 'travel light.' The story transitions to Halla's journey in historical times (and through centuries) to Constantinople and eventually to late medieval Germany. Now the fun part is connecting it to Time War.....

Donnamira, I suppose W-in-the-W's can be read from many levels. Doesn't Mr Toad remind you of any modern-day politicians . . . and not just from the US? I don't know if Kenneth Grahame wrote it as an allegory but certainly the characters and their characteristics are still with us today. The pompous Toad. Ratty probably based on the 'muscular Christians' so admired in Victorian/Edwardian literature, simple but honest Mole, the wise old Badger (but do we pay close attention to his kind these days?) and the rabble of weasels, stoats etc fermenting trouble deep in the Wild Wood.

I've started West With Giraffes which I am surprised to discover is based on a true story.

Annpan, That's a wonderful story about your grandmother. Strangely, it just came in tho you posted three days ago. Gremlins, I guess. As for ice scrapers, we wouldn't be without them where I live, mostly for car windows and roofs.

Vee, People are indeed very much the same in previous times as now. Read Jane Austen's Emma and the family discussions in the drawing room are similar to now. That old cranky father stirring up and the peacemaker son changing the subject. Just like any family gathering!

I'm reading the latest David Baldacci, To Die For, courtesy of my daughter who really likes his books and gets them as soon as they are released. This is a pretty good one.

Just picked up from the library's 'Local History' section North Forland Lodge: A School in Wartime a collection of chapters written by pupils who attended the girls boarding school when it was evacuated from a coastal town in Kent and settled in the local 'Big House' at the edge of the small town where we now live.

Interesting as today we in the UK commemorate VE (Victory Europe) Day, with church services, especially at Westminster Abbey, TV interviews with very elderly ex-military people, everyday memories from members of the public and so on.

The 'girls' from North Forland talk about having to chop fire-wood, take weekly baths in 3 inches of water (despite his Lordship's pigs being hosed down daily) help to plant and later harvest potatoes, pick apples . . . and all this between doing normal school work.

One amusing incident describes all the 'best' sets of china being brought into what had become the school kitchen as Queen Mary (mother of George V1) was visiting and often took a fancy to any little trinkets lying about; hosts found it difficult to turn down her requests for a 'gift'!

Vee, That sounds really interesting. Nothing like history by those who actually lived it. And an amusing anecdote about Queen Mary.

I am reding Iced, a Felix Francis book I had missed. I always liked the Dick Francis books and continue to enjoy Felix, although not as much.

How To Read A Book by Monica Wood.

I am not sure if I like remembering some of my childhood during the war.

My mother and her parents with whom we lived tried to make it a normal time but of course it was not. We lived near London and slept nightly in a half-buried Anderson shelter during the Blitz. My father was stationed as an Army liaison officer in Persia.

Food was rationed but as grandad worked at Smithfield meat market we did get off-ration offal to supplement the allowed meat ration and he grew vegetables in the large back garden.

It was a time of "Make Do and Mend" and I have always felt the influence of those times.

Annpan, I still find it difficult to 'waste' food and use everything up unless it is covered in green mould. We don't buy many new clothes and I still mend things where possible. Well, OK, except for darning socks as they are almost always of 'mad-made' material and cannot be repaired. MY DH and I are just too young to remember WWII ( I always tell anyone impolite enough to ask my age that when Hitler heard of my birth he went into his bunker and shot himself).

I have a young acquaintance who complained that her daughter's school skirt split at the seam the first time she wore it so it was thrown away. On another occasion she trod in something 'unpleasant' so, rather than clean her boots, she threw them out!

On a WWII related note. Today marks the 80th year since the liberation of Guernsey in the Channel Islands where Princess Anne will take part in the celebrations. The popular US books Potato Pie . . . . did not have a good reception over there due to it's inaccurate depiction of the relationship between the Nazis and the oppressed population.

I put aside The Spellman Files to read Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs. It’s pretty good. Still trying to decide whether to finish Spellman.

Donna, I often put down a Spellman to read another novel.......then go back to the life of Izzy and her family. I like that I know the characters and can revisit them when I want.

A too long and rather tedious read has been The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan. I don't understand why 'secret' is in the title as there are so few known facts about his life that most of it could be 'made-up'. I also found some of the language used, a sort of mock Elizabethan, off-putting, although had it been in modern English I expect I would have been equally dissatisfied!

I've just read A Murder for the Books by Victoria Gilbert, an entertaining read enhanced by its library setting. She has written lots more, which I will pursue because who doesn't like to read about books?

I slogged through to the end of The Spellman Files. I never did think it was funny.

Now I’m working on The Book of Doors. Bon, did you finish listening to it? I like it okay. So far I think the story line is fairly predictable. I’ll let you all know what I think when I’m done.

Donna

I'm currently reading a slow-going but interesting novel by Lisa See, The Island of Sea Women. It's about Korean women on an island in the 1940s. These women are specialists at collecting valued sea creatures from the sea, diving deep (without oxygen tanks) and holding their breath for extended periods - a dangerous but well-paying job. Well-paying by island standards, that is. These people live in near poverty, harvesting their food from both the land and the sea. Apparently, this is based on a true profession from that time.

As I say, interesting, but slow. It suits me for now as I am laying around recovering from yet another case of covid I brought home with me from a trip last week. I have a habit of coming home with covid whenever I've been on long or multiple flights. Sigh ...

Donna, I did finish it but can't say it's a favorite.