dittybox

During the lockdown a great many current affairs programmes are having to conduct interviews with people directly from their homes, and it has been heartening to see how many interviewees are sitting in front of a full bookcase. When you look at all the interior design pictures on Instagram you might be forgiven for thinking that books are no longer required in a modern household.  The walls are all dove grey and white and only interrupted by a line or two of some uplifting quote in copperplate script.  Now we see the truth!  All sorts of real people still own books, and in many cases, quite a lot of books. My family always had books at home, and although I have seriously culled the quantity since moving to this house, I would never want to be in a house with no books on the shelves.  We have bookshelves in five rooms here and a tub of children's books waiting for the Great Grandbaby to be old enough to want to listen to a story. You can tell a lot about a pe...

So many little jobs are getting done during the lockdown that I'm sure the house and garden have never looked better or been so clean.  Today I took all the books off the bookshelves and gave them a little brush over and re-arranged them in a more logical order. The picture shows the shelves in the study but there are more in the dining room, my work room and the children's room. Part of my housekeeping process is to weed out anything that I don't love or need and I pass them on to local charity shops so that they can benefit other people.  Since my father died I have been quite strict with myself about this as while I was dealing with his book collection I realised it is possible to have too many books. To Dad, books were almost sacred objects, and once they entered the house they were never likely to leave, even if they got damaged or he didn't like them.  He actively built up many shelves of non-fiction books to make a library for himself, and for a while, this...

N ow and again you read a book that you realise will change the way you think and In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahmen is one of those books. I've just taken a copy back to the library after spending at least three weeks reading it and I was even tempted to keep it for a bit longer to go over a few sections again.   Take note of the title as events in the final chapters throw a different light on all the thousands of words that have gone before, much like the ending in The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  The part of the story that you didn't know is never spelled out, but glimpsed as shadows flickering in a crowded room. Much of the book is set out in narrative memories and each chapter is preceded by excerpts from other books.  Ignore these at you peril as they indicate the direction of travel and are not simply window dressing.  One of them taken from John Donne (Meditation 17) provides the guiding light for 'what we know' at the end and Rah...

This is a beautiful edition of the first Harry Potter story illustrated by Jim Kay. My eyes landed on it in a second hand bookshop straight away as it was in such good clean condition and I don't think it has ever been read. This is one of those books that I consider to be a real treasure as the quality of the artwork is fantastic and even if you never read a word of the book you would want to look at the pictures. The illustrations are scattered through the book with some covering two pages for maximum effect. I read on the fly-leaf that Jim Kay has been commissioned to do other books from the series and after a quick look on Amazon I can see that he has already done three. If this volume goes down well I think I know something that will be included in Little Grandgirlie's birthday presents later in the year!  She can have this one when they pop over tomorrow - I've just finished reading it myself.