dittybox

  Angel Delight. If any part of your childhood happened in the UK in the 1970s then you will surely remember the arrival of these packets of magic dust that transformed half a pint of milk into pudding.  No saucepans or fancy kitchen implements required, just a bowl and a fork, and by the time you had it all mixed together it was already setting into a smooth and creamy mousse.  This was a taste of the future! As soon as I saw the bowl of Angel Delight on the front of Grace Dent's book I was sure I wanted to read it.  I wanted to re-live the days when an Arctic Roll was something really special and tinned spaghetti on toast was considered a balanced meal.  I wasn't disappointed.  I got all that, but I also got a lot more that I hadn't been expecting. Grace Dent writes with the kind of unashamed honesty that starts off as bravado and slowly, slowly morphs into what life was really like for a girl growing up on a housing estate in Carlisle.  By fourteen ...

  ' Diversity matters.  And everything in the universe is connected - between the forests and the prairies, the land and the water, the sky and the soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all the other creatures.'                                                                   Suzanne Simard The indigenous American people know this, the Aboriginal people know this, and I'm pretty sure people in my neck of the woods knew this in the dim and distant past, but we 'civilised' people have chosen to forget. We forgot to take only what we needed; we forgot to put something back for everything we took and we forgot to treasure all the plants and wildlife that lives right alongside us. Suzanne Simard's book is written from the heart and neatly blends together her scientific research with her own family stories....

  Published: 2016, Windmill Books Just now and again, a few days come together where I start to feel that I am happy in my little corner of this earth and I get to enjoy a run of good things. It began with my birthday on Tuesday when I had visits, phone calls, messages and chocolate cake, then rolled right on into the Annual Golf Weekend.  Do I play golf? No, but my husband does, and off he goes with my blessing as I rub my hands with glee at the thought of having the house all to myself for a couple of days!  This is my chance to watch long films with complex plots ('Can't you find something a bit happier?'), whack my music up and read at any hour of the day or night.   And right on cue, along came A Gentleman in Moscow.  This book is a prime example of why I stopped giving out star ratings because I enjoyed it more than anything I've read in a long time and I've already dished out several fives. (Too easily pleased my dear dad used to say, but I think he ...

It's not fair! A line we learn to say with a pout as toddlers; scream in frustrated rage as teenagers and finally get to understand in full murky depth in our later years.  This book could easily be re-titled: The unfairness of life, as witnessed (and contributed to) by Olive Kitteridge.  It's a collection of stories linked by Olive's hefty presence as she goes about her life in a small coastal town in Maine. Olive is without doubt a difficult woman, who ought to live alone with nothing but a doughnut for company, but instead she is married to Henry who is the nicest man in town and shows her nothing but love.  He is a pharmacist who could have taught Dale Carnegie how to win friends and influence people and all Olive can see is a man who is soft in the middle and far too tolerant of dim-witted people.  What does he ever see in her? Each of the chapters introduces a different set of people with their own troubles and conflicted loyalties and in most cases the go...

  Published: 2020, Picador Genre: Fiction Themes: Glasgow, poverty, alcoholism My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤❤ Shuggie Bain is a novel about love and loyalty and hope. The kind of love that allows young Shuggie to help his alcoholic mother into her good black tights.  The kind of loyalty that makes him leap back to her side rather than stay with his traitorous father in a house where he would at least get fed.  The kind of hope that keeps him going because maybe one day his beautiful mother will get better and they can both start a new life as normal people. Young as he is, Shuggie quickly learns to do what he has to, rather than what he should do.  He doesn't comment on the 'uncles' that come calling on school-day afternoons, dangling the temptation of a few cans of Special Brew that they consider to be fair exchange for a little more than her charming company.  He knows when to make himself scarce and not to be a bother, and most importantly, he learns to manage h...

  Published: 2018, Penguin Genre: Fiction Themes: Trees and forests, logging, destruction of ecology My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤❤ I felt I ought to go outside to get my photograph for this book because the whole purpose of it is to remind us that we are not the only living things that matter on our planet. Richard Powers gives us the stories of nine people whose lives have been altered by trees, but those stories are really only secondary to the message in the book. THERE IS ONLY ONE EARTH AND WE ARE MESSING IT UP I don't remember a time when I read something that made such an impact on me.  By the time I was a third through the book I was starting to see the damage here in my town - let alone the rest of the world!  Trees hacked back because the fallen leaves are a nuisance, grass dug up and replaced with plastic grass that doesn't breath, concrete covering more and more space... I could go on.  What most people don't realise is that nature knows what it is doing if ...

Published: 2022, Bloomsbury Genre: Fiction Themes: South America, family relationships, business My rating (out of 5): ❤❤❤❤ If I ever tell my life story, I will take a leaf out of Violeta's book and make sure you understand that everybody loved me, and despite all sorts of questionable behaviour on my part, I leave the world as a winner. This is the story of a hundred year life.  Violeta is approaching the end, but before she goes she is determined to write out her life story for someone she loves dearly.  You don't get to know who that special someone is for most of the book, but that just serves to give the narrative a little twist. I didn't much like the character of Violeta but I understand that people who don't go round upsetting the apple cart don't make for very interesting stories.  With such a great time span to play with, Isabel Allende had plenty of scope for changing Violeta's circumstances and adding in references to world events to keep the reader...