dittybox

  The take-away from this book is that bad things can happen to good people and none of us should get too comfortable in life as you don't always end up where you expected to be. Faith and religion are tricky subjects to tackle in a novel, but Elizabeth Strout understands her subject, and her portrayal of a young Christian Minister in his first church perfectly captures how theological expectation does not always survive contact with real people. Tyler Caskey is an idealist who has to learn that not everyone's moral compass is set in the same way, and even his young wife surprises him sometimes when she makes judgemental remarks about people in the congregation.  He is also aware that the women in town like to gossip and the slightest hint of scandal is enough to get their telephones ringing as there's nothing they like better than building something out of nothing.   Tyler doesn't like to correct people individually and hopes to get his teaching across through thoug...

  As you get older you start feeling a responsibility to preserve what you know about family history and this is why Michael Palin felt he he had to write the story of his Great Uncle Harry.   Some years ago an elderly cousin of his father passed on to Palin a box of photographs and papers that had come from down from her grandparents (his great grandparents), and as she had no children, she gave it to him to keep it in the family.  For a long time everything just sat in a box as there were other more pressing projects to deal with, but when working on a documentary about the last days of the First World War, Palin found his great uncle's name carved on a memorial at the site of the Somme battlefields.  When he discovered that there was no grave to visit and Harry's final resting place was 'Known Only Unto God', he knew he had to know more. Writing a book like this is a lot harder than it looks because the old family notebooks and papers only gave the bare outli...

  This one surprised me.  After reading the first few pages I was starting to think that I didn't much like the writing style and I didn't really like the characters and if it had been a Wednesday (library day) I may well have taken it back and got myself something else.  Then all of a sudden it perked up.  It was a bit like one of those films that starts in black and white and then flips into colour when the story gathers pace - and it certainly gathers pace! By the time I got to the last third of the book I could barely put it down. The Birnam Wood of the title is a gardening collective of people who go around planting vegetables on little pockets of land that don't seem to get any attention from anyone else.  The produce is then used to help feed the group and the remainder is sold to raise funds for anything they can't get by upcycling things discarded by other people.  It's all very small scale until they receive an offer of funding from a billionaire ...

When I started reading this I thought it was a translation because there was something about the writing style that reminded me of translated books by Isabel Allende.  Turns out the author is American, and when I think about it, the first name 'Dave' is probably not a traditional Spanish or Basque name so maybe that should have given me a clue. There are great swathes of history that I know nothing about, so the title Guernica meant nothing to me, although many of you may be aware that the Spanish town in the Basque region was heavily bombed by Hitler's German Air Force acting in support of General Franco in 1937.  There was no specific military purpose for destroying the town and many innocent civilians lost their lives during the prolonged raid. The Spanish artist Picasso (who I have heard of) was outraged by the bombing and within the same year produced a large mural as an anti-war statement.  Picasso and his painting 'Guernica' are mentioned many times and a rev...

  It's 1954 and a young mother has been brutally murdered.  There is only one suspect and that is her mother-in-law who had been staying with the family.  It's a terrible crime and the newspapers make much of the fact that the accused is a Greek woman from Cyprus who speaks no English and therefore requires an interpreter to help her throughout the court proceedings. The interpreter, Eva, is also Greek and the police come to her as and when she is needed, but she has never dealt with a case as serious as this one and it requires her to spend a great deal of time with Zina Pavlou who has been sent to Holloway Prison while awaiting trial.  During their time together Eva becomes quite protective towards Zina but feels powerless to do anything to help as she is only there to record what has been said and must not interfere. The plot-line is based on a true story and it becomes quite gripping as we learn more about Zina and her past life back home in Cyprus.  The aut...

  I am sixty six so I guess you could say that I have already mastered this subject, but when I saw this in the library I thought I might see how someone else is handling it. It's not exactly a Haynes Maintenance Manual, more a re-telling of the events that led to Lyn Slater becoming known as 'The Accidental Icon', and you may have seen her blog or her posts on Instagram.  She's very stylish and when she became accidentally famous she was living in Manhatten and already had a keen interest in fashion.  I was only a few pages in when I decided that I probably wouldn't ever wear Japanese deconstructed clothes from high fashion brands, so I must confess I just skimmed through the rest of the book.  We don't need lessons in how to be old because it creeps over you like fog in the night and all you can do is stay healthy and don't get tempted to follow any light. I often hear people say that they don't feel any different inside than when they were teenagers, ...

  The Dark Island of the title is Orkney, which in reality is an archipelago of islands just off the northeast coast of Scotland.  Here in the UK we are familiar with TV detective series (based on the books written by Ann Cleaves) set on the Sheltland Islands in the North Sea to the north of Orkney, and in this book we have a similar backdrop but the main character is a journalist not a detective.   The author Daniel Aubrey wanted to write a book about autism, so the young reporter Freya Sinclair has autistic traits, although she doesn't have a firm diagnosis as she is waiting for the outcome of her assessment.   All through the story-line Freya's behaviour is very challenging for everyone around her as she is driven by her own issues and her colleagues see her as unreliable, unpredictable and self absorbed.  She doesn't follow instructions, she disappears without warning and she ignores her phone when everyone is worried sick about her.  The auth...