Reading Love Letters from Cell 92 by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria Von Wedemeyer. I like ordinary homely details, what he is reading, whom she visited, what he is learning from his Bible reading and all in the midst of the bleakness of prison. Love, waiting love at it's most acute.
Eating brown toast and honey. Or was for breakfast.
Drinking tea. Obviously.
Wearing black trousers, peasant style blouse from Sainburies (blue and red patterns), and black cardigan.
Feeling hopeful. Because of different new things that might happen/are happening.
Weather is surprisingly mild. Bulbs are beginning to poke their heads out which fills me with spring-anticipation.
Wanting - well - many answers to this one. I have applied for a job, waiting to hear about short listing and then interviews would be the 1st March. But I would really like to get it. Please.
Needing - again many replies. However I really need to de-junk my flat. The proportions of this task are a little over-whelming but I suspect I need to isolate certain areas (this box, this cupboard, this drawer) and just focus on it for an evening or weekend afternoon.
Thinking about quiet time (and bible reading) quality. And not really having it or doing it. Early it needs to be, and of course with tea. But more than that I need soul feeding. After all, few things are needed and they tend to be the most important.
Enjoying NIGELLA!! I ordered all of the Nigella TV programmes on DVD from Amazon. I love her enjoyment of cooking and food and somehow I am picking it up when my motivation for cooking for one is at a low ebb. So I am enjoying preparing a meal (however humble) in my kitchen and eating it.
Looking forward to an International Palliative Care course at Edinburgh University for the whole of next week and a long weekend in Birmingham with friends.
Thank you Sarah Bessey at http://www.emergingmummy.com/ for this idea and giving me permission to use it.
Showing posts with label Book reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book reviews. Show all posts
Sunday, 12 February 2012
Thursday, 15 September 2011
"Howards End is on the Landing" by Susan Hill.
I found "Howards End is on the Landing" by Susan Hill in Waterstones yesterday and what a find it is - "I decided to spend a year reading only books already on my shelves for several reasons..I sometimes wonder if the books came into this house or if the house grew around them. Either way, they feel as organic a part of it as the beams, the Aga in the kitchen, the wood burner in the sitting room, or the old pine wardrobe that arrived in half a dozen sections and had to be assembled once it was in the right bedroom."
Books are indeed the decor of my flat- I decorate with bookshelves, and adorn with second hand copies or with a beautiful-with-etching new copy. The good ones are each a little world, taking you back to where you were when you first read it (rattling through India by train to Agra reading all of Jane Austen) or taking you forward providing some new insight.
On the internet :-
"The start of my journey also coincided with my decision to curtail my use of the internet, which can have an insidious. corrosive effect. Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while one's ability to spend long focussed hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted....The internet can have a pernicious influence on reading because it is full of book-related gossip and chatter on which it is fatally easy to waste time that should be spent paying close careful attention to the books themselves, whether writing them or reading them."
She never said a truer word- and here I am writing this on Facebook. And on my blog. But some fasting needs to take place with my internet use. My powers of concentration were greater as a teenager and I do think it was the lack of television and computer use.
Susan Hill explains further:-
"Rationing it strictly gave me back more than time. Within a few days, my attention span increased again, my butter-fly brain settled down and I was able to spend longer periods concentrating on single topics, difficult long books, subjects requiring my full focus. It was like diving into a deep cool Ocean after flitting about in the shallows, Slow Reading as against Gobbling Up."
However that is only the first few gems. Our reaction to individual books is so personal - and it is heart-warming, like sitting by a fire in winter with cocoa to read of her personal and extremely well-read history and thoughts on different literature. Harry Potter and Dickens. PG Wodehouse and Enid Blyton. Poetry and Pop-Up books. She is not snobbish about literature. The only thing it needs (boring, I know) is an index and then you could look up what she thinks about every individual (and there are many) book that she mentions.
I have only just started it- but it is splendid and soothing at the same time. A September Holiday leaves-turning- brown rainy afternoon, Read, if ever there was one.
Books are indeed the decor of my flat- I decorate with bookshelves, and adorn with second hand copies or with a beautiful-with-etching new copy. The good ones are each a little world, taking you back to where you were when you first read it (rattling through India by train to Agra reading all of Jane Austen) or taking you forward providing some new insight.
On the internet :-
"The start of my journey also coincided with my decision to curtail my use of the internet, which can have an insidious. corrosive effect. Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while one's ability to spend long focussed hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted....The internet can have a pernicious influence on reading because it is full of book-related gossip and chatter on which it is fatally easy to waste time that should be spent paying close careful attention to the books themselves, whether writing them or reading them."
She never said a truer word- and here I am writing this on Facebook. And on my blog. But some fasting needs to take place with my internet use. My powers of concentration were greater as a teenager and I do think it was the lack of television and computer use.
Susan Hill explains further:-
"Rationing it strictly gave me back more than time. Within a few days, my attention span increased again, my butter-fly brain settled down and I was able to spend longer periods concentrating on single topics, difficult long books, subjects requiring my full focus. It was like diving into a deep cool Ocean after flitting about in the shallows, Slow Reading as against Gobbling Up."
However that is only the first few gems. Our reaction to individual books is so personal - and it is heart-warming, like sitting by a fire in winter with cocoa to read of her personal and extremely well-read history and thoughts on different literature. Harry Potter and Dickens. PG Wodehouse and Enid Blyton. Poetry and Pop-Up books. She is not snobbish about literature. The only thing it needs (boring, I know) is an index and then you could look up what she thinks about every individual (and there are many) book that she mentions.
I have only just started it- but it is splendid and soothing at the same time. A September Holiday leaves-turning- brown rainy afternoon, Read, if ever there was one.
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