Thankyou for all your kind and helpful comments yesterday and your emails on the same topic - lots of sound advice and supportive words to which I should certainly pay heed.
Just to pick up one or two of the points raised, Claire mentioned the book How to Do Everything and Be Happy
by Peter Jones which she'd noticed under 'current reading' in the sidebar - it so happens that that was sent to me for review and arrived at just the right moment! I've now read it, enjoyed it, and am skimming through it again to be sure I've grasped its strategic elements and then I'll come back and talk about it here soon.
Also on the current reading list is my attempt to 'break free' (though I can't possibly compete with Freddie's outfit), i.e. reading something of my own, not a book someone has sent. I absolutely loved T.E. Carhart's The Piano Shop On The Left Bank
when I read it a few years ago (it got a bit of coverage in this post) so I've picked it up again and have happily entered the world of Desforges Pianos: outillage, furnitures behind its deceptively simple shopfront. Coincidentally, there are two piano shops in the street where I live and we are on the left bank - not of the Seine, rather the Water of Leith, so while our neighbourhood may not have the same cachet as Thad Carhart's Parisian one, its piano shops, small run of secondhand book shops, the house in which Chopin gave a recital and the house in which Robert Louis Stevenson was born all give it a cultural frisson!
Lastly for now, a quick word on today's arrivals: Insurrection
, a hefty 600-pager of a novel about Robert the Bruce written by Robyn Young, whose Brethren
trilogy has been a bestseller - that's due out early next month, and The Yellow Duster Sisters: A Wartime Childhood
, a memoir by Susan Kennaway which tells of her evacuation, along with her sister, to Africa, and their subsequent return to England and boarding school. With an emphasis on "the often destructive nature of shifting wartime family relationships, Susan Kennaway asks in her prologue, "Can anyone be in the least surprised at the people we children became? Remote, fearful of separation, suspicious of close relationships. Cautious, mistrusting and, sometimes, cold as ice? Did that really happen to us? Were we really part of the exodus? Was that really me? Well, yes." That book, too, is due out shortly.
