Wednesday Books

Well, the blog is back. I'm calling this Wednesday Books - plural - because I've had a lot of reading time over the last five weeks. On the morning of February 17 - Ash Wednesday - I stepped on some ice on the Chalet Hill outside our place. My left leg shot out at 60 mph, bringing my right ankle under and in. Although we did not know this until later in the day at the Lake Chelan Community Hospital when doctors and x-rays got involved, I badly broke my right ankle. I had 3.5 hours of surgery the next afternoon, and I now have 14 titanium screws and a plate in that ankle. So the last five weeks - and more weeks to come - have been about trauma, surgery, and ankle recovery. Finally this week I am feeling normal - with my ankle in a big cast. I cannot put any weight on it, so I get around in our apartment on a nifty wheeled "crutch substitute," as it's called it the medical world. They take me down the hill in a 1950's snow vehicle called the Imp (its real vehicle name - not a Holden nickname!). Until Tuesday, I was only going down on Sunday afternoons for dinner and church. Yesterday I spent all afternoon through dinner in the Village, getting up and down stairs with muscle (mine) and help, and with the assistance of a nifty stair-climber one of the carpenters made. So things are improving, but it is a long haul. Larry is fabulous in every regard with all this. I call him St. Larry.

So I've been reading lots of books. I finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (spoken of with reverence in previous blogs) and it is indeed stunning from beginning to end. I read In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif, which was the March selection of the Faith Women's Book Group which paid a lovely visit up here the first weekend of the month. I liked the novel very much, especially in its look into the cultural struggles of educated Egyptian women in the 1970's. Then I read the latest Karin Fossum, a Norwegian mystery writer. Her detective is Inspecter Sejer. This one is titled The Water's Edge. They all make you wonder about the effect of dark nights and deep fjords, but she's good at her craft, and the translations are excellent. I read Laurie King's The Language of Bees, the latest in her Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell series. I've enjoyed this series all along. I think she has convincingly found a female partner for Sherlock. She nicely weaves in Conan Doyle's character threads and Holmesian history to make it all compelling and believable. And she writes well. And now I have just finished catching up on The #1 Ladies Detective Agency books by Alexander McCall Smith - I read five in a row! They are good. They are all the same length (about 200 pages) and his writing style is such that you just whip through them. But it's nice writing, and the musings and humor make them highly enjoyable reads. Today I started a novel called The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club by Gil McNeil. Seems pretty good so far - a nice story line that should be interesting, interlinking generations in a small English town along with some very high-flying journalistic types.

In the meantime there is Holy Week and Easter. They are well in hand. Just have to get down there to get it all organized! Holden is a great place for help in time of need, and I am very grateful for that.

That's all for this Wednesday. Now that I have some energy and focus back, I may blog more often. (I know, I know, I've said that before...)