Hey there!
Yup, I’m still alive and reasonably well.
All of December and about a third of January seem to have rolled on by without me present in this particular venue, and I guess all I can say is, “Whew! Life!”
An utter avalanche of kind-of-unplanned-for paperwork landed in my lap that last week in November, and then I got sick with a virulent virus (I’m much better now), and just Plain Old Stuff kept cropping up. Christmas whooshed past. We got the tree up on December 24th (and it’s still up though not for much longer as it is starting to drop needles and become a fire hazard over there in the corner of the living room), but we didn’t actually have our family Christmas dinner till January 6, because my daughter-living-at-home was also ill, my husband worked through the holidays, and we told our living-elsewhere son to stay far away from the House of Plague until we weren’t quite so collectively contagious. So now I’m feeling more human, and things are starting to get under a bit of control, and I yearn to return to the blog. Which I shall do properly soonish, I hope.
In the meantime, I’ve been reading mostly old favourites. Pretty well every single D.E. Stevenson I own, plus the whole Megan Whalen Turner Eddis-Attolia quintet-so-far (the sixth and last book is due out in March – sob! – can’t believe it will be over), plus various other old friends. R.A. MacAvoy, Rumer Godden, Margery Sharp, some literary garden writers. This and that, mostly easy reading. Nothing too demanding.
I did read a new-to-me book, a reissue of the 1962 novel Four Days by John Buell (thank you for that, Brian Busby), and it was an intense little experience pushing the #10 end of the rating. I will write about it in the very near future.
Also Colin Thubron’s 1987 travelling-in-China book, Behind the Wall, which was absolutely excellent.
Great experiences with two writers I suspect I am in no way done with.
I sometimes wonder if I’m running out of writers to discover, and then another obscure door opens and off I wander into another dusty corridor lined with shelves full of delectable things by people I’d not yet heard of. And thank goodness for that! I will never run out of things to read, will I?
Here’s hoping you all have had a marvelous holiday season, and that 2019 is good to you!
Leaves & Pages 