The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole

Posts on this blog dried up for a while here didn’t hey. That may be because baby 2 arrived seven months ago and we moved house - but not in that order. Surprisingly enough reading opportunities and sewing opportunities also dried up.

I have managed to complete one book in this time. The secret diary of Adrian Mole was a fun and quick read about a boy coming into his teenage years. It’s a classic for s reason. It’s a very funny way of a young boy trying desperately to make sense of the adult world around him. I can’t remember much detail now as it’s been months since I read it but I do remember having a grin on my face for most of the read.

Foundation

I finished this novel around two months ago. A lot has happened in the meantime, I’ve moved house and had a baby, so my memory of the novel is a little hazy. This novel is apparently a classic and mainstay in the science fiction canon. It is the story of a colony of scientists and chronicallers(people are writing an encyclopaedia to chronicle everything) who have had to move planets. What really struck me was the lack of female characters in the story; I counted a receptionist and a nagging wife. Strange that these new colonies are able to repopulate given that scientific  developments don’t seem that advanced. Anyway, there are various plots to take over this particular colony and the story loosely follows the attempts to thwart the takeovers before they happen.  My daughter picked up the book one day and I asked her what it was about. She looked st the cover and said it’s anout a white man. Such wisdom from a two year old!

Embassytown

I really enjoyed my previous experience of reading China Mieville but I struggled with this one. I'm wondering how much of this is because I rarely get to read for a long stretch of time, I am grabbing moments when I can and try to read a little before I go to bed. I miss my bus commutes to work where I would get at least two half hour stints a day. The problem with not having a long amount of time to get into this book mainly stemmed from there being a new language to learn and keep up with.

This is a story that is about Avice, an 'immerser' and a Terra from Embassytown. This is another planet sometime presumably in the future where two different species (Terra and Ariekene) live side by side, but unable to communicate apart from through ambassadors who are able to speak Language. There is a new set of vocabulary throughout the novel that is not always explained. This is one of the main themes of the book, language. Avice is a simile. Her story is used by the Ariekene to make sense of lies. The Ariekene cannot lie. It is a very complicated storyline, but involves the breakdown of communication between the two species and the resulting breakdown of the community and resulting war. I think that if I had been able to spend more concentrated time on this novel then I would have been able to get more out of it. Instead I found it more confusing than enjoyable, but I would imagine that the whole philosophy of language and why we use it would be an interesting concept to explore.

A Child called It

I've read this before, but my hubby is having to teach it and the young lady was happy to entertain herself (on my phone, bizarrely by locking herself in my bathroom in the dark, she calls it the dark room and it's currently her favourite place, that - or inside her wardrobe, that is also an icecream shop didn't you know) so I reached out for the nearest thing that I could find. I finished it in a day...

It was quite interesting to read purely because I was reading my husband's colleague's copy, and it had his annotations scribbled all over it. The book is the story of Dave, as a child and the traumatic start to life that he experienced through the neglect and torture that he experienced through his mother. I remember reading it as a teenager and just taking it at face value. It's hard to put down purely because you can't really believe that this could happen to a child and that no-one would pick up on it and report it for ages. However, reading it as an adult, and with the help of comments such as 'Oh dear Lord...', you realise how ridiculous some of the sentences are. It is meant to be written as if it was written by a child, however it is unrealistic that a child would use some words or think so philosophically about what was happening to him. Apparently this is being taught on a week where the students are looking at misery lit. I can't disagree with that description!

Swing Time

Hubby bought this for me as an un-Christmas present to thank me for doing a lot of child looking after solo in the run up to Christmas. I had actually started another book but put that aside to start this one. I really enjoyed reading it. I think it's my second Zadie Smith book?

It is the story of the narrator (I've only just realised that she is never named) and her friend Tracey. They grow up together on an estate in London, both are dancers but only Tracey has any natural talent. As they grow up, they grow apart. The narrator is the daughter of an ambitious black woman, who becomes an MP, and a white postal worker who lacks ambition. The narrator goes to university and lands herself a job with a record company and then as a PA to a singer, a job that takes her around the world. The novel has a general theme of dance that runs throughout it. But really this is the story of a young woman who has always been in someone else's shadow. Towards the end of the novel she starts to make her own decisions and starts to discover who she is away from the other's shadows.

Christmas present sewing

So, a first for me... I made a rag doll for Alice. I used a pattern that I found via pinterest 
to make this doll. I've never really followed a pattern for anything before so learning the language of patterns and sewing (beyond quilting) was a new one for me. I found the pattern for the doll itself easy enough to follow but struggled a little with the dress. I'm still not sure where I went wrong but there are quite a lot of open seams and I can't see any in the demo pictures. Still, I was reasonably happy with the result. Alice had no idea that it was coming, and seemed pretty happy with her present. Dolly has been given lots of toy food and has been given lots of cuddles.

The Woodlanders

I haven't read any Thomas Hardy since GCSEs or A-levels. Last summer I drove my grandma and her partner to Thomas Hardy's two houses in Dorset. One was a tiny but beautiful cottage where we walked through some woodland to reach it. The other was bought and designed by Thomas Hardy once he was an established author. The latter house was where he wrote the Woodlanders, but really as I was reading it I was absolutely imagining the setting of his childhood cottage home.

The story is based around the lives of people based in a small woodland village, most of the people make their living around the care and sale of wood. This is a romance in a way, as it follows the marriage of Grace to the doctor of the area in an attempt by her father to move Grace up in the world. I really enjoyed the description in this novel. It took me a few pages to get into the language of the novel but I loved it. I don't know if I'll be reading any more of his novels in the near future but if another title (that I haven't read) is on my list, I'll look forward to reading it.