Catching up on recent reads

Due to major life-changing disruptions, reading has been haphazard. Loaded down with Responsibilities, Legalities, Obligations, I've tended to favour reading of the Very Light-hearted variety, starting with


The Ivy Chronicles - Karen Quinn
A very enjoyable story - woman loses high powered corporate job, husband and luxury NY apartment, creates a new role for herself as private school admissions adviser in a cut-throat competitive world where rich parents will go to any length to give their children a headstart in life. Humorous, eye-opening, and a heart-warmer too.


Fat, Forty and Fired - Nigel Marsh
Another humorous memoir about an advertising agency MD who takes a year off. Very entertaining, quite insightful and sensitive. Laugh Out Loud material.


Time of my Life - Allison Winn Scotch
About second chances. The protagonist, in a picture perfect life, a baby daughter and lacklustre marriage, finds herself 7 years back in time with a former boyfriend, with the knowledge of her future and the chance to change her past. Complex choices.


The Help - Kathryn Stockett
I enjoyed this in audiobook, and was transported to a different world by the wonderful voices of the narrators, such a vividly created world, set in Jackson, in the American South, during a time of racial division and social awakening when a young white woman and a few black maids dared to risk all in a secret daring project. I would recommend the audiobook version which brings the characters and era so much to life.


Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
I love Neil Gaiman's books. So rich, strange, captivating. Fairy tales for adults. My introduction to him was Fragile Things which I fell in love with, and recently I enjoyed in audiobook "A Study in Emerald" and now "Neverwhere". Neverwhere is about Richard Mayhew, a standard young man working in the financial corporate world in London who rescues a wounded woman one day and finds his world as he knew it disappearing. He discovers a dark shadowy world, London Below, where he helps the woman named Door to find who murdered her family and embarks upon an adventure that changes him irrevocably. Neil Gaiman narrates this audiobook himself, and is brilliant! He brings it so much to life, and I was brought to tears of laughter and sadness.


Gifts of Unknown Things - Lyall Watson
Humbling to know that it's been 33 years since this book was first published, and yet it's as fascinating and relevant as ever, marrying science with mystery, quantum physics with mysticism so beautifully and poetically. The author's own experiences on a small volcanic island in Indonesia become the tapestry on which he weaves scientific inquiry with magic.


And I've temporarily given up on Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, To Say Nothing of the Dog (great title!) by Connie Willis and Snow by Orhan Pamuk. They all share one thing in common - great promise but too heavy going and bogged down in detail for me at this stage of my life.

The lost recipe for happiness - Barbara O'Neal

Another sensual book about love and food. I must be on a theme. Very enjoyable, a love story with food, ghosts, pain, redemption. It has the dark vein of pain from the heroine's past, to add spice to an otherwise reasonably predictable love story. I loved it anyway, and the food recipes sound delicious.

A Thousand Days in Venice - Marlena de Blasi

I finally got around to reading this book which has sat on my shelf for years. I imagined it'd be some idealised romantic story and was pleasantly surprised to find that it's romantic but not in the usual sense. It's very real, with a sensual appreciation of life's abundance. The writer's gorgeousness comes through in her whimsical, creative way, the way she creates beauty out of circumstances which might otherwise be considered challenging, and engages with the people and her environment to make memorable food and special occasions.

The Marrying Game - Kate Saunders

A light hearted and funny read about four beautiful sisters who take matters into their own hands when faced with the loss of their beloved dilapidated family home, and decide to marry money.Written in an intelligent wry style and quite enjoyable, though three-quarters of the way into the book I thought it sort of took off at a tangent when the oldest sister behaves uncharacteristically, but it all comes together again satisfactorily.

Code Name God - Mani Bhaumik

Just finished this audiobook. Fascinating - dirt poor Indian boy became a scientist and invented the laser technology that made LASIK surgery possible. He found that fame and fortune could not provide him with happiness and began to go back to his roots to search for a deeper meaning. As he digs deeper he finds that the science he's so immersed in brings him back to spirituality. I found his scientific explanations very accessible.