October Books and More

 Hi everyone.  More beautiful weather on tap in New Hampshire today. More fall yard clean up is on my agenda. We painted the fence yesterday, hurrah, and it looks fantastic. 

Let me start off today with another bird journal page for Wendy's challenge at Art Journal Journey.

When I made this page I was specifically thinking about Covid, and  how we are all a bit like a cage bird right now. Also how we all want to fly free again. I made the background bright happy colors for hope and even stamped bits of a map on the page to represent how Covid is not only a worldwide disease but how we are all missing so much many things in the world, whether it is travel or just local things.  Can you tell these colder and darker days as well as the rise in numbers is getting me down a bit?

 I added the clock because it is just a matter of time before all  get better.

I am also participating in Art Everyday Month .

Thought I would share my monthly book read today also. As I write every month, this post is more for my own records, but I know many of you enjoy reading about books also. So here it is.

If not your thing, that's OK. For all of you, whether you read to the end of this post or not,  enjoy your weekend.

My Listens:

I ended September and started October with a bit of Roald Dahl. He wrote amazing older children's books. If you're not familiar with him,  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory might be one his most famous. 

Last month I listened to Matilda by this author.  I enjoyed that so much I went on and listened to this book also by him.

I didn't like The Witches as much as I did Matilda, but  I still enjoyed it. I smiled a lot and thought it was a very clever story. Dahl lived in England but his family was Norwegian. What I did love about this story is he incorporates a Norwegian grandmother, and the reader, Miranda Richardson, did a wonderful Norwegian accent when speaking for the grandmother. Although I must also say, she also did a terrific witch shriek, a bit ear piercing even.

Typical of many children's stories, the boy tries to solve the problem, but with the help of his grandmother. This story has a wonderful grandparent and child relationship.

I found the 1980's film of this book with Angelica Huston on Netflix, and I watched that. It was a fun version of the story and fairly true to the book.

A Witch in Time was an enjoyable listen. A friend recommended it with a text that said she loved it. I didn't love it, but I am glad I listened. In this story a woman is doomed to relieve her life over and over through different time periods, starting in France in the  late 1800's. I did love the part set in the 1930s. The rest of it was good to very good,  not exactly repetitive but had some elements repeated. The women in her modern reincarnation didn't excite me too much, and I thought she might have been a little stereotypic. This  modern woman does occur throughout the novel.  And why did I enjoy the book but didn't love it like my friend did? Maybe it was the writing style or maybe I just wasn't as much in the mood for this story as my friend had been. Yet I do recommend it if you like this kind of story.

Then I needed to listen to something with a little meat in it. Melinda Gates' The Moment of Lift was my next listen.

I enjoyed it being read by Melinda Gates, and I also enjoyed learning about the woman who Bill Gates fell in love with and married. I also enjoyed hearing about the amazing woman Melinda Gates  has met on her journey with the Gates Foundation.  The chapter on schools and education was in some ways repetitive after teaching for 36 years , but that being said, there is always something new to learn. It's not a long book, and  it could have been a bit shorter, but overall I highly recommend it . It did make me think about how much further women's opportunities have come since my grandmother's and mother's times.  Even between my early years and my daughter's.  It did motivate me to think about women's lives in places where life is so much harder than it is for many educated women in the western world. 

Mysteries were calling me, and so I listened to these 2 light cozy style ones. The were both enjoyable, fairly quick listens,  well written and although not particulary unique, sometimes that is just what you want to hear.  And they both had orange cats.  The first one, Ghostly Paws, was set in Mystic Notch, New Hampshire.  

This one had a bit of magic, some romance and a nice mystery about who killed the town librarian.

This second cozy style mystery, was set in Salem, Massachusetts. It also had a bit of magic, some romance, and the death of a local tv station personality. The killer in this one was  easier to figure out earlier in the book, but that really didn't turn me off of the story.

And my latest listen is this classic, A Woman in White. I read the Moonstone by Wilkie Collins earlier this year and enjoyed it so I decided to try another of his books.  Women in White is over 24 hours to listen to, and I'm over 12 hours into it at this point. So far so good. I'll talk about it next month.

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My Reads:

My first book, The Ashes of London,  was an excellent story.  It starts in London during the Great Fire of  1666 and goes into the next few months once rebuilding begins. I didn't know much about the Restoration Period, which is when this story is set, and that itself was fascinating. The author did, what I believe, a very good job making the time frame real and the characters believable.  There are 2 more in this trilogy which are on my list. (Of course I have a huge to read or listen list. I think once the weather gets colder and as covid gets worse, I will hopefully knock off a few more reads.) The mystery was also very good, even if for me, it did get a bit lost in the story of the time period. 

Then feeling a little travel itch, and not being able to go far afield, I pulled this book, Steps Out of Time,  out my  collection. I had bought it a couple of years ago on mark down but had yet to read it. It is a true account of a women from Michigan who walked the Camino de Santiago. The book is not exactly written in journal form, but reads in chronological order as she walked the breadth of Spain to Santiago de Compostela. ( She started just east of the Pyrenees in France.) Part of me would love to take this walk. What I don't know is if I would really like to do this or if it is one of those things that sounds better than it would actually be. ( I must admit getting a book stamped at the end of each day is something I would be into doing.) 

At the end of the book the author talks about how popular this walk has become, and it sounds like it might be a little more crowded than when she walked it in 2002. The number of pilgrims  have skyrocketed in the last few years. I even know 2 women who did walk it a couple of summers ago.

  Katharine Soper  writes about what she gained from this very long walk, and I have to say that's what I really liked about this book. The author managed to get past the blistered feet and aches to realize that this trip was about giving herself some time to know herself again, without all the daily commitments of family, home and work.   

And in October with Halloween approaching, I wanted to push myself outside of my normal reading limits. Yes, I went for spooky. Not my usual read, although I have read some non-spooky Stephen King. In fact 11/21/63 by him is one of my all time favorite books. (That one is about time travel and preventing Kennedy's assassination if you aren't familiar with it.)

So I picked up this next book, a Stephen King classic.

One thing I did do was promise myself  that when and if the story got to too spooky for me and I couldn't read on, I would call it quits with the story. No pressure to finish the book.

 I have yet to complete it, but so far the spooky is ok, but I'm only 250 pages in, so we shall see. 

And I won't read it before bed.

Smile. 

I also pulled this book off my shelf and am reading it alongside The Shining.

In a recent book post by another blogger (Jeanie at The Marmalade Gypsy), Josephine Tey's  classic about Richard III was mentioned. I read that book a few years back, and as I often do when I get on a reading kick, I pick up a couple  or a few other books on the same topic. Sometimes I read them all at once, and sometimes I shelf one or two. 

At that time (a few years back), I read The King's Grave  (Phillipa Langley and Michael Jones). It is about finding Richard III's remains, and after reading that,  I didn't feel I needed to read more. I am glad I kept The Bones of a King on the shelf until now, as it is a much different and a little more scientific (although very readable for non archeologists and bone specialists). I am fascinated by the DNA work and also the other scientific tests they performed to prove if these were indeed Richard III's bones. (I think I should have studied paleontology and how it related to archeology. Not that teaching wasn't a really good career for me. It was.) 

As I am just about done with it, I am including it here in this post. 

If bones and royalty are something you like, then I do highly recommend this book.  

And I already have a stack of books to dive into during November.

And that's what he or she wrote (and I read/listened to). Hope your weekend is going and/or  continues to go well.

Thanks for visiting.