What are you reading at the moment, part2

I've just finished The Return, Greendorrie. I didn't like it as much as The Thread as I felt there was an awful lot more she could have done with the characters but I won't say any more. I hope to get The Island out of the library next.

I would be interested in any recommended non-fiction. Right now I'm reading HOMER'S ODYSSEY about a blind kitten. It's light reading and the author is a clever writer. It's not sad for those who don't like sad animal stories. I especially like good biographies and am fond of history. Hope I don't sound boring because I'm not! I, also, like nature and books from people regarding their travels.

Have you read The Hare with the Amber Eyes marilynclare
Emperor of all the maladies is a fascinating history of cancer. Won a bunch of prizes - pulitzer etc last year. Surprisingly gripping recent history.
Also The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society - fiction but against a second world war background in Guernsey.

Just finished a book called the Mistress's Revenge in which the mistress narrates her spiralling decline after being jilted by her lover after a 5 year affair. Due to her ongoing obsession with her ex her own life goes into freefall she neglects her partner, children and finances with quite disastrous consequences, until she plots her revenge! Good final twist. Numberplease and Jack have recommended Perfect People so I have bought that today and will probably start that next.

I've just started reading I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith. I gather it is now a modern classic so am giving it a whirl. So far, so good.

Glad you're reading Perfect People baNANA. Would love to know what you think of it when you've finished.

I've just re-read (for the umpteenth time), Frenchman's Creek, by Daphne Du Maurier, after feeling rather down in the dumps.
It is, for me, magical. I'm transported to the creek with the water lapping, and the dappled sunlight and the peacefulness.
Not to mention the pirates!

So romantic and not a swear word or explicit sex anywhere!

I keep Frenchman's Creek and Rebecca on my Kindle. Can't think of deleting them. I'll collect the other books electroncally in due course and read them all again. Fabulous author!

I loved Daphne du Maurier when I was younger, not read any for a long time though.

I love Daphne du Maurier's books. Just talking about them here makes me want to read them again. They're the sort of books you want on your shelves, so that you can read them again when you feel like it. Didn't she write the 'horror' story - was it 'Don't Look Now', which was set in Venice and made into a film with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie?

About to start The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. My sister-in-law had brought it from the States for her holiday reading and didn't want to take it back in her luggage. I'll pass it on to my daughter when I've read it.

Yes, fantastic film green

I am half way through 'Daphne Du Maurier' by Margaret Forster and what a fascinating read it is. Like many other gransnetters I have read Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, Frenchmans Creek Etc Etc but had no idea about the life of the author, except that she lived in Cornwall. What a massive eye opener this book by Margaret Forster is! From her unusual relationship with her father, her secret life dramas, her troubled marriage to 'Boy' Browning (an aide to the royal family) her extraordinary friendships with other women and her life with her own children. I am begining to look at her famous novels in a completely different light, they seem to be a mirror of her own dreams and fantasties of her very disturbed and secret life, and I am only half way through!! Margaret Forster wrote the book with the full co operation of the family and you will be fully aware of that when you read it! I will have to re read all of the favourites again with new understanding. Read it if you are a devotee of Daphne Du Maurier, or even if you are not, you will be surprised.

Right up your street, I should think B

I wonder if one has an affinity with the author, it makes for an increased receptivity for any book they write?

gma - I read Margaret Forster's biography of Daphne Du Maurier a few years ago and enjoyed it very much. You might like a book called Daphne by Justine Picardie which is a novel about Daphne at a low point in her life when she is aged about 50, and has discovered her husband is having an affair. The books is set against a backdrop of her writing a novel about Bramwell Bronte.

Thanks for your info baNANA-I will check and see if it is available on ebooks-I am sure that it will be.

Disappointingly, it's not on Kindle. I've ticked the box asking for it to be released in that format. It sounds like a good choice for my book group. I'm sure most of us will have read several du Maurier novels. I wasn't at the last meeting because I was away and guess what they decided on for the summer break. Yes - Fifty Shades!

Annobel-just looked on Amazon and 'Daphne' by Justine Picardie is available as ebook, price £5.31. Would be a good book for your reading group-how did you get on with 50 shades..? Just read a sample on kindle but its not my type of literature(?)

On the Kindle I have just read "The illegal gardener" by Sara Alexi, about the effect that a divorced woman who goes to live in a Greek village for a new start and an illegal immigrant there to make money for a second-hand tractor for his Indian village have on each other. It is a picture of Greece, and of the comfortable life of the affluent westerner contrasted with that of the transient workers who live from one day to another, and how each helps the other. Put starkly like that, it sounds eminently missable but I could not put it down, fight up to the (fairly) happy ending.

It was a freebie (you are too late, it is now £3.30) that in retrospect I would have happily paid at least that much to read.

Nothing good at the moment I am in one of those dry periods where I can't find anything I like. Nothing is as good as a book you soooo enjoy, the trouble is you can't put it down and you finish it far quicker than other books then have trouble finding something else just as good.

I used to think that I ought to finish every book I started and then realised that life was too short for some of the rubbish you pick up. So I am much more picky now

On and off for the past year, on and off, I've been going through Trollope and am in the midst of the Palliser novels, at the moment, Phineas Redux.

Just started 'A Dark Adapted Eye' by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) which has been sitting unread on the bookshelf for ages. I don't know why - it's gripping!

What happened there to make me repeat 'on and off'?

Dunno, Annobel, dunno!

Rhetorical question, when. Maybe concentrating on the Olympics to the detriment of everything else!