Summer Doldrums

This time of  year, all I want to do is sit in a comfortable chair and read.  Do you feel that way?  There is something about August that says sit back, relax.  The garden is more or less under control, well, barring weeding, watering and mowing, but for the most part the plants are quietly doing their thing quite nicely, the veggies are growing and we are harvesting as we want to eat.

So...what am I reading?  Diana Gabaldon's latest book, "Written in my Own Heart's Blood" a cracking good story - all 814 pages of it has hooked me in!  This is the latest in her "Outlander" series of historical, time traveling novels and is another page turner.  I can't put it down!

I first came onto Gabaldon's story 20 years ago, browsing the book shop,  looking for a good read.  I remember walking on a west coast hiking trail with a friend telling her about this book I was reading  -the  heroine's step back 200 years in time through some magical standing stones in Scotland and all the adventures that ensued.  She was so intrigued she got the book, then passed it onto her daughters, and so on and so on.  My own copy became so tattered it was held together with packing tape.  I finally replaced it when the second book came out - and by then I was totally hooked on the story - I think like a lot of people - of Jamie and Claire - he a 1700's highland warrier and she, a world war II combat nurse. 

Seven novels later I'm still hooked enough that I don't want the story to end.  Apparently neither does she.  She writes on her website that there will be an eighth novel in the series.

 I'm also reading Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitter's Almanac and thoroughly enjoying her prose along with her immense knowledge about knitting.  "Bear with me", she writes, "and put up with my opinionated, nay, sometimes cantankerous attitude" The book was originally published in 1974 and while some of the projects are a mite old fashioned, the knowledge and advice she hands out around them is priceless.

I'm also reading Ann Lamott's book "Bird by Bird" - the sub title is Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  I picked it up in defence against writer's block which I seem to be suffering  since my accident.  Odd that - a trauma of the body does such a number on the mind - but it does.

So look for me in the lawn chair.