A dark adapted eye

When I first started on this Genre Busting reading challenge I thought that I never read crime novels and never really have done. Except that is a total lie, when I started to think about it I realised that I loved reading Agatha Christie when I was younger, instigated by my mum, who gave me all of her novels to read. And my absolute guilty pleasure (shhh, don’t tell anyone) is watching Miss Marple or Poriot on a Sunday afternoon, while I am doing some crafting stuff.

Then I started to think about it some more and I realised that I did used to read a range of crime novels, although the authors escape me right now. So, this really has made me reassess my reading habits and next time I go to the library I might well head onto the crime section as well.

Anyway – onto the book. The first award that I looked at was the Mystery Writers of America and Ruth Rendell was the 1997 winner. Now these awards are a bit different in that it is not given for a specific book, but a writer. I searched at the library and realised that Barbara Vine was a pen name for her as well, so I decided to get one of hers as I wanted one which interested me. So I chose ‘A Dark Adapted Eye’.

Quote from the first page:

In these circumstances alone one knows when someone is going to die. All other deaths can be predicted, conjectured, even anticipated with some certainty, but not to eh hour, the minute, with no room for hope. Vera would die at eight o’clock and that was that. I began to feel sick.

Hmm, interesting – no?

Now, I have to say that this was hard going at first, mainly because of all the names and who married who and who was related to whom, not helped by the fact that lots of people changed their names, over and above getting married. It made it rather confusing.

However as I went on I started to get more engrossed in the plot and the book, I started to care about the characters and wanted to know more.

The plot twists were brilliant – you are never quite told what is going on until later when you realise and it all makes perfect sense, or not as the case maybe.

I am pleased that I read this book and I will certainly investigate more of her books (under both names).

Looking forward

As I said in my last post, this is a time of reflection and introspection for me and it is something I greatly enjoy.

I have a couple of projects on the go to help me with this; and I wanted to share the one that I have just completed. Well, started really.

Self help books have never been something that I have been fond of, at all in fact.  But I came across this book, not sure how now, and it struck a chord. Once again my library came up trumps and got the book in for me within the week.

The book is The Happiness Project  by Gretchen Rubin. It is good. I read it taking notes as I went along as I thought within a couple of pages that I would be able to use what she is saying. One reason for this is that she states that she wants to become happy with what she has.  Which appeals to me – we can’t all ditch out lives and head on out to Italy, Indian or wherever, a la Elizabeth Gilbert (although I have enjoyed reading her books). The other reason is that she said that she should be happy and she feels she could be happier.

I totally get this – I think it is years of depression has scarred me in that my natural default mode is  several notches below ok – I get angry and wound up easily, I do tend to have black tinted glasses and pretty much always see the negative rather than the positive. I fact not only am I a glass half empty person, but I want to know where the other half went and why I don’t have it.

I know that this can be draining for people around me and so with the aid of this book I have decided to change that.

One of her ideas is to have daily resolutions and mark off how you do at the end of each day on a chart. This really appeals to me as I am a compulsive list maker and I love to tick things off. I also like having a sense of achievement. These daily resolutions are not focusing on big things that new years resolutions are, but small things that I can do daily to help me feel and act happier. I have decided on these after brainstorming what makes me happy and what doesn’t make me happy. Which in itself gave quite surprising results – if you haven’t spent time think what makes you happy and what does make you happy take a piece of paper and spend 10 minutes doing so, I am sure you will be surprised.

I am gong to share these here – mainly to give me a sense of accountability.

Movement so this is any form of movement – a 5K run, 10 mins dancing like a lunatic. 30 mins yoga at home, etc etc it doesn’t include walking to a destination which I have to do such as the train station/uni/work. This is not about getting fit it is about making myself feel good by taking time out to feed my body.

Space I have a strong sense of needing lots of time and space to myself and I often don’t let myself. So this is time to myself to think and relax, to listen to music or read – other than on the train and without a computer (unless it is writing)

Spiritual This could be prayer, meditation, ritual, solitary, with other people or whatever. The idea is that I make this part of my daily life and focus on doing so.

Achieve I like to feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, so this is just a small task which makes me feel like I have got somewhere – writing a blog post, working on  a project, practicing a piece of music (I am teaching myself to play the piano from scratch) etc.

Fruit eat one piece of fruit a day. I know this is not complicated, but I am not good at eating fruit, I have oral allergy syndrome, so I am allergic to a lot of them, but there are some I am not allergic to. I am hoping that this will generally help me with my health, because being ill makes me very unhappy. I can eat vegetables, it is just fruit that I have to force myself to eat.

Nagging task There are many things in my life that make me guilty that I haven’t done, many of them are 10 minute jobs at the most, but I just never seem to get around to them. So, if I aim to complete one a day then that guilt will lessen, feeling guilty does not make me happy!

Good person Here I am trying not to snap at people (especially my OH), to apologise when I have done something wrong and you know, generally be a good person! I am not saying I think I am a nasty person, but I do think I could be nicer!

So, there you go, that is my daily resolutions, not new year resolutions, but just a gentle focus on doing things that make me happy and addressing things which make me less so. Phew, rather a long post, but something that I wanted to share with you all. Have you done anything similar? How did it work out for you?

Reading challenge update

As you may remember I got really excited when I heard about the reading challenge and I quickly chose the books (often based by what the library had) and reserved them straight away.

I should have known better, my library is very efficient and I quickly ended up with a huge stack of books. Oops, a little overwhelming, especially with my stack of uni books too. Nevermind, I will just renew them and plod on through.  I do already have 80p of fines from this challenge already, I really need to put the library books into my Remember the Milk system.

look at the size of the Laymon one!

I should explain that my reports on the books will not necessarily be proper book reports, such as you would turn into school, I don’t really know what they will be at this point in time, but they won’t be that.

Have any of you signed up to the reading challenge?

Book challenge.

I love reading – it has always been a vital part of my life. I am sure the reason why I have bad eyesight is that I read by torchlight under my covers after I had been told to go to bed.

I read at high speed and then often go back again if I feel it is worth it, I have a collection of books which have been read over 20 times at least. They are my go-to books when I am feeling in need of being comforted. These mainly consist of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, but there are others on the list as well.

Aside from books that  I have had to read as a former English teacher, or for studying purposes I do tend to go for Sci-fi/fantasy. It is quite hard to break outside of a genre once you are firmly embedded!

Thanks to Armatius I found out about a book challenge. I do firmly love a challenge! Check out here for details. 

So, despite doing my masters and having a crazy reading list I am going to do the genre-buster challenge to start with and see how I get on, I might then go on to Toe-Dippin’.  Ooh, new books, excitement! And I had just cleared my waiting list at the library too!

Take a stand and shout it out!

When I visited my library last weekend it was filled with small children. I was a bit bemused by this until I saw the HUGE Peter Rabbit, Gruaffalo and another creatures I didn’t recognise. The library was being visited by characters from childrens’ story books!

There was much laughter around the room and awed looking children. That is apart from  one little girl, who insisted her mum took her up to see the Gruaffalo. When she got to him she stood there frozen to the ground and I could just see the fear building up her body, her chest start shuddering, her eyes open wide and her lips trembling before howling the place down!

But when I got to the counter to take out my book I had reserved (Nudge – review coming soon!) the librarian told me the council is planning on cutting the opening hours and making redundancies. You know my feelings about our library, so I decided to take a stand and shout it out.

I have written to the councillor in charge of making this decision, our three local councillors, the MP and the local paper. The local paper has said they are covering the story, they are just waiting for the council to tell them what they are planning on doing. The have said that they will quote me because I highlighted some important issues to them in my email.

I have to say I was feeling quite proud of myself, but then I thought, why am I not doing more? Why didn’t I complain about the bins? What else can I do in my local community? When I originally wanted an allotment all of the waiting lists were very full and I did complain again to the councillors and they did opening up a new site. I’m not claiming it was down to me, but others must also have complained and together we were taken notice of.  Often as individuals making our own small steps we forget that if we join together with others the sum of our steps is greater than the individual.

So, how do you take a stand and shout it out?

The library

Since moving to a new area I decided to start investigating our local library. The one in Brixton, where I lived a couple of house moves ago was beautiful; housed in an old, old building originally built by Tate & Lyle. Stretching over 3 floors it was stunning. However it seemed to have no books in it and was primarily taken over by computers. We could order books, but this had to be done in person and we were charged 50p per book (not a fortune, I realise, but still) and we were notified by a postcard, which we filled in.

What a difference at my new local library.

I can search, reserve and renew books online. This is great for when I read about a book on blogs, I can just go there straightaway and order. It is free to reserve books and I get notified by text message. How modern is that!

They have an Internet cafe as part of it and so there is still ample amounts of free Internet access, important in our town as (without seeing any statistics) I would say there is a very high proportion of unemployment and poverty.

So I get lots and lots of lovely free books, there has been very few books I have searched for which haven’t been available, which is superb. This is saying something considering my eclectic reading habits.

Although I am not a parent I can appreciate the lengths the library goes to to engage children. In the past there was an ‘invasion of Darleks’ event, which sounded so cool I was thinking of going down. Over summer there has been an ‘Adventure Seekers’ promotion with a list of books they recommend for different ages and some sort of sticker collection for books read and there is always a member of staff wandering around in a purple satin cloak (I assume this is connected)! There is lots of places for children to sit and read or interact with the surroundings and there is desks all around the upper floor for adults, including some comfy (ish) chairs near the daily papers and magazines.

There is also free Internet access courses for people, teaching them how to use the Internet. The foyer is used for community promotions – free energy efficient light bulbs, free blood testing for over 50′s, information pn the new recycling scheme about to be launched across the borough. The local theatre is also housed here, so there is lots of information about the local arts groups.

I am going to miss going into the library so often now that I am starting university TOMORROW! It has helped me move to a new community, given me an opportunity to talk to people who I wouldn’t normally encounter and gives me an excuse to walk or cycle into town. If you haven’t been to your library recently check it out!