Awash in books!  Brand new books, old favourites, a number recommended in blogland, and they all arrived at once over the library desk....

Plus three Adobe Digital Books that I thought would be ages coming!

I have put off getting some of the library books until the last minute, to give myself a little more reading time, and if I were really clever I would quickly devour the ones that I know someone else is eagerly awaiting because for sure there will be no renewing them.

But I'm not clever, - I'm sentimental, and I am living at Stillmeadow with Gladys Taber these days, as I have many other times over the years, - I keep going back to the mid twentieth century when her work originally captivated me, first in the Ladies' Home Journal and Family Circle as monthly columns, and then I became passionate about her books describing the life she, her friend Jill, and their children lived in a heritage house built in 1690 just off Jeremy Swamp Road near Southbury in Connecticut.

Gladys Taber died in 1980 and  her books, of course,  have a remarkable fragrance of those simpler times which I find appealing.  The recipes she includes are the lovely comfort kind, - food that that was quite at home in my kitchen and could often be found baking in the oven or simmering on top of the stove.

She was my inspiration for gardening and for cultivating the awareness of beauty in country life;  in the comings and goings of birds and wildlife and in the appreciation for the simple rural way of life.

And yet, she also was very aware of the dangers that threatened that rural life, and her daughter Constance has said....

 " Gladys was one of the first to write about the dangers of uncontrolled development in Connecticut.  If she were alive today she would undoubtedly be finishing a book on land conservation.


Her books clearly depict Stillmeadow and its world as symbolic of something larger than one family, one town:  a way of life very precious and inevitably endangered.


Somewhat prophetically, in Stillmeadow Sampler, a book of essays first published in 1950, Gladys Taber wrote about a zoning meeting she attended in Southbury:  "It was a grim picture.  Business was bound to come; light industries were already shopping for land.  The quiet country farms were already going and developments would take over...  Eventually, of course, we will have to have some sort of plan to guide future developments.  Somehow we must protect the wooded hills, the greening meadows, the clean, sweet-running brooks, and the historic white houses - they are a precious heritage"


I only have a few more pages of this lovely book to read, and then I will set it aside until next time my hand and eye and heart are drawn to it.

Tomorrow I will start to read Alan Bradley's new book,  " A Red Herring without Mustard" which begins with the quote....."a cup of ale without a wench, why, alas, 'tis like an egg without salt or a red herring without mustard"   from A Looking Glass for London and Englande (1592) by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene. and features the further adventures of Flavia de Luce, "the insidiously clever and unflappable eleven year old  sleuth" who is the heroine of this series (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag).

The wind still blows with a chilling vengeance but I am looking forward to March coming in like a Lamb!

What am I reading???

We are not too well acquainted with the lazy, hazy days of summer, - the kind where you sit out in the garden with a book. Out in the garden where sound is the gentle murmur of butterfly wings, bumble bees and soft breezes sighing.....

We come from the era where 'a thing worth doing is worth doing well' (my father) and where one must squeeze the most productivity from every available moment (the beloved's watchword). The key word here is available. Mornings are available. The earlier the better. But after the morning hours have been squeezed dry of productivity the afternoon activity is best accomplished stretched out flat on the couch, or lying back in the lazy boy chair, I believe this is called re-charging.....

It doesn't include reading, alas. Reading is reserved for evenings, or bedtime.

And so now, at night, I am reading Alan Bradley.



When I first heard of Alan Bradley,seventy years old with a surprise contract for six yet unwritten books, a resident of Kelowna just two hours away from us here in the Similkameen, I envisaged a Grandma Moses type, or a Susan Boyle, - a newly discovered author, a son of the land, a simple, gifted writer upon whom fortune had finally smiled.

However my interest led me to discover that he was a much more sophisticated author 'who has published many children's stories as well as lifestyle and arts columns in Canadian newspapers'. (flyleaf) Click and read more about his connection with the University of Saskatchewan, and his many other accomplishments.

And I did discover that B.C. cannot claim him as a native son, but can only be grateful that he retired to this beautiful province after garnering an impressive CV in Saskatchewan.

I have yet to read the book he wrote with Dr. William A.S. Sarjeant, Ms Holmes of Baker Street, - the book that advanced the theory that Sherlock Holmes was a woman, and 'was greeted upon publication with what has been described as "a firestorm of controversy"'. I can well imagine!

What I have read is his delightful and clever story of an eleven year old mystery solver, Flavia de Luce. Flavia is a unique child, a product of her eccentric family, her penchant for poisons and chemistry, her individuality as the youngest girl, shunned by older sisters, and her sharpness! The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is delightful and a book that makes it difficult to put out the night light...



What I am reading now is Alan Bradley's earlier book, 'The Shoebox Bible' - a poignant memoir of a family who 'managed' after the father ran away from home, and a mother who stored hope in a shoebox. I am still immersed, having only reached page 45, but I have a lovely eagerness to go to bed early, and read more of the Songs of Solomon that expressed hope, and the gloomy Old Testament
passages full of grief and despair.



P.S. I forgot to say that the writing is beautiful with many imaginative pictures - 'my right arm stretched to the shuddering point', and a fair amount of elegance.

'Often, as we grow older, we forget how keen our senses used to be. We forget the bottlebrush intensity of a caterpillar tickling its way across our upturned palm; the thousand shades of green a leaf can be; the wonder of watching a devil's darning needle touch down weightlessly on a sunflower; the sound of raindrops plopping like little wet meteorites into the dust; the way in which, after the rain, the sky drips with liquid gold, and how it felt to breathe in the rich black odour of the earth itself.'

And in addition the excerpts from the Songs of Solomon and Proverbs add an ageless beauty.

Lovely reading....