Summer Reading

The reading group I belong to has just finished reading this novel, The Island by Victoria Hislop. We borrow from the library's reading group collection 6 times a year and then every other month we take it in turn to choose a book which we buy. When this book was chosen we had got to the point of requesting a good summer read, not too demanding and with a story that we could understand, after a few dark, gloomy and hard to read choices. I think our member chose well. The story involves the island of Spinalonga, which was a Greek leper colony off the coast of Crete up until the 1950's and follows a young woman's discovery of how the island is bound up with her mother's past. It is part love story, part family saga - some members of the group had holidayed in Crete and visited the island, now a tourist spot, so it was interesting for them. I have now lent it to another friend who is going to read it on holiday in Greece.

I read a lot, but I don't always read every reading group choice - I figure that I've reached a point where I read either for pure pleasure to enjoy a story or pictures (like in quilt books) or because I want to find out more about a subject. Life's too short to read books that I don't really enjoy and wouldn't choose for myself - I will generally try to give them a go, but if I really can't get into the book and it is taking me an hour to read three pages I give up. On the other hand, sometimes a book group choice turns out to be something I love, like The Time Traveller's Wife. There are no men in our group - someone's boyfriend did come along once when we had a local author attend the group meeting as we had read his novel but maybe some of our choices are a bit too female oriented.

I am plodding on slowly with sewing down the binding for DS's quilt and am cutting out light/dark triangles for a depression block quilt but neither seems worth showing a pic of yet - hence the post about books.