Some Good Books

But first....

Here is a card I made for my fathers' birthday last year. It's an altered photo of him with my two angels.
I love altering photos and was first introduced to this technique in a magazine article by Karen Michel. The magazine was Cloth Paper Scissors, either the first or second issue, and it's one of my favourite magazines.

Now, on to those great books....About a month before Christmas I read The Turning by Tim Winton. It's a collection of short stories that overlap each other. When I finished I was left wanting more, more about the characters and what happened next. How brilliant a writer is he. I then had to read another of his books and so I picked up Dirt Music. I simply could not put it down and read that in one weekend, which is no easy task with small children. It was a fabulous story all the way through. I was then lucky to get about half a dozen books for Christmas and as we were staying at my parents place for two weeks I was also given the time to read some of them. The first one I got to read was A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. My husband has cousins in England that quite a few years back (when Hornby had only two books published Fever Pitch and High Fidelity) said that it seemed as though Nick Hornby knew them and were writing about their lives, they were even living in the same suburb in London as him!! I certainly hope that the similarities have ended as this book is about a group of people that unintentionally meet at the top of a building, all with the intention of jumping. It does make an interesting read and whilst I didn't like it as much as About A Boy or How to Be Good I still thought it was fab. Next was The Riders by Tim Winton. The first part actually made me laugh out loud a few times, but I think knowing down-to-earth aussies and crazy Irish folks certainly helped. The second part of the story was quite different and at times I didn't want to read any more because of the anguish but I couldn't stop! In the end you're not given 'answers' to everything but to me that just made it seem so real, and another GREAT read. The last book I got to read was The Thirteenth Tale by Dianne Setterfield, again another book I couldn't put down and was snatching pages whenever I could. I just LOVED getting lost in all these stories and was grateful to be given the time to do it.