The end of my 8 week rest

Reading 'The Friday Night Knitting Club' in hospital.

It's time to go back to work after an extended post-operative recouperation time. I have done everything that the doctor prescribed and will now reap the benefits of rest and creativity. Whilst I was mostly confined to home, I was not lonely or without company.

Thanks to the social network of sms, blogs (Thanks Roz, Diana and Britt-Arnhild et al from Armchairtravellers group and fellow Artist Trading Card artists), Facebook, Yahoo groups of fellow artists and friends and emails from friends from all over the world, it has been a time of connectedness and 'virtual' support. These connections have become an important part of my daily life in the past few years and helps stave off homesickness for friends, to say nothing of news and inspiration I gleen vicariously!

In this recouperation time, I had a chance to read without guilt, having been banned from doing housework. I read some enjoyable books.

My favourite 'reading' application has become MP3 downloads to iPhone or portable MP3 books from the library. Being so portable, it allows me to read *and* play with ATC's, knit, cook or do the ironing! As they say, time flies when you are having fun! More and more I can see myself converting to this medium to 'read', but of course nothing will ever take the tactile place of a book book!

I try to always be a conscientious reader and purchase downloads from official sources and I am a keen supporter of our local library, particularly for audio books.

During March and April I read:

The Friday Night Knitting CLub by Kate Jacobs (SlimInk)

Me by Charles (Bud) Tingwell (CD)

The Thief Taker by Janet Gleeson (PLayaway)

Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (SlimInk)

Down under by Bill Bryson (playaway)

Rules of Engagement by Anita Brookner (Book mooch)

The Boy by Julian Davies (borrowed from Kerrie)

The Georges Wife by Elizabeth Jolley (Bookmooch)A

Where Rainbows End by Cecelia Ahern (playaway)

An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy (library)

The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows (SlimInk)

The Blind Assasin by Margaret Atwood (MP3) (F2F bookclub)

The Road to NAB End by William Woodruff (Playaway)

The 19th Wife (SlimInk)

When purchasing physcial books I try to be a conscientious buyer and source from independent bookstores. It is very tempting to buy books so cheaply from big department stores, so when yielding, I try to buy one for one (i.e one from independents and one from Big W). It is important to be a patron of your library also, as stats prepared from visits and borrowings support future funding.

I am a keen Bookmoocher for the exchange of used books and many titles I have on my shelves are from Bookmooch.com. I also rent books online from Slimink.com.au and look forward to my monthly exchange of latest titles.

I have resisisted buying a Kindle to date. I don't like the thought of being restricted to Amazon.com for downloads. But as with everything, I will have to do some more research to see who owns websites such as Audiobooks.com and others that I currently favour for purchase of downloads.

Certainly ebooks in audio or electronic reader form are the way of the future. For me, the chance to read audio books is the chance to enjoy more books than I would ever have time to physically read. I am restricting my e-choices to fiction and non fiction stories. My already groaning bookshelves hardly have room to fit a mouse, let alone more fiction and bio books so this is a good option for me! And imagine the whole moving house concept sans books, or rather, minimal books. These two factors make enjoying eBooks a pragmatic choice for me in the future.

I do however love my reference and text books and coffee table books and could not imagine replacing them with electronic copies. I must admit more and more if I want a recipe I will first look online if I don't have the recipe. I have not bought a recipe book for many years, but then in saying that, I do have some beautiful classic cookbooks which I would not part with.

I will always have bookshelves groaning with books of all genres. And borrowing or exchanging eBooks? Hmmm... nothing will take the place of real books it seems...

'We Need to talk about Kevin' by Lionel Shriver

Here is an excerpt of an interview from a very interesting website on Lionel Shriver talking about her book.

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/birnbaum118.php

Lionel Shriver's latest novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is her seventh. Her previous novels are Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family, Game Control, The Bleeding Heart, Checker and the Derailleurs and The Female of the Species. She attended Columbia University and has lived for many years in Belfast, Northern Ireland and has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the Philadelphia Enquirer. Currently she lives in New York and is, as one might expect, working on her next novel.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is the story of Eva Khatchadourian's retrospective account of her son's life up to and beyond the day he went to his high school and began shooting his classmates. As Suzy Hansen writes at Salon.com: "What we get … is an interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly credible thriller. We Need to Talk About Kevin is about motherhood and the possibility that one's ambivalence about breeding might influence the growth and development of a child. Eva, in her scathingly honest and often witty recollections of her relationship with Franklin, her agonized decision to give up a life of traveling for motherhood, and her painful years with (the truly hideous and apathetic) Kevin, faces the question head on: Am I responsible for what my child has done?"

I loved this thought provoking book. Shriver's writing style is articulate and very detailed but her exploration of human thought is very real. As an Aussie I couldn't really relate to the issues of schoolyard crime, nor that of possession of handguns as our life seems so remote from the spine chilling phenomena of schoolyard massacres that we hear on the news from Amercia all too often. I guess the issues are still the same - if you wake up one day and realise that your son is a potential killer, what steps do you take, whose side will you take, and will you defend your own even though they have committed a henous crime. Will you blame yourself?