Bank Holiday reading

Well, I seem to have got through the reading block - thanks to Elizabeth Jane Howard. She's long been a favourite of mine and I must have read the Cazalet series at least three times. I find her straightforward narrative style very comforting. I read her autobiography, 'Slipstream' last year and was surprised to find how much of her own life she put, only thinly disguised, into the Cazalets. Today's reading has been 'The Beautiful Visit', one of her earliest, published 60 years ago in 1950. Once I found my way in (bearing in mind yesterday's reading block) I was away and am now two thirds of the way through.
I found some memorable descriptions in the early chapters, for example 'a magnificent cedar tree like a butler, old, indispensable and gloomy'; 'curls of smoke the colour of distance'; 'the river gleamed like a wide snake asleep'. As the story progresses I'm warming more and more to the main character (no doubt EJH herself) who is struggling in the years of the First World War to establish her independence both as a person and as a woman.

And in the garden I've planted four more box plants, bought from the market on Saturday morning.

Reading block

Just can't settle to read at the moment. I've started about half a dozen books in the last week and just can't seem to find a way in. I'm a great believer in the time having to be right, so they'll go back on the tbr shelves until their time comes round again. Meanwhile, I'm making good use of the early morning lie-in by revamping this old blog, which never really got off the ground.