Review of The Thing Around Your Neck

I’m continuing to have a book of short stories ‘in-progress’ alongside longer fiction –a way of ensuring there’s reading for whatever mood I’m in!!    In what seems to be Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s first collection of short fiction, and was not an easy book to find even in Hay on Wye, these stories draw on the ancient and modern lives of Nigerian women, and occasionally of the men in their lives.

Adiche writes of events happening at the intersection of people’s lives and the influences of the relationship between their country and the ‘West’, usually the USA. These are powerful tales, sometimes disturbing, often uplifting, frequently she shines a light on a very small part of life in a detailed and engaging way. Well worth the search and a worthy companion to Half a Yellow Sun. 

At The Quilt Museum

Had a wonderful day in York on Friday, most of the time at The Quilt Museum http://www.quiltmuseum.org.uk/  where there is an impressive retrospective of Pauline Burbidge’s quilt work http://www.paulineburbidge-quilts.com/. ‘Interpretations in Cloth’ shows the artist’s seminal quilts and some helpful elements of the design stages in the airy, light infused setting of St Anthony’s Hall. There are just enough quilts to trace Burbidge’s artistic journey with cloth, paint and stitches and, wonderfully, you can get close up views of her signature combination of hand and machine quilting. My favourites were the landscapes  -shades of black and white and subtle use of stiches combined to give a 3D effect close up and from afar.

There is also a small but inspiring exhibition of the whole cloth quilt work of Amy Emms http://www.quiltershalloffame.net/index_files/Page904.html  with whole cloth quilts, a wedding dress stitched beautifully by this lifelong quilter.

There’s a great little museum shop and yes, Sue and I both added to our collections of fabric and books.We then found a small but well stocked knitting shop with more temptations before a meal and the train home.

The Quilt Museum needs your support, its present exhibitions are well worth a visit  .. do go.  I’m now looking for a workshop where I can play with fabric and paint and stitches and learn to develop my quilting in the direction of making some more fluid, less design by numbers small pieces.

A Prayer for Owen Meany: a good book holds my hand

Its been a while since I blogged so this is an effort to return to that and to tell you about John Irving’s 1989 book A Prayer for Owen Meany. This was a charity shop find, its a thick book so good value for a £1 but the covers conceal the challenge of lots of speech in upper case which made me feel that the character, Owen Meany, was shouting at me. This was not in keeping with the his persona, and was considerable as his story drives this book: I wonder what others thought of this.

Anyway, that apart, i enjoyed this book. The different time frames are very skilfully interlaced, there is a cast of engaging characters who interact in comic, tragic and unexpected ways.  I can now add this to my list of books that have ‘held my hand’ as I waited, once more this summer, in a hospital. This time I was there for a CT scan prior to my radiotherapy and had the pleasure and security of being looked after by former students.

There are likely to be other ex-students around next week when I go to The Royal Marsden at Fulham Road for the first of four brachytherapy treatments and I know I will experience a great sense of deja vu as I walk through the doors to where I had my first job after leaving school.

More on next week later. Meanwhile, I’ll post this and continue to listen to the wonderful Melvyn Bragg bringing out the best in his academic guests in BBC R4’s In Our Time. This week its all about the cell, the cell cycle, and that wonderful word meiosis has just been said.