Tuesday afternoon at the University is proving a good time and place to blog simply because of the way the computers are set up here. The seats are what my mother would have called ’sit up and beg’ and force my back into a better position than would be the case at home. I’m seriously thinking of trying to hide one under my coat as I leave, but I have a nasty suspicion that someone might twig what I was doing.
So, I may not blog as often as I used to and I may not get round to visit quite so frequently, but bit by bit I am managing to find solutions that work. And the greatest of these is the audio book. I am having a great time with what I have managed to find. I even got a copy of A S Byatt’s new novel, The Children’s Book the other day which I’m saving for after Christmas when both my reading groups will be discussing it.
The Bears and I are thoroughly enjoying the experience of being read to. We draw the curtains, light the candles, turn off the lights and settle down to let someone else do the work. For the most part it works extremely well, but there are a couple of things that are going to take some getting used to. First, there is the question of how long it takes to listen to a book compared with the time it takes to read it. We have been listening to The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest for two weeks now and although it is a whopping great big book, it wouldn’t have taken half that long to read it; we still have a third of the story left to go. This means that the thirty hours of The Children’s Book is going to take three weeks of evening listening at the very least. I am going to have to plan my group reading much more carefully in future.
Secondly, you have to listen to every word. Now you can take that last sentence two ways. You have to listen to every word first time round because you can’t go back and check what you might have missed, or at least you can’t do it easily. But also you have to listen to every word, you can’t skip the equivalent of the scenes in the film where you would have your head in a pillow, the bits that I would normally skim over because they were too gruesome for my taste, the recording goes relentlessly on. I’m sure we will get used to this as we become more accomplished listeners.
In the meantime, I’m still trying to make up my mind about buying a special chair. It is a terrible expense. Watch this space for further developments.

I was late coming to Anne Tyler despite the fact that I have two friends who have read everything she’s ever written. I finally caught up with her work last year when we read Digging for America in one of my reading groups and since then I’ve also read and loved Patchwork Planet. I want a local organisation that will send someone to come and mow my lawn or fetch things from my attic. What a wonderful idea. So, when I saw her new novel, Noah’s Compass, in the local library I picked it up and brought it home and I have to say that it’s really set me thinking.
On Tuesday we had the second seminar in this term’s series on Charles Darwin, this time given by an expert in Victorian Literature, very boldly venturing into the world of Linguistics. One of the things he wanted to talk about was the difficulties that have been identified with Darwin’s use of language, most especially concentrating on those pinpointed by Gillian Beer in her excellent book Darwin’s Plots. In this book, Beer suggests that they were four particular problems with the way in which language works that made it difficult for Darwin to express his theories in writing:
I am really looking forward to our book group meeting this evening when we are going to discuss Sebastian Barry’s Costa winning novel, The Secret Scripture. I have already heard from three other members of the group as to how much they have enjoyed the book but each one has also added a caveat, that they were shocked and disappointed by the ending.
Sacred Hearts is the third novel by Sarah Dunant to be set in sixteenth century Italy, this time in the city of Ferrara. Like the two earlier books, The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan, Dunant’s primary concern is the life that intelligent women were forced to live in those times and places if they wished in any sense to fulfil their potential.