Category: e-books

Ink in the Blood: A Hospital Diary by Hilary Mantel

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

This is a short memoir which I read quickly and easily on my Kindle – it’s only available on Kindle! Quite ironic that the first ebook (ie inkless) I read should be called ‘Ink in the Blood’! I was really pleased to find this because I loved Wolf Hall and had tickets for Hilary Mantel’s talk at the Borders Book Festival at Melrose in the summer.  She had to cancel that because she wasn’t well – I didn’t know just how ill she was. Ink in the Blood reveals all – how she had surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction that ended up in a marathon operation, followed by intense pain, nightmares and hallucinations.

Illness she found knocks down our defences, revealing things we should never see, needing moment by moment concentration on breathing, on not being sick and being dependent on others for your well-being. She read Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill, which she thought was piffle, describing decorous illnesses such as fainting, fevers and headaches. She wonders what sort of wuss Woolf was, as she obeyed her doctors when they forbade her to write, whereas writing was Hilary Mantel’s lifeline – it was the ink, as she wrote in her diary, that reassured her she was alive.

It’s amazing how much she has managed to pack into this short memoir and one that repays more than one reading.

Product Description  from Amazon

During the summer after Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, she fell very ill. Just how ill is described in her extraordinary diary, Ink in the Blood. Originally published in the London Review of Books, it is one of the most incredible and haunting essays published in a very long time. In the diary she explores in forensic detail her loss of dignity, her determination, the concentration of the senses into an animalistic struggle to get through, and the attendant hallucinations she was plagued by.

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 134 KB
  • Publisher: Fourth Estate (15 Dec 2010)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • ASIN: B004GJXQ0C
  • Source: I bought it

Ermintrude

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

100 Years of Ermintrude: a Life in 33 Stanzas written by Tom Evans and designed by Jacquetta Trueman is the first e-book I’ve read. When I was asked to review it I thought it sounded interesting and different. It is, but I can’t say that I’d like to read many books like this. However, as it is very short it isn’t difficult.

The four-line stanzas are simple to follow – one to a page and each one illustrated. It’s narrative poetry on a small-scale . We get glimpses of the highs and lows of Ermintrude’s life as the years roll back almost to her conception. Each stanza covers a brief memory of different events – some happy and some sad. I did find myself wishing there was more information about each event, but then maybe that’s how it is when you get to be 100. This is a good example of how to compress a life into a few short verses and still retain an interesting story as the milestones in Trudi/Emintrude’s life come back to her as she reached her 100th birthday.

This little book made me pause for thought.