Drood – BooksPlease

Christmas has been and gone whilst I’ve been away from the blogworld. For days I didn’t even switch on the computer, what with getting ready for Christmas, which this year included moving loads of boxes we haven’t unpacked so that our son and his family had room to sleep at the weekend, and I had a cold, which didn’t help at all. Anyway we had a good time.

I had some books (my favourite presents) for Christmas, all of which I now can’t wait to read. No doubt I’ll be writing about them later – they include Agatha Christie’s autobiography, and her Secret Notebooks and a book on the Eleven Missing Days, all of which I’ve dipped into.

Meanwhile I’m still ploughing through Drood. I have very mixed feelings about this. Ann wrote the other day on her blog Table Talk that she has a problem with books centred on people who really existed and I think that is part of my problem with Drood.

Drood himself, of course, is a fictional character, but most of the book is about Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, both of whom don’t come across as people I would want to meet. But I want to know more about them, if only to find out what they were really like, and to read more of their books. I’m glad I’ve already read Collins’s The Moonstone, because the plot of this is detailed in Drood.

The other stumbling block I have with Drood is that there is far too much detail and emphasis for my liking on horrific opium induced nightmares. On the other hand I want to know how it ends, so it is keeping me turning the pages, although I am tempted just to skip to the last few pages.

The snow is still here, thawing just a little bit today, but we ventured out yesterday to the next town, over the border in Scotland and joined the library. I restricted myself to borrowing just three books – two on the history of the Borders and The Music Room by William Fiennes. I have The Snow Geese by him, which I’d really like to read soon – but it’s still in a box somewhere.

It’s been snowing here, but not as much as in the south of England and I do find it odd that we’ved moved north where it’s supposed to be colder and it isn’t! This snow is the best kind – crisp and even. The roads have been gritted and are clear so we’re still able to get out and about. We haven’t had time to do anything but shop so far, except for two visits to our family in Scotland, now much nearer than before. We’re off there today for a school carol service with the two older grandchildren. They have had more snow than us, so I hope we’ll get there and back ok.

We’re still emptying boxes and trying to find the best places to put things. I can’t imagine how I fitted everything into the wall unit for example, but what came out should go back in, shouldn’t it? And will we have the bedrooms ready for the family to stay on Sunday – I hope so?!

The computer is in a room overlooking the back garden – this is the view from the window.

: View from my desk

Amazingly, there is an apple tree out there that still has its apples. The birds love it!

: Close up of apple tree

The garden has a small stream runing through it going into a small coppice.

: Stream at the back

Here is a view of the front garden as seen through the lounge window

: Christmas tree in the front garden

Still not much time for reading. Drood is proving to be a test. It started off really well with the train accident that Dickens was in at Staplehurst, great descriptions of London and so on. But Simmons’s inclusion of great tracts of background research is slowing down the story interminably. It reminds me a bit of Les Miserables!