Book Club

During the summer I started to work my way through a history library inherited from my dad, my uncle and my son, Jim's, undergraduate course. Come the autumn and half way through the first thick tome I have put that on hold as the demands of my Development Psychology course at the uni took over.

Needing a break I picked up Jodi Picoults "My Sisters Keeper" to take to Norfolk and which I devoured over the weekend. She deals with a big Issue in each story and this one was to do with a couple having a child to provide donor parts for a sick sibling. She really manages to bring the topic to life and together with the pace and twist of a detective novel it was one of those reads that makes you wish you hadn't got other commitments to get in the way.

So much so that I scoured the shelves and went straight into "Vanishing Acts" which touches on issues of child abuse and abduction, alcoholism, abduction and honesty. It coincided on my Development Psychology module on morality and probably was more useful, certainly more gripping.

I'll probably go back to her, but for now I'm racing through a memoir "In Search of Fatima" by Ghada Karmi. A refugee from Palestine as a child, she grew up in the UK and it really gives a human face to the tragedy of Palestine as well as actually bringing out some of the history that seems to have been forgotten. The first part covers much the same ground as that series on TV The Promise which deserves another viewing. My uncle Peter was in Palestine but I never talked about it with him. So much is lost because we never ask - and then its too late. So I have plans to do my own memoir while my memory is still (more or less) there. Just don't hold your breath.