todayiamadaisy | My Tender Preparation

One thing I have discovered about having a Kindle is that it is forcing me to read books. Meaning, all the way through. What I find happens with a lot of fiction is that I will read about a third of the book before my attention starts to wander, me being less enamoured of the characters than the author. What I do then is read the last chapter, to find out if the ending is interesting enough for me to want to get to there from where I am currently mired. Only you can't really do that with a Kindle, so I have to make the decision there and then: do I plough on or do I stop? Oh, the pressure.

It's not just forcing me to read all the way through, either; it's forcing me to read more thoroughly. I tend to skip poems (or songs or dream sequences), only to have to flick back later on when I realise that the poem contained vital information. It's a pain to do that with the Kindle, so I have to read them as I find them.

One thing that concerns me, although it hasn't happened yet, is if I ever read a book that has a map at the front. How would I manage that? I suppose I could open the file on the computer and print a screen shot of the map for reference.

Anyway, the book I am currently reading in between chapters of Chocolate Wars is The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton. This is one where I had to make the stay or go decision, because the book does seem to be taking an unnecessarily long time to get to the point. I chose to stay, but it was a close-run thing.

The book is about five generations of women in the same family, and it's jumping about between their lives, as the modern-day woman is trying to unravel the stories of the older ones. That's all right: each chapter very clear what year it is and who is the subject. The problem for me is that it starts trying to explain one unusual event and just keeps getting bigger. In the late nineteenth century there is Georgiana, the high-spirited minor aristocrat who runs away from home and has illegitimate twins and dies a pauper, and her mousy companion, Adeline, who marries Georgiana's creepy, possibly incestuous, brother. In 1900, we have Georgiana's orphaned daughter, Eliza, who sees her twin brother stamped to death by a runaway horse before being threatened with the workhouse just before being kidnapped and taken 'home' to Adeline and her fragile daughter, Rose. In 1913, Eliza goes missing, Rose and her husband die in a train crash and Rose's daughter, Ivory, dies of scarlet fever… except she doesn't, because, in fact, she accidentally boards a ship while playing with Eliza and ends up, at four years old, alone in Australia, where she is adopted by a friendly harbour master and renamed Nell. In 1975, Nell, who married an American and has now returned to Australia as an elderly widow, wants to return to England to find out about her past, only to have her plans thwarted when her wayward adult daughter, Lesley, runs away leaving Nell in charge of her ten-year-old grand-daughter, Cassandra. Finally, in 2005, Cassandra is trying to get the bottom of it all. I was going along with it all, until I got to the bit halfway in where we discover that Cassandra is moody and withdrawn not because she was abandoned by her mother nor because her grandmother has just died, but also because her husband and their young son died in a car crash and the only reason they were out driving was to give her an hour alone to sketch. That was the point where I said aloud, 'Oh, come on!' There can be such a thing as too much happening at once.

Unlike my life, which has been very quiet this week.

Day 31. Monster quilt