Just one of those weeks

I was full of good intentions to get back to regular blogging and to get you all up to speed with what I'd been reading and knitting over Christmas....

......and everything conspired to stop me doing just that. I went to photograph the knitting and the Christmas goodies but the batteries in the camera were dead and the spare set was nowhere to be found.

Then we had a problem with our broadband connection, which is hopefully now rectified.

And it's been dark when I've gone to work and dark when I've got home so the taking of photographs with the now fully recharged camera has been just impossible.

Is that enough excuses yet?

I am off for 2 days now so there should be a period of daylight tomorrow during which I can take photos for you.

In the meantime here's a round up of what I've been reading.

I finished the proof of The Crystal Skull by Manda Scott - it was absolutely great. A cracking story, with believable characters, convincing historical details and a bit of mysticism thrown in. You know I was banging on about how poor some of the fiction I had read recently was - well this was the antidote to all that. A great plot, well written and throughly absorbing. It even had me, shameless old cynic that I am, believing in all the prophetic stuff, at least for the duration of the novel. Highly recommended.

While huddled under the duvet feeling cr*p last week I read The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower. This was also very good. A great historical novel with a riveting plot and very informative about the Bayeaux Tapestry and the whole 1066 period and its aftermath, about which I knew absolutely nothing. Strangely, Scottish schools don't labour much on The Battle of Hastings in history.

Then I picked up an absulote gem - Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. I don't usually read translated fiction (it was originally written in German) as I always think it loses something along the way. But this was a treasure. A murder mystery in which the crime is solved by a flock of sheep, told from the point of view of those sheep. I wasn't sure how it would read but it was totally wonderful.

Not sure what I will read now. I picked up a proof of The Reincarnationist by M J Rose and stuck it in my bag to read at lunchtime. 50 pages was quite enough to decide that this one was not for me. Not particularly well written and with a very irritating habit of jumping from one time period to another in the space of a sentence. The narrative voice was grating too. Not a good start. So, back to the groaning shelves to choose something else then......hmmmmm.

I promise I will try and get some photos up tomorrow.