This week has been quite busy, although not on the reading front. However, I have managed to finish Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, the first book in the trilogy His Dark Materials. Ostensibly a children's book, I enjoyed it up to a point. The main character Lyra I found interesting and sympathetic,the events in the story made one want to read on to find out what happened, the other characters were of interest, but...there still seems to me to be something not quite satisfying about reading a book written for children when an adult. The slight simplification of emotions felt by the adults in the story, perhaps, or the particular use of language.

On Saturday afternoon I attended a talk by Louis de Bernieres in Winchester, and visited the new Winchester Discovery Centre for a quick look round. Some of the ideas used there I used in the Shirley Library in Southampton 3 years ago; however the extension of the building is very successful and links into the older part very well. The refurbished building is much lighter and brighter than its former incarnation., which was very dingy. The Louis de Bernieres talk was both very informative and also very amusing and well worth the trip. It is satisfying to see a writer who one first came across years ago and thinking at the time that he had some interesting stories to tell and an individual way of telling them and seeing one's expectations come to fruition, as it were. I haven't yet got hold of his latest story, The Partisan Girl, but his talk has made me want to. I certainly enjoyed his last book, Birds Without Wings more than Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and I really liked that too.

Birds without wings

I've spent some time in France recently, where we have just bought a house, so the time away was not exactly holiday, what with visiting the notaire, meeting the builder, getting the electricity switched back on, and setting up the phone - the lady who dealt with us in the France Telecom office in Aurillac was a model of patience, helpfulness and all round good customer care, (in the proper sense of that phrase) and the phone is now duly installed. I took a selection of books to read while away but only manged to finish one, Kate Atkinson's Not the End of the World, a collection of short stories ideal for the circumstances, and also started reading Louis de Bernieres' Birds without wings. partly as an antodote to IKEA and MFI kitchen catalogues. The story relates the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small village on the coast of Turkey during the early part of the twentieth century, including the First world war and the subsequent conflicts in the Balkans and previuos Ottoman Empire countries. It also includes a description of the early life and rise to fame of Kemal Ataturk. I found it fascinating and throughly enjoyed it. Like Captain Corelli's Mandoline, it required a bit of patience at the start. I found the descriptions of the relaxed attitudes to religion of both Muslims and Christians heart-warming while reading them, but surely real life was a different story. The chapters describing the events at the front line at Gallipoli are however far from heart-warming, but one soldier's view of how he came to be there and what happened to him and his fellow soldiers, and what he felt about it. The aftereffects of the wars were the terrifying aspects, for individuals and whole communities.