A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Hmm. This was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Hmm. An interesting book, certainly, and I did not know about the Ukrainian famine and the hardships faced by Eastern European families as described here ... but, I feel there has to be a but! Perhaps there was too much hype surrounding the book. I couldn't say that I didn't enjoy the book, but compared to the feeling I have when a book has to be devoured, or the exquisiteness of Cold Comfort Farm, or the romanticness of Jane Austen, or the magic of Jostein Gaarder ... well, I suppose it's like comparing a kebab to a gourmet three course meal. Perhaps I just didn't "feel it", as my pupils would say.

I had wanted to read this for a while, and eventually bought the book in a motorway service station shop as part of a "buy one, get one half price" offer, when my husband was buying another book.

Right. The next one will be on the 1001 Books list ...

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

An exquisite book.

What was the "something nasty" Aunt Ada Doom saw in the woodshed?

(I feel that I should also add that much of this was read on the tube recently, and when we went to the cinema I carried on reading until the lights went down. Very funny, very unusual. A funny/strange feature: it is said "in the near future" - it was written in 1932, and at one point a character refers back to a 1942 war. What is funny is that you are not conscious of this normally - if anything, it has a real twenties/thirties feel about it - but every so often there's a strange anachronistic feature, such as "he dwiddled the dial on his picturephone" (that's not an actual quote, by the way!) or the "airpost". Anyway, other than that, this is a great book. Not bad for £2.49 at Oxfam ... As I said - exquisite.)

Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho always writes interesting books. I love The Alchemist, which was for me, like many others, the first of Coelho's books that I encountered.

This book is a collection of reflections, often less than a page in length. Many of them are very moving. Some are funny. There are quite a lot of "life's like that" ideas, which I suppose in shorter form could grace the pages of the Reader's Digest magazine, although that seems quite flippant when writing about Coelho!

One of my favourite images was that of comparing a pupil to a pencil: 1) the pencil is guided by a hand, as we are by God; 2) sometimes the pencil needs to be sharpened - this brings suffering, but makes the pencil sharper, and better; 3) we can rub out the mistakes a pencil makes - correcting a mistake is a good thing; 4) what matters is not the wood outside but the graphite within; 5) the pencil always leaves a mark - so do we. We should consider what that mark is ...

A Christmas present from Mum, I will probably dip back into this ... I'm sure there are some assembly ideas in there!

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

I have finally finished the first book of the year. And what a moving, great book it has been. Set in the South Africa of the 1940s, two men meet in sadness and despair but part in reconciliation and hope.

I love the way this book is written, from a variety of viewpoints and voices, breaking off from the main plot occasionally to touch upon other issues that matter. Very poetic.

Highly recommended. And only £1.49 from Oxfam ... A bargain.